I also believe (and the evidence shows) that more and more people will join the useless class as automation continues. However, the evidence also suggests that Steem, at least in its present incarnation, is not the solution. The Gini index on Steem is close to 1, making it more unequal than the most unequal country in terms of fiat currencies. What good is it to replace control by large corporations and governments with control by a few whales? The idea of tokenizing the economy however, does hold promise. Money and prices are just signals that allow distributed decision making to make the best use of scarce resources. Once we are so efficient through automation that most of us won’t need to work, humans are no longer scarce resources, yet we are the primary users of the scarce resources, such as energy, food, and land. At that point, a monthly or daily income given to all just becomes a number of votes for how each of us want the automation to use scarce resources. Some may want to use their income for travel, some for a bigger house, etc. We are going to have to go beyond current fossilized thinking of basing income on a person’s productivity—unless we want a major revolution. After all, when most of us can’t do productive work, who will buy the products made by corporations?
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Of course missing from this equation is this aspect. All the jobless will have to be severely repressed in order to keep them from expressing discontent in socially disruptive ways. So, an autocratic (world government) would have to rule over all these unhappy people to keep them in line. Of course, a lot of people think we're headed there anyway. And what about the "free market". As you indicate, consumers are an essential part of a working economy. Income will have to be provided, work or no work. I have further thoughts about the "useless" class, which I will post in response to the blog, above.
With respect to placating the jobless, I think what we are seeing in the U.S. and Europe is actually a different strategy: shift the blame away from the real reasons to one or more groups of people. In the US, the Republican party, large corporations through legislative capture, and the conservative media, have at least half of the population convinced that poor people, immigrants (legal or illegal), and liberals are to blame for their situation. A story in the NY Times today just pointed out that profits have skyrocketed, businesses are having trouble hiring, consumer prices (across the board, but especially for healthcare and education) are on the rise, yet worker income has barely budged. It is worth noting that many of the big tech companies (FANG) spoke out against many things that the Trump administration proposed, but not the huge corporate tax cut. At a time when we really should demand that these companies do more to support the countries they sell in, they are doing everything to amass and concentrate their wealth. Look at Amazon shopping for deals from cities for its second headquarters. Of course, the tax cuts comes at the expense of social programs and infrastructure spending at exactly the time when more and more people need those programs. All the democratic party seems to be able to do is keep saying "Bad Trump." I see no attempt by them to actually clarify and address the real problems. My hope is that technology such as crypto and steemit will help here, but we clearly need a lot more experimentation with what works and doesn't work. At the same time, major corporate and political powers will definitely move to ban, limit, and then ultimately exploit and distort the new platforms so that they can hold on to power.
So much of what you say I agree with. But it's not up to the Democrats. In most cases, as we saw in the last election, they represent powerful interests that want to keep control. They distract us with cultural wars--use Trump as a cartoon arch enemy, as he uses guns and religion (also immigrants and the poor).
I do place my hopes in crypto and Steemit to bypass power centers. Also place hope in the free expression that is allowed to flow here. Increasingly, censorship prevails on other platforms. We need decentralized sources of information so people can decide for themselves which ideas are valuable, and what information is "fake". We really do need to grow these sorts of alternative news sources. It's not a coincidence that every autocracy, as soon as it is established, curbs speech.