I'd be interested to hear any other potential solutions. Seems to me the choice is either:

a) basic income, or

b) all the unemployed who can not get a job in the new economy are given a government job. The work in the job doesn't matter, as long as it provides a fig leaf to allow the government to give them the money they desperately need to live.

If its not entirely clear, I think that these non-jobs are are an unfair and incredibly expensive way of giving out benefits. The richer would be better off with a basic income (free money! smaller more efficient government meaning taxing the rich less!). The poor would be better off with a basic income (no social workers or benefit admins judging you! future is predictable so able to start investing for the future!). Its only annoying for those of us in the middle, those who will not benefit much from a basic income (because it won't be a huge amount of money, our taxes are unlikely to decrease) but will also not see much benefit from it (I probably already had a safety net in terms of friends and family, and the basic income will be too small to support the lifestyle I am used to anyway).

But until we reach the new economy where robots completely replace everyone, we don't need "fig leaf" jobs. There is actual, useful, work that can be done. For example, people can be put to work repairing our "crumbling infrastructure" or building new infrastructure (c.f. FDR). Some of them can provide day care for working mothers. Etc.

Basically, take all those cool programs that the left seems to like and make folks who claim to be unable to find a job be the ones to actually do the work.

Once robots take over, eliminating these basic jobs will be so cheap that no one will object. Until then, we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves.

We should pay people to study and provide higher compensation for better grades. (However, failing can't be allowed to compromise basic shelter/food needs.)

Ouch. What if the grading system is unfair and allows students to game the system by memorizing facts instead of actually understanding what they're studying? (Not quite a rhetorical question, this is pretty much how the educational system in many parts of the world works)

That's what you, and many others, imagine but what does the research say? For links and references to a variety of studies that have attempted to get some data on this issue check out the Basic Income and MINCOME entries in Wikipedia.

And what if there simply isn't enough work, in the traditional sense, to go around? This is a very real issue as automation increases and this time around the newly jobless can't go work on Ford's assembly line or take stenography classes. The fact is there are going to be far more people without jobs than there are jobs available.

It's kind of ironic that in 2015 work is fetishized to a degree that would make Karl Marx blush. This is a worrying trend. As another contributor has already pointed out, if we don't update our, quite literally, outdated attitude towards work and employment we are potentially facing some very serious social unrest.

Not working and not having your basic needs met is probably worse though.

How about basic income and abolishing any minimum wage? (And other barriers to low income employment.)

Basic income creates a de facto minimum wage by setting a wage for a complete lack of labor. I'd think any other minimum wage would be redundant.

A welfare system that abruptly stops paying out when you've got a job sets a de facto minimum wage.

A basic income doesn't prevent you from working for a small amount of money. (And people might even elect to do that, if the job has other good sides.)