Praising the "gig economy" means he knows nothing about what the "gig economy" means for ordinary workers. The gig economy is when you have to spend more time scrounging up odd jobs than actually working to get paid. The gig economy is having to work multiple part-time jobs since companies won't hire full-time workers—except each of the part-time jobs expect you to be on-call 24 hours/day. The gig economy is non-compete agreements for part-time low-wage service workers. The gig economy is hiring friendly white people for the purposes of branding, then firing them all to cut wages once your image is established. The gig economy is offloading costs of business onto your employees. In short, the "gig economy" is a rebranding is corporate exploitation of low-wage service workers in the context of high unemployment and lack of regulation.

Saying "these sorts of jobs provide the upside to a universal basic income’s floor: our goal should be to make it vastly easier for individuals to better themselves if they choose to do so" is just blaming unemployed people for losing their jobs when the financial industry cocked up the economy with "financial innovations" (i.e., fraud).