I&#x27;ve been in favor of this for a long time, but I do have a more nuanced opinion in that I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s &quot;time&quot; yet.<p>IMHO we&#x27;re getting there, and when the (very likely) big wave of automation hits it will be time. The true automation wave has not happened yet, and when it hits it will make the outsourcing wave look like a minor disruption to the employment market. I fully expect that by the year 2100 most non-skilled labor will be obsolete.<p>--<p>Edit:<p>There&#x27;s one more &quot;elephant in the living room&quot; that I&#x27;d like to bring up in this thread before I&#x27;m outta here. I&#x27;ll leave it here at the root since it&#x27;s part of the core point I was making. Few bring up this fact since it leads to areas that many consider non-PC or impolite to discuss.<p>The average IQ is 100, and intelligence and other abilities are normally distributed within the population.<p>This is pretty much fixed on short-term human timescales unless we can widely deploy genetic engineering and brain-augmentation. Not only are these things massively hard -- probably harder than any of the crazy automation anyone is predicting -- but they&#x27;re also going to face intense opposition on both religious and secular-ideological grounds. If you think the furor over GMO foods is excessive and irrational, imagine the furor over GMO humans.<p>It&#x27;s also likely that those with the strongest opposition to genetic enhancement (on largely superstitious grounds) would be precisely those for whom it would be most beneficial. Conversely, those most enthusiastic to adopt it would be those who don&#x27;t need it. As a result it would probably accelerate the trend I&#x27;m discussing here.<p>This means that if automation and other factors are constantly conspiring to increase the median <i>skill level requirements</i> of labor, eventually significant portions of humanity are simply going to fall off a cliff where the economic value of their labor becomes zero. From a purely economic point of view these are now worthless human beings. It doesn&#x27;t matter if labor supply exceeds demand if the labor available to fill that demand can&#x27;t do the work.<p>As automation gets better, this cliff will move up the bell curve. As it does, then due to the shape of a bell curve <i>the number of people thus affected will increase exponentially</i>. This is a recipe for blood in the streets -- and for totalitarianism as a response.<p>So we have a choice.<p>Option #1: consign those who fall off the edge to poverty and wall them off in ghettoes, and implement a totalitarian political regime with total surveillance of the entire population to deal with the perpetual undercurrent of crime and terrorism that this will create. The result basically looks like a B-grade cyberpunk film.<p>Option #2: admit to ourselves that we are entering a post-capitalist early-post-scarcity phase of development and implement some level of basic income.<p>I&#x27;d go with option #2. Not only is it better for humanity at large, it&#x27;s also better for me as I don&#x27;t fancy living world #1 even if I did get to live in one of the posh totalitarian enclaves.