Guaranteed Basic Income

So I've talked about the fifteen dollar minimum wage as being a good idea whose time has been overlooked, I don't think it goes far enough though.

We aren't there yet, but we are moving in the direction of a post-labor society, assuming we survive the next few decades, we will be seeing a world where one person can farm for hundreds of thousands, where most goods are delivered by automated systems, and factories require only a few engineers to oversee the robots, and that is great, however what it means is a large part of our workforce will be surplus to requirements and thus, out of a job unless a solution can be found.

The thing is, I don't see it as a problem needing a solution really, rather a best case scenario, I feel like we could move from needing to work, to wanting to work. That we can become a society of creators, artists, scientists, and engineers rather than customer service and fast food drones.

But to do that we need a few things, the first is an increase in educational standards, as well as access to education, the second is freedom from worry about the day to day basics of living. Both require overhauling some pretty entrenched systems, but the second is probably the hardest to do.

Government provided housing and food is one option, but that seems like it would lead to projects built by the lowest bidder, and a lot of subsisting off the poorest quality foods, which is more or less how the majority of the country operates now, so we need to do better, and that would be a Guaranteed Basic Income.

A lot of people argue against this idea, and you don't see anyone in the mainstream really talking about it, welfare is unpopular enough with a certain part of society, let alone putting everyone on it, and expanding the benefits at the same time. But as we move to a society with lower labor requirements, we will still have millions of citizens who need to be taken care of, and to have something to do. With a Basic Income, these people become free to retrain, go back to school, start a business, or create art and music.

How many Einsteins are born, grow old, and die without the opportunity to use their gifts? Well if we use his estimated IQ of 160 we can make a guess, roughly 0.1 percent of the population charts at or around that number, and yes I realize IQ is a poor way to measure intelligence, but it will suffice for now, given the US population is in the neighborhood of 350 million, that means there are probably 3500 or so Einsteins among us at any given time, of those, statistically speaking more than half of them will belong to the lower-middle class and below, people who must work every day to get by, or not even that. So some two thousand geniuses will go unremarked and die in obscurity.

Remember it took just one to build the foundation of modern physics, what are we losing every year with our current model?

People think that if we don't have to work for something then it isn't worth having or we don't deserve it, but I think we as a society have an obligation to reduce workloads by as much as possible, having the freedom to do things, and the education to use that freedom will almost certainly stimulate people to do more than simply work to live paycheck to paycheck.
And there will probably be those who decide to accept their life on the Basic Income and not attempt to make themselves more, so what? If they aren't hurting others or dragging them down, then who cares if they "waste" their life? There are plenty of other people taking up the slack, and the difference is those people want to do it, rather than people doing the minimum necessary to get by, we become a society of volunteers, people in their fields doing work because they want to, because it is right for them, I think that is worth pursuing.

I know it's a pipe dream right now, the current powers that be a quite happy with the status quo, but they won't last forever, the cracks are showing and they will fall, it is sad that they will hurt a lot of people before they come down, but come down they will anyway.