A universal basic income is not a cure for this particular problem.

The reason the idea is getting interest is the number of people who don't have and can't get jobs.

Buckminster Fuller talked years ago about the need to abolish the notion of "making a living" because he was prescient as usual and foresaw a time when many people couldn't.

You "make a living" doing a job. The job exists because someone else is willing to pay to have that job done. What happens when you don't know how to do anything someone else will pay for?

Work flows to where it can be done cheapest, and pretty much always has.

As the Internet Eats the World, and robotics become more sophisticated, whole classes of jobs are going away. They are either being automated, or are being done elsewhere because the job does not have to be done where you are and someone elsewhere will do it cheaper than you can. They can do it cheaper because it costs less to live where they do, and will accept a lower price than you can charge.

(Government efforts at protectionism at best slow the process. They cannot eliminate the problem. And protectionist efforts raise costs for everyone else. How much more are you willing to pay for things you buy to see that they are made by workers in your country? At some point you'll say "That's too expensive" and not pay it, which is why those jobs go elsewhere in they first place.)

Technology gets praised as creating jobs, and indeed, it does. But the new jobs created don't help those whose jobs were eliminated by technology. By definition, those new jobs are new, and the folks idled don't know how to do them, and possibly can't learn because the job requires the equivalent of an advanced degree to be able to do it. What do those folks do instead?

Work flowing to where it can be done cheapest has always been a factor. What is changing is the amount of work that can be done elsewhere or by machine. Folks doing unskilled/low skilled labor have suffered the most, as no one will pay living wages for that sort of work in an industrialized nation like the US. Well meaning efforts like mandated minimum wage increases are a band aid. There must be minimum wage jobs covered by those mandates, and the higher the minimum wage goes, the harder employers think about what the job is worth and whether they want to pay that much for it. If you have a minimum wage job, you benefit (if you don't get laid off to cut costs.) If you don't have a job and are looking for a minimum wage job the bar just got raised.

But increasingly, it's not just unskilled/low skilled labor affected. I tell people, if it can be done by machine, or elsewhere for less than you want to be paid, it will. We are still discovering how many that applies to.

Will a guaranteed basic income make everyone couch potatoes? Hardly. Aside from providing income needed to live, jobs structure time, and give you something to do with your waking hours. The bigger question is just what sort of potential people have to unleash. What would you do with your time if you didn't have to work for a living?

This is ultimately a political and social pro0blem more than an economic one. The notion of "making a living" is embedded in our culture. Jobs are status markers. What you do for a living and what sort of living you make doing it is a principal source of status. What happens to your status when you can't make a living?

I don't have good answers for any of this. I am simply convinced that we aer mostly not even asking the right questions.