[thelastgallon]

It probably won't be a straight up cash, but something like what Cuba does: Cuba does not have a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Instead, the Cuban government guarantees basic survival through a socialist welfare system, consisting of state-controlled employment, heavily subsidized utilities, free universal healthcare and education, and a monthly ration book (Libreta de Abastecimiento) for basic food items.

For UBI to work, the precondition is Universal Billionaire Income, so it will look something like this when its implemented: The Secretive Conglomerate That Controls Cuba’s Economy: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/16/world/america...

[buu700]

Personally, I'm not entirely opposed to UBI, but what I'd rather see is a system of guaranteed jobs and educational/training stipends (with part-time and/or remote options). The reason for that is primarily fault tolerance: in the event that a major disaster renders our AI/computational infrastructure inoperable (or adversarial), it's imperative that humanity itself act as a redundant store of all the information necessary to preserve or reboot civilization.

That being said, I do think UBI (with some guardrails) is still preferable to making everyone consume services provided exclusively by government monopolies. Not because anything provided by the government in particular is going to be magically low-quality, but because any monopoly is inherently insulated from long-term systemic incentives to compete on price and quality.