UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want.
And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
This becomes less of a difficult pill to swallow if a) we're involved in a trade war, b) the economy has crashed and we must work our way out of it "for the country", c) the right people get enough money.
They're too smart for mass murder because that would actually spark a resistance, not to mention get other nations involved. I don't think a sweatshop labor economy will spark a resistance because we can't even resist our current labor abuses (and neither can that segment of China's population).
> What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
Still too optimistic on how long-term the American approach will be. There won't be a UBI, the oligarchy will be paid directly from government coffers. The deficit, bonds and other government instruments will paper over the collapse of tax-revenue and population for a while, before the whole house of cards collapses[1]. I think the billionaires hope to be in space habitats or dead by then, if not, there's always their bunkers in New Zealand - their cache of gold bars should still work there after they ravage the USD. Capital knows no borders.
1. See late 1990s Russia. Only simple, extractive industries will chug along.
> If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power.
Only in a democracy.
China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway.
America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
The trouble is those populist politicians, in the US at least, are the very same billionaires at the top of the system who have somehow convinced the working class people they are on their side.
>The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
I agree that people will still want/need meaning, and some may lose it, along with their jobs, but having the money for basic needs by default gives you the ability to explore your interests with less risk. You can spend 6 months learning to paint or program or write stories without worrying about food and bills if UBI is properly implemented. If you miss your tech support job, you can go idle in 30 channels on Libera and help people that wander in asking questions about whatever software.
What am I missing here? People giving up without trying to find something to do? People who feel useless if they aren't the family breadwinner? I personally look forward to a day when most people don't need to work, and instead can "work" on what they choose.
Or, less pessimistic, a lot of people are happy to consume human relationships all day.
That’s what life has always been about for a large segment of people, going back thousands of years. Media is more or less a bandaid. People are busy, people are anxious, people don’t want to bother to spend money - media can give the sensation of human interaction without the hard bits.
But ultimately, if I could never work but I was surrounded by my loved ones forever, I would be pretty happy with that. We can find stuff to do, or just do nothing at all. With them, it’s always a blast.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
It's not like most jobs in this economy provide purpose and meaning now as it is. People on UBI can find meaning in hobbies, art, hiking, friendships, and other things that they currently don't have time for. Volunteering is another route. Remember how everyone started baking sourdough bread and making home cooked meals when the pandemic started? We'll find other ways to have purpose and meaning. UBI will be a lot like retirement is now only it will last for a much longer portion of the lifetime.
UBI won't fix much for a far more trivial and mechanistic reason: adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income merely gives landlords the ability to charge ($1,000*n bedrooms)/mo more in rent.
I always disagree with this moving freely argument. Certainly some live where they do specifically for work, but some are also there to be close to family. They will not be interested in relocating to save a buck.
In other words, the real estate market is sticky. There are large costs to moving, so consumers put up with price increases more readily than they do in other markets.
But there's a big gulf between "sticky" and "laws of supply and demand don't apply".
People on UBI will be much more price sensitive than those supplementing with wage income since the UBI dependent will be time rich and money poor. Landlords will have less power over them. They'll still have some power because of the stickiness.
There's a big gulf between "eventually all marginal productivity increases are eaten by rising land rent" and "laws of supply and demand don't apply."
You have no reason to believe people with new marginal income from UBI would move to lower COL areas. We have strong reason to believe they'd spend that money to move toward high COL areas. Evidence for this is the fact that people, when they have money, choose to live in high COL areas.
People living solely on UBI will be the poorest people in the country. It's absurd to believe that UBI will be generous enough to cover more than basic living expenses. They're not going to behave like "people with money".
I didn't say anything about "people living solely on UBI"
Your claim is, I guess, that people supplementing wages with UBI will move to poorer locations, because they are less tied to their jobs, and then the poorest of the poor (those who already live in bottom-percentile COL locations) will... move to even poorer locations?
Seems like a wacky argument relative to: "people will do what they literally always do with new marginal income, which is move to nicer areas, and since everyone is doing it simultaneously without new supply, prices will go up and nobody will improve their lifestyle."
Landlords can't simply arbitrarily raise rents like that. If they could, they would already charge every individual tenant 100% of their income. Renting is a market like any other, and markets have limits and competition. The renters that do try to increase rent by $1000 will simply not have tenants anymore, and those that didn't, would, because UBI means people can basically move anywhere, any time they like.
It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
That can happen because of a new subway station, a hot new employer nearby, or simply because money appeared in their pockets.
If money were no object, more people would live in high COL areas, not fewer. You know this is true because you see it in the prices.
To prevent rent increases you’d need people all to have $n appeared in their pockets and to have a pact not to then spend $n to upgrade their living arrangements. The cruel irony of course being if everyone attempts to upgrade, then no one achieves an upgrade but they do achieve spending their new money!
Additional income is not additional willingness to pay 100% of that income forthe currently-purchased quality and quantity of one particular good or service, and even if it was that's a demand shift which without a supply change, will still result in a smaller increase in rent.
UBI, which any realistic method of implementing makes a shift in income from somewhere higher on the income spectrum to somewhere lower (the exact shift being defined by the UBI level and financing mechanism), most likely (if it replaces existing means tested welfare programs) most favoring a level somewhere above where current welfare programs start tapering off, does have some predictable price effects, but they aren't “all rents go up by an amount equal to the UBI amount times the number of recipients typically living in similar units”.
First order, they are some price increases across goods and services disproportionately demanded by the group benefitting in net, with some price decreases across those disproportionately demanded by the group paying in net. These will vary by elasticity, but in total should effect some (but less than total) compression of the time money shift, reducing somewhat the real cost to those paying and the real benefit to those receiving, but with less effect on those paying because of lower marginal propensity to spend with higher income.
Beyond first order is more complicated because you have to work through demand changes,and supply chnages caused by labor market changes from reduced economic coercion, increased labor market mobility and ability to retrain for more-preferred jobs, which are going to decreased supply for some jobs, increase supply for others (though on different schedules), etc.
> It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
The only landlords who can afford to operate this way own many, many units. A long term tenant who pays in a predictable manner and isn't actively damaging property is worth their weight in gold, and you can't afford to roll the dice on the next tenant unless you're able to spread the risk and cost of the churn around.
All rents are set by the market's willingness and ability to pay.
No matter whether you're the 40th percentile (a vacancy-sensitive landlord) on price or the 90th (a vacancy-insensitive landlord), the dollar value of the underlying distribution is defined by the market's willingness and ability to pay. If that goes up, the entire distribution moves to the right.
Does your rent go up by the precise amount of your increase in income every year? Mine doesn't. My landlord isn't checking my W2 or tax statements for extra rent money, that isn't how it works.
The assumption that all rents, everywhere, would go up by the amount of UBI is the definition of "arbitrary."
>Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount?
What does it matter?
You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
Rents can rise based on minimum wage, but all renters do not raise their rents precisely by the increase in minimum wage.
And when high paying employers come to an area, not all renters raise rents accordingly.
You're ignoring that market forces exist affecting rent other than the simple greed of landlords. Not every landlord would increase rent by the amount of UBI because there is an obvious market opportunity in not doing so, and because not every property could justify that, even with UBI.
> You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
I'm a landlord. My agent figures out the rent to charge on my behalf. They do this by making an informed guess as to what the market can bear — sometimes they've been wrong, and had to reduce the asking rate.
That is, mechanistically, how they discover what the market can bear.
If everyone gets £1000 UBI money each month, everyone can afford to pay £1000 more rent than before. Some agents will guess this means everyone can afford £500 more rent, some will guess higher, some will guess lower. They'll discover through this process of guessing and seeing what happens, how much people can actually pay.
This is complicated by all the other concurrent changes, including:
(1) the scenario of no-more-work-needed suggests that some of the tenants will move to wherever the rent is lowest rather than where their previous commute was shortest
(2) no-more-work-possible meaning money supply goes down rather than up
(3) people won't need to spend a huge amount of money commuting, not just time, which may increase personal money supply (just not by as much as the loss of income from not working)
(4) if they actually like the homes enough to want to spend all day in them, rather 5 hours awake and inside because the other 19 hours of the day are 8 asleep, 2 commuting, 8 working, and 1 lunch break; UBI being claimed by 500 people who all officially live in the same 1 bed flat in a Norfolk village, but they're all actually spending their money on living in relatively cheap safari cabins in Botswana or whatever, is a very different dynamic than everyone staying put to keep close to friends and family.
(On the plus side, if we have robot workers so cheap there's no point hiring humans any more, then we may also get a lot more high-quality housing for a price of next-to-nothing).
No landlord is looking at a particular tenant's income under the microscope and adjusting their rent. But, of course they do it in aggregate based on averages. UBI shifts the overall demand curve, and every supplier of goods will adjust their prices proportionally.
Applying it to rent is arbitrary. The general point is that it is inflationary for all goods and services.
That is assuming UBI is funded through government borrowing as we saw with COVID stimulus. If funded through new taxes the inflationary impact should be much less.
(I don’t have enough economic training to determine how much less.)
Well it's not quite arbitrary because it will induce supply in other goods and services. Rent in high COL areas is driven primarily by land rent (i.e. cost of land, regardless of whether that land is actually rented to the building on top of it or not), which has zero supply elasticity.
And then the other portion of rent (the building itself) is also pretty darn supply-inelastic as well, though not entirely.
i live in a high COL area and rent is not high because of land costs. there are several empty lots that people want to build on but the discretionary review process for entitlements make it too easy to wreck the permit process (everybody knows this in the entire world; this is the YIMBY line which has truth to it). another factor is the cost per bedroom to build is very high, due to the cost of building in the market (labor, cost of goods, etc). so it's actually everything to do with the building/entitlements and nothing to do with land cost. at least where i live right now. proof: the college cancelled a massive housing project because it was gonna be too expensive per bedroom. this wasn't because of land costs but building costs.
aside, while i'm at it, let's take another swipe at free market and housing: the YIMBY line has truth about regulations preventing building, but if you look at build starts for like the 10 years after the 2008 crisis, you'll see a lack of buildings that happened during that time. they had record housing starts leading up to the crisis, and you know what also existed then? the same regulatory regime that we are now tearing down to help us build what we need. but after the crisis, the builders stopped building because they were fearful about the market. this suggests to me that "regulations prevent building, just let the free market take care of it," is too simplistic and ignores very real data. the market took care of it by not building.
So 1) yes construction costs are a huge, huge factor (especially right now), but 2) land is about $1.5MM/ac in Burlington VT. A few miles outside of it, land is about $150,000/ac.
Consider a 2 acre project:
$3MM in land costs inside Burlington
$300,000 in land costs right outside Burlington
What projects would could you do on the $300,000 lot that you can't possible do on the $3MM? Basically all of them!
Regarding the UVM project: they should sell that parking lot to bring the $1.5MM/ac costs closer to $300k/ac so people can build stuff instead of a place to store asphalt :)
No, those are real numbers spot-checked from Zillow. I was on my phone and, ya know, it's an Internet argument, so they're definitely ballparked, but they are from real actual land sales inside Burlington and then a few miles outside of Burlington.
I suppose the delta is surprising to you?
It's expensive because it's productive. The marginal productivity of living/working in Burlington means the market can sustain higher costs, ergo the costs go up.
This is more problematic than every other good because 1) they cannot add more land inside Burlington and 2) the land doesn’t actually have higher carrying costs by virtue of being more expensive (unlike roughly every other asset).
i look at zillow multiple times per day so i'm well aware of the local market, so no it's not surprising me. zillow doesn't give the full picture of what is happening locally. zillow list price for vacant land doesn't consider all the vacant lots held by people who aren't building for various reasons nor does it consider the surrounding suburbs etc. or the land uvm holds but doesn't develop (who they gonna sell to? they have more money than anybody). there are a lot more variables than just zillow!
> Zillow list price for vacant land doesn't consider all the vacant lots held by people who aren't building for various reasons nor does it consider the surrounding suburbs etc. or the land uvm holds but doesn't develop (who they gonna sell to? they have more money than anybody). there are a lot more variables than just zillow!
What? Yes it does. That's how prices work. If UVM sold all of their land, prices would go down, but they aren't selling all of their land, so the prices are higher.
I never said "all land is being used productively." I said "land prices are the primary source of cost in high COL areas." One contributor to high land prices are all the things you mention: people withholding their unused land from the market.
No, there are not more variables than just the sale price. The price of land is the price of land, and it factors in all the variables you mentioned.
of course land price contributes to housing cost but "land price" isn't the full picture. i wish it were that simple.
> That's how prices work. If UVM sold all of their land, prices would go down, but they aren't selling all of their land, so the prices are higher.
yes exactly how prices work in a textbook but a textbook is not a local market with all sort of dynamics. imagine the political process of UVM choosing to sell all their land, that is just absurd to be like "they can do that and the price problem is solved!" they probably got the land for very cheap and clearly want to develop but they can't because they can't afford construction costs, for a number of reasons (price of land being only one).
UVM’s internal politics are, in fact, accounted for in the price of land.
Yes, for that particular plot of land, which they already owned, the land price is not what prevented construction. That particular project’s failure is not a major driving force of the price of living in Burlington.
The fact that 2 acres costs $3MM is a major driving force.
Meh, I just shared the fact that for the same scale of project outside of Burlington, anyone can literally 10x their budget for construction costs based solely on land price differences.
Of course the counterpoint is: a single stalled project with extremely unique economics (built for students and on land that was already owned)
you continually show your lack of information about burlington's real estate situation with each comment. very entertaining to me. thank you for the entertainment as well.
This is why UBI isn't a good solution to the massive glut of problems we're facing.
Which is why universal basic services[1] provide a much better solution, because they make it the government's problem to handle the logistics of creating or procuring the resources people will need.
But after decades of red scare, I don't have much faith the U.S. government will move in this direction, and even the working class may protest it due to how conditioned they are to reject anything they might associate with communism.
Increasing the rent price makes it much easier for new rentals to come online, as long as the government isn't effectively stopping new competitors. Much the reason why grocery stores, car mechanics, etc. aren't going to raise their prices by an average of $1k/mo.
No, it doesn't, and the proof of that is that landlords don't already charge 100% of income.
You seem to be assuming housing rental is an perfectly monopolistic market, which it isn't, and any place where it even loosely approximates that needs to correct that whether or not UBI is adopted.
I had to move out of an apartment a few years ago and into a spare half-story at a friend's house. The apartment was attempting to raise my rent, while not to 100% of my income (yet), a significant amount. Their excuse was "that's the market rate now," and when I told them to F off and went to check other nearby apartments, they were correct, that was the "market rate."
I have absolutely zero doubt that if the government had paid me the difference they were trying to charge (as UBI or any other stipend), they would've raised the rate again by the same amount very quickly. In fact, going by the idea that supply & demand are what caused that (rather than simple landlord greed that I generally see it as), UBI definitely can't fix it, since UBI will not increase supply or decrease demand-- they'll still need to charge just enough that some people can't afford it in order for there to be "enough."
You're somewhat correct in that the solution (building more housing, I guess) is not really related to UBI.
This is correct, it does apply to all forms of wage increases. I wouldn't say "instantly," but yes that's why cities are perpetually expensive despite constantly increasing productivity. They are highly productive ergo they have high wages ergo they can sustain high rents ergo they have high rents ergo they "are expensive" compared to adjacent markets.
Mentioned above but I'll put it here too for other readers: the reason rent is unique is that in high COL areas, it's driven primarily by the price of land which is has zero supply elasticity. Higher prices induce supply in all other forms of goods and services.
Regulations are causing the fact that housing prices follow purchasing power of potential buyers: it causes a shortage in supply, which means supply side can dictate prices. Prices will be what buyers can afford. Just wait for the next recession, housing prices will fall, even with the same regulations.
Actually, I contend that it can increase supply of "housing sufficiently near sufficient income" by improving some marginal (existing or potential) housing.
Most participants in mature markets know approximately what percentage of the public's wallet they can grab. Obviously it's not 100% for any of them, but they all know what they can get away with.
My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income, landlords would respond by raising rent by about $400-$500 or so, grocery stores would raise their prices by a percentage of that new income, and so on for all businesses, until all $1,000 was soaked up and the public is no better off than they were before.
> My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income
Aside from whether the prediction is realistic under this assumption, UBI under any realistic financing scheme doesn't do that. It replaces (and potentially increases the net benefit of) means-tested welfare at the bottom end of the income distribution and spreads the clawback from a set of relatively sharp cliffs that occur between working poor and middle income levels to a much more gradual effective trail-off over nearly the whole income distribution as part of progressive income taxation.
Has anyone considered something like UBI but instead of income make it UBG--Universal Basic Goods.
The idea would be that when automation advances to the point that something can be made with very little labor the government would build automated factories to produce that thing and make the output available for free.
There would still be room for private companies to make those things too. They could make fancier or higher end models for those people who want something more than the free models from the government.
The only scenario where UBI/UGI would make sense is one where AI can replace most/all humans at any job they could have. At that point it makes no sense for there to be a economic hierarchy at all.
No, UBI makes sense right now (the exact level that makes sense changes over time), it is a lower-bureaucracy, lower perverse-incentives alternative to means-tested welfare (and, possibly, also minimum wages) as a means of providing a support floor (its not really a flat addition because any means of financing it will provide some form of clawback, and if done through the progressive income tax, it becomes redistributiion that compresses the pre-benefit-and-supporting-tax income distribution.
The way it does all these things is by adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income. That is what UBI is. Whether you choose to cut means-tested welfare or increase progressive taxation alongside it is up to you.
- Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI? Or only UBI? The premise upthread seemed to be UBI in response to mass unemployment caused by automation. Are you sure renters will still have more money in their pockets, even with UBI?
- If they don't have employment, and incomes are $0, then in the absence of UBI, would rent also drop to $0? If not, then I think we're better off with UBI.
- These higher prices for rent and groceries seem like strong incentives for competition. Maybe we can't expect that in NIMBY San Francisco, but without a jobs market, the only attraction to live there is the weather. Why not move somewhere cheaper?
> Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI
Any system with UBI requires other sources of income to exist (thr absence of such sources means that nothing of value is being produced for exchange, in which case any money printed is basically monopoly money and how you distribute it doesn't matter because it isn't doing anything), and a major premise of UBI has always been that it enables those transitionally deprived of income more freedom to reconfigure their lives and ramp up these sources of income (and does so with less redundant—with the progressive tax system—bureaucratic overhead) than do means- and behavior-tested welfare programs.
The particular mix of available other forms of income between wage labor, independent business, or capital don’t really change the basic arguments.
Well, my question implies that being a landlord would be a remaining source of income, for starters. But if that landlord also owns the automated farms and factories producing consumer goods without labor, then the people they're renting to really might not have any other income. At any rate, where a UBI is substituting for employment income that someone used to earn, but is no longer able to, then I don't think the renter gains purchasing power to pay more for rent. (They do gain free time though).
I'm not so sure about that. A few years ago I looked for historical university cost data. I didn't find much, but when I graphed what I did find I did not see any noticeable change in the rate costs grew between before the availability of cheap loans and after their availability.
Beat me to it and you're absolutely right. There's no need to guess what's going to happen here, we've already seen what happens elsewhere when the government injects a lot of money.
This seems reductive. Not all goods have inelastic demand and no substitutes or alternatives. Not every industry is supply limited. Said differently, not everything is immune to competition.
If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison. Instead of saving 500/mo by commuting, now you might save $1000 by relocating.
Rate limit edit: I said commuting, not going going to live in some random place.
> If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison.
Do you think "just move away from the city centers (where all the jobs that you used to need are) to random middle-of-nowhere wherever-we-have-space" will hold forever, and won't trail off once the initial phenomenon of everyone dispersing is finished?
If "meaning" was a good argument against UBI, then nobody would want pensions, because UBI is exactly the same as setting the state pension age to zero.
Leaving aside that older people aren't as enthused about FT work they've known for 30 years, many of them keep jobs or get bored and lonely without them. Not everyone wants to sit around crafting useless projects, or consuming. Creating value for others and connecting (and status signaling) can provide meaning, and granted in retirement there are other vectors for that made available such as volunteering.
It's not a good argument against UBI, but there are better arguments against UBI.
You don't have to make a binary choice between work and useless craft projects. Community projects and helping other people in their more meaningful projects can be useful and be fulfilling and make someone feel accomplished. Part of the problem with working as much as possible until retirement age is you never build any community presence or report and don't often make friends doing their own projects that would need your help.
I think volunteering could actually solve part of that. Butarge scale of volunteering work, thinking about the scale of unemployment in the future, might need governments to step in to create them.
Purpose. I'm sure lots of people don't think of it as their purpose to work in factories and offices performing some routines they don't particularly enjoy but had to because they have to.
You have to think outside of this consenting slavery box. Individuals will find meaning in their lives. Volunteering is one. Learning a craft is another. Acquiring knowledge and improving oneself as a person is one too. Americans/westerners keep lecturing about "freedom" but they don't even recognize what real freedom is.
I too worry about a future where the rich no longer have any need for the poor. I think the scenario where the rich end up just giving the poor a bit of money each month is an extremely optimistic one. Much more realistic is a slow genocide, where the poor simply die en masse in the streets due to having no homes, food, and healthcare, while such homelessness becomes both increasingly more unavoidable and more illegal.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
Aren't you too pessimistic? 1 kg of rice costs somewhere around $2 here and you won't eat it in a day. So with $20-30 you can have a month worth amount of rice. You don't need thousands of dollars to survive.
And giving everyone $30 every month won't break even developing country economy.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
Employment is the only - or even best - way of finding meaning in one's life?
i'm very far left ideologically and i think UBI in the current political economy is a bad idea because it's just gonna go to rent etc. all the capitalists will raise their prices.
The elites leaving common folk relatively alone would be a best case scenario. If people are free to build and supply for themselves with UBI then life wouldn’t be bad.
Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.
And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.