It's never been fair. And those with the upper hand always set the rules. That's been true since life first formed on this planet, and we shouldn't pretend that those forces suddenly do not exist anymore.
Of course not, that's not what I'm implying here at all, a certain degree of unfairness will always persist. However, this does not mean that we shouldn't try to reduce it as much as it is possible to us.
In 10 years we could see lots of taxi and personal drivers unemployed, for example. That stuff happens. But the productivity pressures on a growth economy are always about doing more with less. So you often either become redundant or aid the process of making someone else redundant. To fight that for reasons of unemployment is kind of a loser's game, though -- you create an unsustainable economy with people paid to essentially be idle and not assault anyone.
I'm not talking about the time 10 years from now, but far further in the future, after hypothetical, but still very likely (in my books) advances in technology have rendered a significant proportion of manual labour employment redundant, inlcuding simple service jobs such as grocery clerks. Again, I stress the highly speculative and theoretic aspect of this thought, it's really more a thought experiment than a concrete proposal.
Such a situation however would pretty much unprecedented in the whole history of mankind. The products previously produced by the labourers, will of course still be produced, just much, much less labour-intensive, as you would really only need to provide maintanence and energy.
This means, that the output, the real material wealth of the society still exists - however, a large portion of the population would be without employment, and assuming that the service sector does not completely incorporate this workforce, which would seem rather ambitious to me, a rather large disparity between the number of jobs demanded and supplied would be the case. This results, when left alone to the forces of the free labour market, first of all in low wages, and secondly, a high rate of unemployment.
So while the improvements in technology would have greatly improved output, and reduced the need for much of the labour, thus making the society much wealthier, large portions of the population would see their conditions deteriorate. To counter this, some sort of balancing mechanism would have to be established.
I know that much of the problems I have described has already occurred during the great wave of mechanisation of agriculture, where the manufactioral and service sector has indeed absorbed at least the vast majority of the people previously employed in agriculture, but I'm rather sceptical as to wether the same would occurr in the, again rather likely case of what I have described above.
This unconditional basic income, or whatever you want to call it, would in another sense only appeal to my personal sense of fairness as well - there is no reason, why this wealth that is created anyways, should not be profitable to all of society, especially when due to a above mentioned divergence between employment opportunities and workforce it is not possible for everyone to work even if they were willing to. Of course, there should still be financial incentive to take up work, meaning the level of basic income should always be below wages.
There would be so much more to this, and the interesting thing about this idea is that much of the society I described is already reality, but this has gotten wayyyyyyy longer than I intended already
To play a little devil's advocate here, isn't there also a balance of abundance and scarcity to consider here? Namely, that societies where food and resources are scarce should be disincentivized from producing more offspring to create even worse competition for dwindling resources?
Humanness unfortunately has nothing to do with it. Mass starvation is nature's way of saying to stop having so many babies and creating more mouths to feed. Pushing that out further by creating leverage to prop up unsustainable populations only makes the inevitable collapse even more potentially deadly and tragic, like inflating an unsustainable economic bubble.
Currently however starvation has very little to do with an unsufficient amount of food being produced, but with its distribution.
And the the argument that the starvation we observe today is a natural way of balancing out population, is empirically just nonsense, as the counries most severely suffering from it are recording the highest rates of population growth, while the richest countries, the ones most abundant in the availability of food and other rescources, stagnate or decline.
Besides that, it's in my purely personal opinion extremely cynical and rather cruel.