alt Hacker NewsLet's grant the premise. UBI, significant enough to live well on, luxury cars and dinner parties for all.
Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?
A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.
Oh yeah, to be clear I fully agree with everything you've said. My core argument is that there will be sufficient economic productivity for everyone to live incredibly well. Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power. That keeps me up at night, and things could go horribly wrong.
I guess the optimistic side of me thinks that benevolence wins out because there's no cost to it. There is plenty of competition among the wealth for scarce resources, but food, medicine, and mass-produceable luxury goods are effectively free. Given that, it's probably just easier to give those away to everyone than to crush most of humanity by force. But that is absolutely naive optimism, because I really have no control in this situation and prefer feeling naive optimism to pessimism.
And on the communism front, I will just say that I find it some combination of deeply amusing/ironic/depressing that the people on the far left protesting AI because it'll take jobs are protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism!