"Basic income mean huge changes"

I have to admit this alone is enough to give me pause. The logic goes something like: "Our current social system has produced astonishing wealth. We can therefore take this to change our current social system and distribute the wealth more widely. Hooray, we fixed things!"

But this amounts to a rewriting of the social system. We have no guarantees that the next social system will produce the same amounts of wealth. This is a silent assumption that most advocates seem to make, and it is completely unjustified. Despite the vigorous handwaving, it doesn't take much Econ 101 to guess there's a darned good chance it will produce less. But, if it produces less, now we're distributing less wealth. Whatever social effects may occur when that happens, it's pretty unlikely that they're going to be happy puppies and rainbows.

If one could assume a steady-state and that the effects of the first year will be the only effects ever, it's all fun and games. But the second and third order effects seem unlikely to produce a happy society, or even necessarily one that is still generating wealth at anything like our current pace.

The most popular handwave seems to be "Well, we can just pay people more to do the things we need done... and look, now they're getting paid more to do these things, so it's a win! Hooray!" but, well, follow that through to its logical conclusion... a society that is paying more for its basic needs is a poorer society. Poorer in the same wealth that we're trying to redistribute. And given that the price has risen, it's also a society that is getting less of its critical needs.

Sure, the first year of basic income is fun and games. But what does the twentieth look like? Or the year that you have to claw it back because the society no longer has the wealth to provide it? What does it look like when 78% of the culture votes for a larger "basic income" every year? Basic income is probably incompatible with democracy in the long term; what are we going to do about that? Basic income, democracy, and unrestricted immigration from poorer places are definitely incompatible with each other, what are we going to do about that? (Given that we already see plenty of politicians with incentives to legalize immigrants so they can have their votes, this is a huge concern.) What does it look like when a natural disaster strikes New York and society is out billions or trillions of dollars? You have to think about more than the first year, and you have to think about what real people will do in reaction, and what real people will do in reaction to those reactions, and so on and so on. Yes, clearly, Star Trek people do great on something probably quite like Basic Income, but that doesn't prove much.

And I'm quite concerned that this is something that from a societal point of view is not something we'd ever be able to remove if it did become infeasible; I suspect that the populace would happily ride it into straight-up social collapse before giving it up. We may be disturbingly close to that scenario even before we try "basic income".

This logic goes flying out the window if we can make robots that "just work" and can provide for us... but we're not talking about waiting that long right now, are we? We may have no practical choice but to suck it up until then. (And ye gods is there probably a thin line between a robot economy smart enough to provide for us without us doing much, and a robot economy smart enough to simply dispense with us entirely.)