There's a difference between everyone getting some money and some kind of pure communism. Proposals for a basic income aren't arguing that in a 10m-population country, each person's basic income will be equal to 1/10m of GDP.
In addition, many of the gains from technological advances are currently not reaped by the people who actually produce them, because technology is a very interlocked system, and monetization does not track it perfectly. For example, some technologies are produced by a chain involving basic-science research, applied-science research, engineering R&D, and product research, but the earlier parts of that chain are, in many cases, not really cut in on the profits. Sometimes that's because basic science/math is not patentable, partly b/c capturing every bit of value you create is in practice difficult, and partly because there is no good mechanism for capturing longer-term value, e.g. if you invent something today which produces a commercializable product in 30 years, any patent will have expired.
Sometimes that's a good thing: the general technological level increases, and technologies become essentially owned by humanity in general. But "owned by humanity in general" is a fairly nebulous concept, since they don't necessarily benefit people equally: the people best posed to benefit from the common heritage of previous generations' technological advances are those with sufficient wealth to utilize them, e.g. to build new technologies on them or factories to produce them. (Admittedly not always... whether new technologies tend to concentrate wealth or dissipate it varies and depends on a lot of factors.)
Dystopian fiction fairly often poses this thought experiment: Take a situation where all human food needs can eventually be produced by purely mechanized means, and that this has been the case for 100 or 200 years. Does this mean all human food needs are solved? Not if the land and robots are owned by a small subset of humans: in that case you have the strange result that a subset of humans has control over all the food, even though they neither produce the food by their own labor, nor invented the technology that produces the food.
Overall, I don't think the basic-income solution is a particularly radical one. If robots are doing an increasing amount of work, and some portion of today's robots are the result of our common ancestors' ingenuity, it's a really rough floor function on "what portion of robot labor should go to human X?". So everyone gets at least some smallish portion of the robots' output, or put differently, a smallish portion of the automation dividend. Then the rest can be allocated with regular market mechanisms. (One advantage from a pro-market position is that a basic income might remove political pressure for other kinds of social-support policies that interfere with markets more, like making it hard to fire people.)
In addition, many of the gains from technological advances are currently not reaped by the people who actually produce them, because technology is a very interlocked system, and monetization does not track it perfectly. For example, some technologies are produced by a chain involving basic-science research, applied-science research, engineering R&D, and product research, but the earlier parts of that chain are, in many cases, not really cut in on the profits. Sometimes that's because basic science/math is not patentable, partly b/c capturing every bit of value you create is in practice difficult, and partly because there is no good mechanism for capturing longer-term value, e.g. if you invent something today which produces a commercializable product in 30 years, any patent will have expired.
Sometimes that's a good thing: the general technological level increases, and technologies become essentially owned by humanity in general. But "owned by humanity in general" is a fairly nebulous concept, since they don't necessarily benefit people equally: the people best posed to benefit from the common heritage of previous generations' technological advances are those with sufficient wealth to utilize them, e.g. to build new technologies on them or factories to produce them. (Admittedly not always... whether new technologies tend to concentrate wealth or dissipate it varies and depends on a lot of factors.)
Dystopian fiction fairly often poses this thought experiment: Take a situation where all human food needs can eventually be produced by purely mechanized means, and that this has been the case for 100 or 200 years. Does this mean all human food needs are solved? Not if the land and robots are owned by a small subset of humans: in that case you have the strange result that a subset of humans has control over all the food, even though they neither produce the food by their own labor, nor invented the technology that produces the food.
Overall, I don't think the basic-income solution is a particularly radical one. If robots are doing an increasing amount of work, and some portion of today's robots are the result of our common ancestors' ingenuity, it's a really rough floor function on "what portion of robot labor should go to human X?". So everyone gets at least some smallish portion of the robots' output, or put differently, a smallish portion of the automation dividend. Then the rest can be allocated with regular market mechanisms. (One advantage from a pro-market position is that a basic income might remove political pressure for other kinds of social-support policies that interfere with markets more, like making it hard to fire people.)