It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simsti

It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot. In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building. Pro tip: cyberpunk fiction was largely dystopian. I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do. Without a culture of opportunity and vision people turn inward to drugs (opiate epidemic), various forms of Skinner box masturbation (game and social media addiction), or lash out. The latter takes the form of disorganized lone nut mass shootings like Las Vegas or organized political fanaticism like ISIS or neo-fascism. People don't like to be worthless. The solution is not basic income. The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling: - Radically extending the human life span - Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general. - Colonizing the Moon and Mars - Replacing our entire fossil fuel based infrastructure with renewables, storage, and possibly some nuclear in areas where those are not sufficient. - Connecting all our major cities with high speed rail or maybe even more exotic things like underground hyperloop transit. - Rebuilding suburbia with modern knowledge about design including the social impact of the built environment. Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people. ... and so on. Basic income is the conservative risk-averse option. The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work. Part of the problem is the "developed world" narrative. Start with the premise that our children should properly regard us as un-developed, then commit a few trillion to becoming developed. If our children and our grandchildren do not look back at us as ignorant and backward we have failed. "When I was your age we only lived on one planet, drove around manual cars that burned dead stuff, and we only lived about 80 years and had a 100 median IQ." Edit: I didn't vote for Trump but when he won I did hold out a little hope that he might be some kind of crypto-liberal who would actually make good on that "trillion dollar infrastructure plan" talk. (A trillion is too low but it's a start.) Alas it appears that this isn't the case and he really is as bad as he looked.