We'll see how smart/rich Musk is once his government subsidies are taken away by Trump.

 
Maybe $1,000,000,000 should be the universal income!

My ultimate guess is that we'll muddle along somehow as we always have.

I understand that the whole "Horses to cars" analogy doesn't work completely with robotics, AI, and automation.

In the 1900's when cars started to displace the "Horse industry" as the primary means of transportation that wasn't already on ships or trains, horse breeders, stable boys, hay farmers, saddle-makers, buggy makers, street poop sweepers etc. were all put out of work over the years.

However, it put millions to work drilling oil, making cars, repairing cars, making tires, oil filters, spark plugs, building and repairing roads, running gas stations and it goes on and on and on.

And with automation picking up all the "new jobs" that previous automation frees up the capital to pay for or make use of... the "new jobs" part of the cycle does not come into play.

However, the increases in efficiency, and cost savings does continue. Where does that capital go? Into a bank, under the billionaire's mattress? Even if it goes into ever more robots, automation, and factories, what good does it do if there aren't millions of people able to pay for the goods or services all that automation produces? Nor can you realistically tax the billionaire at 90% or whatever and give it back out as welfare or "min-come" because Keynesian snake-eating-its-own-tail schemes never work out in the long-run, and they don't provide an outlet for the new income, the new wealth such productivity creates.

The other part of this problem is the more industries automate, the cheaper their products and services get. You may not think so, but think of how many things are effectively "free" already in the digital realm where we have some parallels as to what a fully automated or at least a highly automated one might look like.  What constitutes "poverty" in America is a constantly sliding scale, where the "poor" have conveniences and luxuries that are unimaginable to people of 50 years earlier.  Would you rather be on welfare in 2016, with TV, a smartphone, heat, AC, running water, modern medical care, or be a wealthy plantation owner in 1700 where if you got sick, they stuck leeches on you, and everyone, even the rich smelled like absolute ass, and were covered in lice?

Or hell, would you rather be on Welfare in 2016, or "rich" before 1942, when mass-production of Penicillin started? And something as simple as appendicitis could kill you?

You can make a video call over Skype or Facebook messenger etc. for free, to anywhere in the world the other person has signal, from your smartphone, possibly over free wi-fi provided by a restaurant or store. In the early 80s's such activity cost tens of thousands of dollars and the equipment was in the millions. Maybe a news-room over it's satellite links could do it. In the 90's it still at least cost hundreds of dollars, and tens of thousands in terms of the equipment if it was owned by you. Now it's effectively free.

Perhaps even more fundamentally important, how much free or open-source software is there.  Maybe it's not as popular or convenient, but it works, and provides all the functionality for nothing but the cost of the bandwidth to download it. (Which again could be free on public-WiFi) Linux operating system, OpenOffice, various free open-source utilities, games, databases... there is very little that can't be replicated for free and not give you basic 1:1 functionality.

What happens when that kind of efficiency and cost-reductions come to food, housing, clothes, toys, durable goods? What happens if a big investment in nuclear power makes energy a fraction of the cost it is now?

The one thing people don't consider in all the hand wringing and worry over: "The millionaires and billionaires have robots, and now even the robots are making more robots, so there's no jobs for anybody.."-problem, is that all it would take is one robot to build a "poor person" a robot, and that robot could make two robots... It won't be comfortable at first, but ultimately the "economic robot apocalypse" could mean more for the end of the billionaire, because nobody needs anything when their robots can make it, build it, or grow it for them, than it does for poor people who won't have a job.

The problem of "jobs" is concerning, but if society automates that heavily, and productivity goes sky-high, and we essentially wind up living in a post-scarcity society... we may not even be looking out for the right problems.