Universal basic income in the future

[Mister Agenda]

The 'new wave' of automation is different from previous developments, which has people who really do understand economics thinking that this time might be different. Previous industrial revolutions still required a lot of simple labor since it has been very hard to replace bipeds with opposable thumbs who can learn a variety of tasks quickly...most 'simple' labor is very complex to a robot.

I feel that there will be lots of new jobs in the future but how many of them will really be necessary to keep people in the basic necessities? How many social media ranking consultants do we really need? Is there any job that absolutely can't be done by an advanced-enough robot?

I work in automation (building, programming, and troubleshooting).  I don't think the advancements are as much as you think.   Machines do very well at repetitive tasks, with little change. I work in places, that still have quite a few employees, even though for the most part, they are fully automated.  Things fail, and get jammed, or need someone to make a choice. There's a brick making facility, that still has a fair number of people, just to pick up the brick that fall over, and to do change overs.     You also need to look at the cost of downtime.    What I mostly hear from companies, is that they have difficulty finding good people.

Interestingly enough I had  just heard the other day, that since 1950 (I believe that was the date; may have been the 40's)  there has only been one job, that has been essentially eliminated through technology.  Care to guess what it is? 
Often, the increase in efficiency, while it may reduce certain jobs; it increases others.

And of course that's the way things are now and there's no reason to expect it to change....

Since we're arguing from 'my experience', I run my department with half the people it took five years ago. If my department isn't completely obsolete in five years (too few people needed to do the job to justify having a whole department devoted to it), it will be because my company is too cheap to spend money on decent tech.

Half of America has an IQ under 100, are they likely to qualify as the 'good people' companies can't find enough of?