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Your hypothetical either assumes that machines will never be able to be plumbers/doctors/yoga instructors, OR just takes a snapshot of some point in time between now and the eventual future when machines are superior at all work currently done by humans.

The former is incredibly short sighted and the latter doesn't seem super productive to me.

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Do you have the robots today? Do you see them happening by the time the next government rolls around and UBI becomes a real choice?

As a reminder, suffering the problems of UBI for just a few years without an actual, functional, non-vaporeware solution in place is going to ruin a lot of lives and quite possibly burn down all our existing shit.

> Robert Skidelsky wrote that fears of technological unemployment were not so much wrong as premature: “Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.”

You're arguing timeline when that's not what the article is about. A world without work is our likely future, and it's worth talking about.

The context matters. Seen the democrat primary speeches? UBI is on the table. There's people in this thread right now advocating for it. The article is indirectly advocating for it. The whole thing is like advocating we drive 200mph over a bridge that hasn't been built yet.

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