alt Hacker NewsIt's less "gloomy" and more of a passionate "Hey, we need to rework the social order anyway, so can we maybe not set everything on fire before we do so?"
Nobody's disagreeing with your latter line, just vehemently screaming that there's no need for willful harm.
Several issues with this:
1. Economic change drives social change. The political will to create something like UBI will not exist unless there is mass unemployment.
2. Right now we need people to work, in order to create the things they need to live. It will not be possible to allow willful unemployment until machines can actually do most jobs.
3. We don't actually know if 100% automation will happen. Past automation has tended to create new jobs, and we've maintained full employment at higher wages. We should see if this happens again before we start panicking.
We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.