> However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI.

I'm not even a proponent of UBI, but I immediately see a few problems with your argument here:

1) They often don't provide subsistence, hence the necessity for many people to have multiple jobs. While we can adjust UBI accordingly (to some extent, obviously CoL is a thing), it's significantly more difficult to adjust around people working multiple jobs.

2) You're missing a critical component of UBI, which is that people are free to pursue whatever they might like (including nothing at all) without the fear of losing basic necessities. Low wage jobs obviously preclude you from doing that--because you're, well, spending your time working those jobs.

This is hyperbole of course, but we may very well be missing out on a modern-era Emily Dickinson or Darwin because they're spending all their time working minimum wage jobs.

3) Everyone's already moving heavily towards automation. Corporations don't employ people out of the goodness of their hearts. The second it becomes cheaper to automate something, those jobs will disappear. You can already see this to some extent with automated checkout lines, internet vs. retail shopping, etc. Unless you do something drastic ala NJ and Oregon with enforcing low-wage work like gas station attendants, those jobs quickly fade away.