We are clearly leaving the era of you eat what you kill. Something else must be found, and UBI is a step in that direction. But there appear to exist in this analysis some idealized displaced worker who has “more leisure time.” There will be unemployed people and employed people. The employed people will work hard, and the unemployed people will have nothing but leisure time. Pockets of service will persist, but it all feels like we’re “On the Beach,” as automation paints us into a corner where machines cannot quite yet go.

Not only will a fair way to distribute goods be difficult to engineer, but, in the absence of such a way, demand will fall, because we still have a Fordist economy in which wages are the greatest source of demand. We can replace some of that demand with a UBI, but it’s not clear that aggregate demand won’t fall just as potential supply increases.

The technology of production appears ready to leave the technology of consumption in the dust. That’s a bad result, but rationing industrial outputs by something other than value given to industrial production is way harder than it may look.