Agreed. My understanding is that around the founding of the United States, something like half of the working population had jobs relating to producing food (farming, fishing, etc). Today it's something like 1%. As agriculture has gotten ridiculously efficient, that's freed up more of us to invent computers or vaccines or TikTok dance trends or whatever. Of course we still need truck drivers to deliver this abundance to our homes (something like 5-10% of the US working population, depending on whether you just count truckers, or Amazon drivers, or gig economy delivery folks, etc)...

But if we make it to a sci-fi future where robofarms produce foods with little involvement, robotrucks transport goods with little human involvement, housing is built by mobile 3D-printer-bots, using materials mined by robots, etc... it's easy to see where the basics could be so easily provided that it would seem (to me) morally repugnant not to provide them to everyone.

I don't believe we've reached a point where UBI makes sense, but it's interesting to me that even if we were in this sci-fi everything-is-plentiful-and-automated future, some folks still think only the people that happened to be born at the right time and into the right circumstances to own and/or operate these robots should reap the rewards. The unlucky who didn't happen to own shares of RoboInc or land one of the scarce jobs ought to subsist as a member of a wretched underclass?