You know, with something like UBI, I was thinking about independent groups such as the Shakers, the Amish, and tribal societies that exist within modern ones. These often function as an economic unit, producing farm or artisanal goods to exchange for currency, goods, and services with the society they are embedded in. The communes of the 60s/70s and homesteaders were/are similar. Some of those were the original producers of soy products in America, for instance. Others were involved in organic farming.
Some people think that the gig economy is a harbinger of a future where larger portions of the economy run in that way, the way movie studios are said to operate.
So, maybe $12k/year is an odd amount for an individual. But what about $240k for twenty people? Or $1.2M for a hundred? Could that be used to power a unit of economic output?
I would also describe a hypothetical society where a substantial portion of its necessities were “automated,” whatever one takes the term to mean. We often take it to mean one thing, but I would put forth that a system of transportation or food delivery is also a form of automation over one where restaurants individually maintain staff to do deliveries. Likewise, a system where an entity maintains computing resources — cloud computing — could also be said to be a form of automation over one where individuals are responsible for the physical provisioning of those resources). Where analogy breaks down between cloud computing and the production of goods and services might be the fact that a lot of stuff in the real world economy has to do with skilled labor. The ease of learning things online might already be a step in a direction, and when it comes to the food supply chain I would argue that many parts are already automated in the colloquial sense. What’s more, already in today’s time people can choose between vegetables farmed via automated tractors and vegetables farmed via artisanal/traditional methods.
That is something like society in the Star Trek universe, where in the 21st century most things get automated and this frees people to go on spaceships with lasers.
