[ekimekim]

(my guess / personal opinion, I don't claim to speak for everyone)

Because so many here believe so strongly in the power of automation. Almost all software engineers are in the business of putting people out of jobs - eg. replacing a secretary with a mail and calendar app, replacing a business middleman with an online marketplace, or replacing a sysadmin with cluster management tools.

A way to resolve this cognitive dissonance of us doing a thing we think is right (automating the world) with causing a thing we think is bad (unemployment) is to turn unemployment into not a bad thing, which is the promise UBI makes.

This doesn't mean we don't honestly believe it can work. But it makes us more likely to WANT to believe it. Brains are funny things.

[ZenoArrow]

Increasing levels of automation certainly plays a part in the drive to explore solutions like UBI, but it's not the only consideration. On a broader level, the issues driving UBI are those related to social mobility and quality of life. Those issues would exist without the drive towards automation.

To explain what I mean, imagine you're working a low-skilled, low-paid job just to keep a roof over your head, with very few opportunities to retrain (both in terms of free time and money). In other words, you're working just to survive, and are not making the most of your time on Earth. UBI would give people in that situation an avenue to retrain, as well as making it harder for companies to keep wages low for undesirable jobs, they would have to better compensate people for giving up their time to do a job they otherwise wouldn't be interested in doing. None of these factors are directly derived from increased automation.

As for whether or not UBI will be a net benefit, the answer is not completely clear, but that's the reason small-scale experiments looking into UBI have been started.