It's a can of worms that really needs to be explored. Maybe the answer is not UBI, but there needs to be some good ideas on the best ways of transitioning to a "post-wage" world, if such is indeed happening (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-wi...)
Mind you, the robots-are-taking-our-jobs predictors have been wrong before. But if they aren't, the issue I see is that a big spoke of the modern capitalism wheel revolves around employment. Employment provides income that supports a wider range of people than mere rentiers can. These employees can in turn spend this income at businesses. If there is no consumer income, any business that depends on consumer demand... well, they have a problem.
I guess it's easy to envision things being pushed a lot further, where automation has eliminated huge amounts of work. The main economy would thus largely be revolving around rentiers, who are unaffected by a lack of jobs, people that support the automation (which so far has been a relatively small group), and any other employment which can't be automated (in an extreme scenario this would be very little). From my perspective, such an economy would hardly look like modern capitalism at all, it would potentially look more like previous rentier-dominated economies. Because jobs are such an important pillar in 20th century life, there will probably also be a culture shock on top of that. Without some changes, it's possible that this transition will be rather rough (even if the automation doesn't quite go so far as some predict).
Mind you, the robots-are-taking-our-jobs predictors have been wrong before. But if they aren't, the issue I see is that a big spoke of the modern capitalism wheel revolves around employment. Employment provides income that supports a wider range of people than mere rentiers can. These employees can in turn spend this income at businesses. If there is no consumer income, any business that depends on consumer demand... well, they have a problem.
I guess it's easy to envision things being pushed a lot further, where automation has eliminated huge amounts of work. The main economy would thus largely be revolving around rentiers, who are unaffected by a lack of jobs, people that support the automation (which so far has been a relatively small group), and any other employment which can't be automated (in an extreme scenario this would be very little). From my perspective, such an economy would hardly look like modern capitalism at all, it would potentially look more like previous rentier-dominated economies. Because jobs are such an important pillar in 20th century life, there will probably also be a culture shock on top of that. Without some changes, it's possible that this transition will be rather rough (even if the automation doesn't quite go so far as some predict).