Unfortunately I agree with your assessment.

From my POV (jaded early-40s tech dropout, electrician); the joke on jobsites back when Andrew Yang campaigned (Presidentially with UBI as a platform policy) was:

>We're either going to have to have Universal Basic Income, or send a bunch of young men off to die in foreign wars – and leadership won't ever voluntarily implement UBI, so I guess it's time for a bunch of dudes to die.

[here we are, six year later]

Maybe the datacenter jobsites are a bit too morbid, but I was really hoping that UBI would've been possible (by now), one pandemic later. We even got (surprise MFers!) LLMs to help with re-distributions... and all we got was a trillionaire!