The Future Demands Your Attention

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”

― Gautama Buddha

The future is coming.
The places and times that we have lived in and loved are ghosts.
Our yester-years are buried. You may cherish the memories or you may damn them...
 but it's best to leave them where they lie, the fastest way you can.
History is best learned from, not repeated.

On our journey, there are many forks in the path.
While we know not where they may lead with certainly, using a bit of reasoning; we make better choices of navigation.
Never turn back and never deceive yourself that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is gone. Passed times seem safe, yet they are vanquished times, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
Yet we can glimpse the forming shapes within this cloud.

The coming AI takeover will be further reaching than most people realize.
A 2013 study from researchers at Oxford University concluded that 47 - 53% of jobs in the United States are at high risk of falling victim to automation by around 2030.
Sections of the service industry are already experiencing this shift as grocery stores and fast-food restaurants introduce self-serve checkout lanes and menus. The rapid advancement in driverless-vehicle technology bodes poorly for America’s 3.5 million professional truck drivers, and as many as 300 000 in Canada. As for the much-lamented erosion of employment in the US manufacturing sector, for every job lost to trade in recent years, eight have been lost to automation.

The dynamics of the past don't apply anymore. Like it or loathe it, an entirely new paradigm is emerging and it demands that we restructure our idea of economies, examine our values, and consider carefully our prospects for survival and well being.

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities are decreasing, regrets are mounting.

Assuming we have searched our values & place humanity on the short list, or even if it's just for economic health, it’s important that people be able to sustain themselves without needing to rely on the shrinking job market..

Even if a trade war with China could bring jobs back to the US it will only be in the short term, such measures are impotent and irrelevant in the face of an AI revolution.
However you slice it, the “putting people back to work” trope misses the point.
If creating work for people is the main goal, why not just hire more construction workers to complete the same task as before, but replace their shovels with spoons? It’s because that would be ridiculous: this illustrates the absurdity of creating jobs at the expense of productivity.
Furthermore, digging with spoons is a degrading meaningless job that robs us both of the spirit, and and our human dignity.

The fact is a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is probably the only way to manage the transition to an automated economy. Elon Musk agrees, as does Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Minister of Finance, has said:

The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market and a civilized society. And to have a genuine right to turn down a job, you must have an alternative option, because desperate people will accept to do desperate things. 

UBI - the only way to deal with the rise of automation.

UBI is a simple moral choice

Like any market, the labor market is at the mercy of supply and demand.

The supply of labor is greater than the demand for labor.
Removing desperation for income, a universal basic income would give workers the ability to decline job opportunities that pay poorly, which would cause wages to rise.
All economies depend on money to circulate in a number of ways, the most important among these being consumption and investment. As people lose their incomes to automation, they would also lose the income they need to buy things, meaning consumption falls sharply. Reduced sales would strain businesses, who would then employ even fewer people, causing the economy to fall into a free-fall recession. In such a situation people would try to borrow money to spend on necessities, but since they would have no income with which to underwrite that debt, it would be difficult to find a creditor willing to lend to them; those few who are willing would charge exorbitant interest rates. Household debt levels, already stretched to capacity, would grow even more. The ensuing economic crisis would cripple everyone, not just the workers.

Even now, before most of this switch to automation has taken place, an unhealthy rate of household debt hinders consumption because it forces people to pay down debt interest with funds that would otherwise be spent on goods and services. By ensuring that everyone has money in their pockets, a UBI takes that weight off their shoulders and keeps money flowing through the economy, particularly after tens of millions of jobs have vanished. Wealth must be distributed more-or-less evenly throughout an economy for it to function smoothly and grow sustainably. In his TED Talk on basic income, Rutger Bregman calls it “venture capital for the people.”

Finally, for the economy’s health, it’s important that people be able to sustain themselves without needing to rely on a job. When an unprofitable company goes bankrupt, it’s typically due to a poor business model and/or shoddy management. The whole point of competition in the so called "free-market" is that the best practices are supposed to yield the most success.
When government steps in to save a failing company using public funds, it's rewarding inferior practices. Bail-outs prevent necessary creative-destruction from taking place in the economy. Inefficient firms should be allowed to die.

Of course, it’s easy to see why governments are reluctant to let big companies fail: people’s jobs — their livelihoods — are at stake. Underpaid, overworked, & underemployed folks are naturally scared, bitter, and motivated to vote against leaders by whom they feel abandoned.
The ability to put food on the table should be decoupled from work so that a superfluous company, and the jobs it represents, can’t hold its employees' human dignity hostage as it manipulates the government for a bailout. Basic income solves this problem while paving the way for greater economic efficiency.

Freedom from labor

Politicians can try and peddle promises of job creation, but an increasingly automated future casts serious doubt on whether such promises are realistic, or even desirable.
To the ancient Greeks and Romans, “freedom” meant being free from the burden of labor — that was the job of slaves. While emancipation was eventually won in large part thanks to the courage of revolutionaries and an evolving moral outlook, it’s little coincidence that slavery was abolished in both the British Empire and America on the verge of the first Industrial Revolution.

The dawn of sophisticated AI machines means that it’s not long before another disruption is upon us. Whether we like it or not, the market will embrace the new jolt in productivity because business interests have incentive to do so. We could choose to bemoan the human unemployment this will lead to, or we could simply reassess our predicament. 
Automation offers us freedom.
Why would we turn that down?

Even if we would, the die is cast.

Employment in the Industrial Age became so tied to self-esteem that in fact, that mass job losses of the post industrial era correlates to an increased suicide rate.
This also plays a large role in the ongoing opioid crisis.

Be that as it may, an imminently rising tide of automation means that the age of dignity in labor is drowning.  It’s difficult to take pride in a job that you know could be done just as well by a computer. People realize that there’s no meaning to be found in this work.
It's working for the sake of working, yet that’s exactly what we’re doing when we settle for an unsatisfying job in order to pay our bills.
A 2014 Gallup poll found that less than one-third of US workers felt engaged in their jobs — and that was the highest level since 2000. It’s no surprise that Millenials feel the least engaged of all, considering that their relatively high levels of education are not to be reflected in equivalent employment opportunities.

What We Need Is A Fresh Perspective

The truth is dignity in life can still be preserved without wage-slavery.
 People who enjoy working because of its social aspect can continue to do so of course.
And the opportunity arises to do what you like, because you like it.
Speaking of dignity, in its current predatory form, capitalism is completely blind to labor not included in a GDP calculation, causing the household economy — activities like childcare and cooking that have traditionally fallen disproportionately to women — to be grossly undervalued.
Antiquated gender roles mean that on average women work fewer paid hours than men, a fact that isn't taken into account in the infamous gender wage-gap.
By providing a permanent income to stay-at-home parents, a UBI would boldly signal that our society recognizes the value of household labor and endorses the time that parents spend with their children, thereby engendering a sorely-needed perspective on economics. (Ironically, the automation wave will mainly affect male-dominated industries first, meaning that men will benefit from an in-home salary at least as much as women will.)

A UBI would grant people the financial latitude to dedicate time to creative or artistic pursuits that  interest them.  A UBI would erase dire poverty, and would hopefully encourage solidarity with, rather than disparagement of, the downtrodden. In fact, in such a future we might even bother to ask why previous generations ever accepted as ordinary a situation in which millions of people struggled to live  routinely working long hours for insulting wages, unnecessary anguish , and no fulfillment.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way

A living wage for every citizen will be expensive, this being said, a UBI could be made self-funding and politically viable by replacing other parts of the welfare state that are unpopular with the fiscal conservatives. Andrew Yang, a current candidate for president calls the Universal Basic Income the Peace Dividend. While the internet and the media paid little or no attention to Yang, (preferring to scold him for not wearing a tie), he actually has the boldest platform of any of the candidates and I suggest should be taken much more seriously. (Look into his policies, I know he's a real outsider-dark horse candidate, and I don't imagine the electorate; ever looking to the past... is ready to embrace him. Yet his ideas are well worth your time to investigate, he's no nut job. [UBI, Universal Healthcare, Human Centered Capitalism...check out these policy ideas.)
Yang, a highly successful tech entrepreneur, wrote a book about how automation will change the job market, and he is fully committed to the policy. “By the time this campaign is over we will have others advocating for UBI, but most politicians are risk-averse. The majority of Democrats at the polls already support UBI,” Yang says “My job is to show everyone this is the future, it is inevitable. The sooner we get across the finish line, the sooner we can end this human suffering.”

Andrew Yang, Presidential Candidate 

There is reason to be optimistic that a consensus could be found, and that’s a good thing because a UBI is going to be necessary in the reality of the future.
Our options are either to modify our economic system in a way that prevents it from coming to a grinding halt, or forsake the technology that will help us confront humanity’s greatest challenges and improve life for everyone. It’s really just that simple.

From a macroeconomic perspective—looking at how the plan would impact the economy as a whole—UBI would likely grow the economy, regardless of how much it costs or how you fund it.
A study from the Roosevelt Institute examined three UBI plans and the researchers found that all three resulted in higher spending...more money cycled through the entire economy offsetting any cost involved.

It’s important to remember that there is a basic income program in the United States already that has been running for around 40 years: the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. So it’s not as hypothetical as some people seem to think. Alaska gives residents annual, unconditional checks of $330 to $2,000.
Finland's UBI experiment is funded primarily through it's leases from oil drilling in the North Sea.

Ultimately, however, a guaranteed income for all isn’t just about what we need.
It is about what we deserve.
Ask a person who is nearing the end of their life about their favorite memory, and you can bet your bottom dollar that it won’t involve a nine-to-five job. When questioned about their deepest regrets in life, the dying consistently lament having sacrificed personal happiness for work. Imagine if we structured our society according to the wisdom of the wisest among us. That would be real progress.