Instead of UBI, wouldn't be better to empower people and communities of people directly by providing financial help and technology, including automation. Each community, city or country needs to be self reliant and not need much external financial help. If a city has enough land to cultivate its food, it can build a vertically integrated economy, with everything necessary for its citizens to live by. People would be directly involved in providing for themselves, using automation as well. They would not feel robbed of their agency and self determinacy.
Practical measures to achieve that would be: to invest in energy tech such as solar, make sure automation and 3d-printing are open source and easy to employ, heavily tax imports in order to encourage reliance on local production, tax automation and AI, provide financial help for local projects, provide healthcare and education for free. With all those in place, the need for UBI would be much reduced.
If people were left with no jobs and insufficient social protection they would not simply roll out and die. They would associate to find alternative means such as self sustaining farm communities, some of them would provide professional services to others, creating a human-based parallel currency. Such communities could invest what they had before into the common pool and have their own capital. With capital they can have the ability to use automation as well. What is essential is that the entry barrier to AI and automation be made low, in order to empower everyone.
This doesn't really make sense. If you give a city full of people the money and technology they need to be self-reliant, then how do you make sure a few assholes (the managers) don't take everything for themselves and leave others homeless? If you have automation doing all the actual work, how are people in this city supposed to earn money to survive? After all, who's going to own the financial help and technology that's being provided to the city? The government of course, but then how do you distribute that? Well either you make people work for money, or you give everyone a UBI.
Finally, there's no practical way any city can be self-reliant anyway. Humans have relied on trade for millennia now. Cities in the frozen north aren't going to easily be able to grow all their own food, cities in other places won't be the best place to run factories, our entire global economy is run on the idea of specialization of labor, and it's been this way since before Roman times. People specialize in certain things, they form groups (companies) that excel at doing certain things, and then they trade with each other. That's how an economy works. Hindering that isn't going to help anyone, at least until we invent replicators (and no, 3D printers are not like replicators).
A low barrier to automation doesn't work because someone has to own the automation, and whoever owns it first has the first-mover advantage and puts everyone else out of business.
TL;DR - Instead of UBI, how about self reliance?
Instead of UBI, wouldn't be better to empower people and communities of people directly by providing financial help and technology, including automation. Each community, city or country needs to be self reliant and not need much external financial help. If a city has enough land to cultivate its food, it can build a vertically integrated economy, with everything necessary for its citizens to live by. People would be directly involved in providing for themselves, using automation as well. They would not feel robbed of their agency and self determinacy.
Practical measures to achieve that would be: to invest in energy tech such as solar, make sure automation and 3d-printing are open source and easy to employ, heavily tax imports in order to encourage reliance on local production, tax automation and AI, provide financial help for local projects, provide healthcare and education for free. With all those in place, the need for UBI would be much reduced.
If people were left with no jobs and insufficient social protection they would not simply roll out and die. They would associate to find alternative means such as self sustaining farm communities, some of them would provide professional services to others, creating a human-based parallel currency. Such communities could invest what they had before into the common pool and have their own capital. With capital they can have the ability to use automation as well. What is essential is that the entry barrier to AI and automation be made low, in order to empower everyone.