I like the idea of the guy in the comment section about owning a part of the robotic infrastructure and it being your responsibility. I think that could actually work. People would still need an education and they would still have a purpose, while also accepting and working within the inevitability of the automation of our society.

If you don't like your presidential choices now, cheer up, it's only going to get worse when the stakes over control of basic wage walks on stage.

All this nonsense about how wonderful it will be when our precious time is freed up to do more meaningfull things is a sales pitch. Unless of course you think waiting in line for your basic foodstuffs alloted to you according to your basic income plan , bronze, silver, gold or elite doled out via your cashless AI banking system overseen by some pampered oligarch in some city you can virtually visit to exclaim your outrage over the subsistance lifestyle you are trapped in is appealling, then you should be thrilled to death to rush headlong into this new freedom generation...now go take up those harpsicord lessons you've always dreamed of pursuing!

Ok, here's the thing: the people who make the rules give zero shits about us. If we're no longer necessary because machines can do our jobs, why should they give us free money? Out of the goodness of their hearts? I don't know about you, but given prior experience, my guess is we'll be all put in jail to serve as slave labor until even that is no longer good enough to compete with the productivity of the machines, and then we'll be killed.

Again this golden goose that is basic income, it doesn't work out people, at 2 million working age 18-65 year old's it works out to around 3 trillion dollars that would be needed at poverty level incomes, that's double the current government budget for all programs. Let's say that just half of them qualify because they already live at poverty level and their jobs go first, where is that 1.5 trillion going to come from? You can't tax robots and corporations are going to offshore that money.

Now one option is to pay everybody, the other UBI option might work out better, but would still be expensive. In the second option the government makes up whatever you don't make if you make under poverty level, say you can only find a minimum wage job at some place that can't afford a robot, you work only 20 hours a week, the government would then chip in the other 10 (because 30 is full time now, thanks Obamacare) until you've reached poverty level, then you get no more and it gets taxed partially back out too on your income tax because you have to declare it. Hardly anybody I've seen talks about that second version, maybe it's not considered Basic Income that way.

And that's the good news. Among the bad news? Radioactive snowfall creating invisible "hot spots" of radiation hundreds and thousands of time higher than is thought to be safe. Even longer term, though, will be the lawsuits, and then the meaningless mitigation and compensation measures. Geological time really crawls when you're dealing with the wrong half-lives and waiting on checks that aren't coming.