> I'm starting to see that UBI is becoming the "answer"

There's been a social experiment going on here at the moment (Australia) - everyone has had UBI for a while in the form of unemployment for everyone who needs it, and paid at a rate that you can live on.

They're finding it hard to get people to pick fruit and so on - it used to be done by back packers who aren't coming because travel isn't happening. Strangely, no one thinks to pay people more to pick fruit and stop it from being a shitty job, instead they lowered the amount they're paying for unemployment. UBI effectively creates a new minimum wage, there are still a lot of jobs no one wants to do, so techtopia will have to wait a while imho.

I am completely okay with letting off-season fruit become more expensive for a while and the tech companies and their vaunted AI divisions get funded by market sensible prices to actually develop the systems we need to do fruit picking robotically (it absolutely can be done, but funding to drive down costs is sporadic).

I mean really one answer here is: maybe we as a civilization don't actually need mass-farmed fruit, because it's not actually cost-effective to produce and consumers clearly don't actually value it very highly.

The point of UBI is a grand solution to stop us having goods and products which depend on creating a defacto underclass.

Yes, same, pay a couple of cents more for a piece of fruit. The trouble is, afaik, is that pushes up the price of local fruit. The local fruit producers are finding it hard to compete on price with foreign imported stuff, (and they like money I imagine), because its picked by slaves and children, the only way to compete is have slave conditions here. A rational response would be to have import duties on fruit and veg so we can pay people properly, but tariffs - no way thats anti global, one of the few things I agree with Trump on.

"here, have some fungible tokens in return for doing nothing of value".

Crypto was such a shit show.