A train is approaching on the tracks, on one track you create free energy, solve diseases, create a new dawn for human ingenuity and also some white collar jobs are removed, others are created. On the other track we continue to toil in the dirt.
I'm not willing to pretend that we'll somehow get basic income before the need and economic tradeoffs become very apparent. Democracy rarely ever works like that and the alternative isn't any prettier.
Regardless, like most tech/social evolution, we can't stop it even if we wanted to. Even if we try to slow it down it will probably just slow it down for some and build a bigger moat around the few with connections to power.
They will eventually come for it, but it will happen much slower.
On this track, we continue to toil in the dirt, unless we figured out how to automate all the farming too. In fact, it looks like we're automatic all the fulfilling jobs and only leaving toil for the humans.
Who, on this forum, is forced "to toil in the dirt" for subsistence?
And even if it were true, what's the quality of those new jobs? Sitting in front of a command line engineering "prompts"? Sounds more like a particularly dystopian sci-fi story than a bright future.
The poorest state in America, Mississippi, is richer than most of the world [1][2]. (No. 19, between the U.K. and New Zealand.) The post-war era experienced the largest and most broad-based increase in material prosperity in human history. Our poorest Americans saw real economic gains rivaling multi-generational ones for Rome's richest. If there is something that will kill us, it's ahistorical nihilism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
I'm not saying there aren't problems. We're comparing medians. The poorest Mississippians struggles with problems on Maslow's hierarchy well above the median or even top quartile human.
So yes, we've been halfway better than nothing at distributing gains. That isn't an argument against change. But it is solid against arguing were should stall all progress until some imaginary threshold is met.