Who are you counting as being in "any position of power"? All the AI lab people are saying that the most likely and best outcome is we all live in a world of abundance where money doesn't matter anymore. Dario, Sam, Demis, and Elon have all said this loudly and repeatedly to anyone who asks.
None of them have articulated a coherent way to get there from here. But they all believe that the technology will make it possible, so the only unresolved question is how to transition us there.
And none of them ever spoke a lie. Especially not if it would further their goals at someone else's expense.
From what I've seen, UBI is just a carrot dangled in front of the poors by utopian Silicon Valley tech bro megabillionaires when they're trying to drum up some PR for whatever big idea they're pimping out at the moment.
There are a lot of discussions of socialization of health care and basic income approaches and sovereign wealth based on automation dividends similar to the Alaska trust.
I think the current spate of mean cruelty ala MAGA and a glorification of a mean and cruel past that was never a golden age is a death spasm of a deeply unpopular belief system. As the actual realities of the policies sink in 70% of the populace is revolted, which is a super majority. That’s more than enough to put a pin in the philosophy permanently. It is also greatly accelerating electrification, realization of the value of expertise in technocratic systems in current generations, etc. I think humans are socially adaptable animals at a cultural level, but for the individual the adaptation process can be awful. I hope it’s not, because it doesn’t have to be. We will see.
We have no choice, we must tax the common people.
The Uprising (2026)Matrix was a good point to this. They made the world a utopia and people couldn't handle it. Our monkey brains require pain give us a utopia and we'll just walle ourselves to death.
(The ones I've heard about, I'm fairly sure, didn't find anything of the kind. Which isn't to say that they show we should have UBI; there are big gaps between what has been tested so far and what an actual economy with UBI would look like.)
I think you've taken the "work less" that was found in some studies to suggest they needed "toil". They simply found it somewhere else.