UBI exposes everything that is wrong with the asshole elite

Joe is a plumber in 2060. He spends most of his time at home managing his 10 robots over the internet who are out in the field clearing drains and installing pipes. It's true that since robots have become commonplace, the price of plumbing services has dropped drastically. But it's also true that he can do orders of magnitude more than his dad who was a plumber too. It's true that the demand for new plumbers is less than ever, but it's also true that because the prices have become so low, people use plumbing services more than ever. Most of his customers are on the $20 per year plan - for unlimited pipe repair, clog fixing, and toilet repair, that is included in their home owners insurance.

Even with all this, his pay is still lower than it ever was, but that's okay because his costs are lower than they ever have been too because of robot use in all the other industries. Joe is on the high end $30 dollar per month per person unlimited organic food plan. Freshly picked food is delivered to his door by drones daily, his robot cook then receives the food and prepares it into gourmet meals for him and his family. While Joe is monitoring his plumbing robots, his home robots busy are doing the laundry, cleaning the dishes, mopping and vacuuming the floors, tutoring his kids, manicuring his wife's nails while she recovers from her $200 spinal chord replacement operation (she injured her back skiing last week). Other robots were tending to his gardens, lawn, and flowers, and patching that crack in the cement he noticed the other day. This is awful, it's going to cost him an extra $30 to retile his terracotta tile porch. Dammit, "I should have gotten that $15 per year insurance plan", he mumbles to himself.

Since Joe has a few minutes, he decides to take a scenic drive in his robot chauffeured car. As the car is driving along, he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he notices he is out in the country. While he was asleep, his robot driver must have filled up his tank for $5, and just kept driving in the same direction. He realized he is in the country because he sees the thousands of field robots picking bugs out of the organic crops, pruning the leaves, and planting the rich and lush gardens. He recalls back when he was a kid in the old days where these fields used to have just one crop, thousands or acres of wheat, tended to by combines. Now they look like tropical rain forests with a variety of tens of thousands of crops each pruned, trimmed, watered, nutriated to their special needs by robotic tenders. Now days, many people just own a few acres themselves and have their robots plant and tend to it, and their drones deliver food from their own land to their homes in town. Joe falls back to sleep content and happy.

However, not everybody is happy. Many of the former elites who congregate in the old coffe house often complain of being sick to their stomachs. It's not that they are sick, it's not that they are even struggling, for their robots are tending to their lives too, as well as their health care. Nope, instead they bitterly mope about the "good ole days" when they controlled all the factories, when they controlled all the production and all the wealth, when they had power over the masses, the banks, the state, and so on. Ever since production and money has become decentralized and distributed, the wealth has too, and they have felt neutered and irrelevant. One chimes up, "dammit, we should have forced through UBI, we should have made it so that we control all the robots, we control all the wealth of production, their token allowances would have been more then enough to keep them happy and pacified, while at the same remaining dependent on us", he continues "since we are the brilliant and the elite, we deserved to control them, we deserved to keep that wealth to ourselves". He rambles on on, "dammit, we should have put more taxes on robots, put in more 'safety and environmental' regulations in to limit competitors getting their foot in the door. His old friend at the table chimes in "yeah, progress sucks, back when there were poor people they might have bought in to our UBI scheme, now they'll never go for it."