I don't think you have to reach for "economics won't exist" to see the serious problem that schemes like Basic Income would hope to address. > our whole econom

I don't think you have to reach for "economics won't exist" to see the serious problem that schemes like Basic Income would hope to address. > our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing. As technology advances, the amount of preparation any of us needs to specialize in something useful/valuable skyrockets. Rather amazingly, 1% of the population of the US are truck drivers or work directly for trucking companies. With families, we're talking about closer to 2 or 3% of the population of one of the most advanced nations on the planet. What's the skills and preparation gulf between a truck driver and the person who obsoleted him? Same goes for manufacturing (which is thriving in the United States, but with lights-out machining, where one person babies and maintains a pod of CNC machines) and many other fields. We need less and less wet robots, and retraining them is close to impossible already -- it may eventually be completely impossible due to specialization.