Interestingly, someone has to purchase the goods that these systems create. Thus, giving people the funds to do so, regardless of where they come from, seems like a necessity.
His belief was that on one hand capitalism was/is absolutely necessary to create sufficient wealth to make redistribution viable (he made the point in The German Ideology that a redistribution before that point would do what we saw e.g. in the Soviet Union: simply spread poverty around, and restart the class struggle it tried to erase as people tried to et out of poverty), on the other hand it would in its end-stages lead to "overproduction" combined with mass unemployment as it would fail to reconcile the need to try to win more of the market with the need to cut employment costs.
The ways society could prevent this happening are many, including things like basic minimum income as you suggest. But Marx argument was that societal changes of this magnitude tends to instead result in increasing tensions until revolutions erupt for the reason that ruling classes rarely see the gravity of the situation until it is too late.
There are many ways he could be wrong about this, but I find it very interesting to observe the increase in frequency with which this issue of automation and its consequencs is now coming up again.
He also foresaw the shift from manual labor to intellectual property as the essential component in production.
What Marx saw as an inexorable trend towards socialism may have in fact just been a temporary consequence of the industrial revolution, wherein labor was especially important and the power of an individual worker was large in historical terms. It's not impossible to imagine a sort of "Neo Feudalism" where a small minority of elites find it cheaper to maintain control via technological force-multipliers than to share their earnings such that everyone is actually happy or nearly so.
His message was less about how important labor was, but how labor got squeezed between the industrial capitalists owning the factories, and the rentier capitalists who owned the land, housing and issued loans.
The connection between mounted warfare and feudalism is controversial [1] but it's common enough that societies adopt social structures optimized for defense. There were almost certainly multiple reasons for the prevalence of feudal relations.
60,000 jobs were just destroyed by automation, this isnt hypothesizing anymore its reality.
Where do these 60,000 people go now? What are the new jobs that these robots have created?
This is what you are proposing as the solution to the problem of job shortages?
We don't have to. There are many complicated jobs that aren't white collar but still require a highly skilled individual and are not currently achievable by robotics (millwrights for example).
The OP is referring to removing monotonous, simplistic, repetitive jobs.
Do you have a citation for that? I would be interested in seeing that. According to the Chinese government (which has been accused, in fairness, of fudging the numbers) their unemployment rate is highly stable.
Historically, as countries transition from developing to developed their workforce will shift from primarily non-skilled labour to primarily skilled labour [1]. China appears to be following this line naturally, if you trust their reported unemployment rates.
[1]: http://images.slideplayer.com/21/6263323/slides/slide_12.jpg
Basically hiring people to dig and fill up white-collared holes.
The generation preceding the current generation will be better educated and take-on the more skill demanding jobs.
Sure it will, because it'll force large social changes and such changes are interesting regardless of whether they're bad or good.
World War III breaking out would most certainly be considered "interesting" news, although there is absolutely nothing positive about it.
Just as mass industrialization necessitated huge social change in response. The emergence of a middle class, the growth of cities, organized labor and work hours, etc.
As automation and AI continue to replace jobs and more and more people find it difficult to compete at any price. I predict you will see similar societal changes in response. I don't know what those will be, and they probably will not come easy. We could see a utopian future similar to Star Trek, or a dystopian one instead.
We live in interesting times. :)