Inefficient Design

The market rate of the work of an unintelligent or uneducated person is below the cost for a person to live. As technology progresses the percentage of people priced out of the job market increases.

Some want to distribute a basic income and allow each person to decide how and what to contribute to society. Some want to build gutters for them to rot in. The latter set is driven by the belief that everyone can and should work. That belief fails to take into account the fact that ANY job these people can do can be done less expensively by a robot. So any work for them must ordinarily be make-work.

Furthermore some people unable to find work are just lazy, some have a disability, and some are undereducated and priced out of the education market. The labor market is not efficient enough to sort them one from the other.

I propose the following form of organization.

A large group (say, 100) of the unemployed, in return for their welfare check, are expected to gather in a warehouse. They are given cheap, durable computers and some appropriate design and building supplies. Importantly, they are not required to do anything but show up and not commit any crimes or trash the place. No one checks their work. There are one or two security guards and a janitor. Each group is told the whole group will receive a bonus if it can solve X design or robotics problem, with no time limit but the first group to solve it gets the bonus.

Now the most driven and educable can be expected to learn about robotics. Everyone else can be expected to help where they can or just spend their time on Facebook or porn, which is also allowed. The most capable leaders will naturally end up in charge, and everyone will have a chance to meet other people, practice teamwork, and generally not be wasting away at home.

Those who can be educated will thereby gain experience and knowledge. No one else will be particularly put out. And even though they won't turn out work at the level of a roboticist, or make a return on the cost, they will slowly solve real-world problems. Ideally even those not working on the team's goal will end up doing something more practical than if they weren't around other people. Ideally they'll find ways to work together and maybe start the occasional side business.

The maximum value for their time is thus extracted, the best will have a way to move up in the world, and the disabled and unwilling won't be any worse off. And in the rest of society the people complaining about welfare will have a lot less to say.

The only downside I can see to this is it can very easily degenerate into workhouses if mismanaged.