Quoting the article: "Yet figuring out how such a system [Universal Basic Income] could be afforded -- and not turn a country into a nation of slackers -- is unclear."
As usual the author misses the point. If robots do all the work why should anyone care whether people turn into slackers? This sort of thinking has always been common. When writing was invented the ancient Greeks supposedly complained that young people no longer memorized The Odyssey. Now that we have computers, people complain that grade school students no longer learn how to write in script. I suppose that when automobiles became common, elderly people fretted that young people no longer knew how to ride horses. You cannot expect people to know how to use obsolete technology they do not use. Someday that will include all technology. People will hardly know how to tie their own shoes, never mind cooking or building a house. That will be a problem for our grandchildren. See Arthur C. Clarke's masterpiece "Profiles of the Future," chapters 12 and 13. Here is the end of chapter 13, describing a world in which all material goods are available in unlimited quantities for free: It is certainly fortunate that the replicator, if it can ever be built at all, lies far in the future, at the end of many social revolutions. Confronted by it, our own culture would collapse speedily into sybaritic hedonism, followed immediately by the boredom of absolute satiety. Some cynics may doubt if any society of human beings could adjust itself to unlimited abundance and the lifting of the curse of Adam—a curse which may be a blessing in disguise. Yet in every age, a few men have known such freedom, and not all of them have been corrupted by it. Indeed, I would define a civilized man as one who can be happily occupied for a lifetime even if he has no need to work for a living. This means that the greatest problem of the future is civilizing the human race; but we know that already. So we may hope, therefore, that one day our age of roaring factories and bulging warehouses will pass away, as the spinning wheel and the home loom and the butter churn passed before them. And then our descendants, no longer cluttered up with possessions, will remember what many of us have forgotten—that the only things in the world that really matter are such imponderables as beauty and wisdom, laughter and love. - Jed
