&gt; <i>Do you have any idea how much mindless, painful, miserable work the people of Earth do to allow you to have a computer connected to the internet, with food in your belly, streets to your house, a house to live in, with electricity to turn on?</i><p>That&#x27;s why Basic Income is a topic <i>now</i> and not 100 or 1000 year ago. We <i>know</i> we could automate most of that survival-level task, at least in principle; at minimum reduce it to small amount of maintenance job while we push for development of self-healing materials. Also, UBI seems inevitable now - because <i>the market</i> starts to incentivize automation of everything, and that means most people will be out of jobs soon anyway. You prefer them to starve and&#x2F;or rebel and trash all our progress, or shall we just skip that bullshit and go straight to something better?<p>&gt; <i>Only on a site for programming could so many people honestly believe such a white-collar-centric hypothesis.</i><p>Or maybe this &quot;site for programming&quot; is acutely aware of our current level of technological development.