Basic income is very different than traditional communism in that it keeps with the basic capitalist infrastructure. In fact, basic income is much more capital

Basic income is very different than traditional communism in that it keeps with the basic capitalist infrastructure. In fact, basic income is much more capitalistic than existing social safety net systems because it maintains the assumption that if disadvantaged people are actors in the market, that the overall system will be more efficient than specific government-specified handouts. Really the question underlying basic income and safety nets in general is to what extent every citizen in a modern society should have access to goods, regardless of their contribution. Once society has decided how much access such citizens should have, welfare vs basic income becomes a question of efficiency and optimization as opposed to ideology. As for automation not reducing overall jobs--as someone who works in automation I don't see how it will magically create more service jobs. There are few jobs today that employ large numbers of people that are not in danger of being replaced by automation--and the whole point of automation and efficiency is to minimize the number of people required to maintain the system. I do think service jobs become the way people become gainfully employed in an automation world, but that society will need to expand its definition of what is a job worthy of recompense--for example someone could decide to become an artist, and actually have that be a renumerative profession.