I would think we, as hackers, on hacker news, would have some unique insight into this.
The software world is built on the back of stuff that was made, not for money, but out of a labor of love, or to impress others, or to scratch our own itch. Our servers run linux, but linux was mostly just linus hacking around. The free software community is about helping each other and building cool things. Most programming languages were birthed not for money, but because the person building them cared about it a lot and wanted to solve a problem for themselves.
UBI would let people who wanted to make stuff actually make stuff, not have to flip burgers 9-5 just to go home and feel too drained to code or write or do whatever it is they really want to do.
There are countless examples throughout history of people building great things and advancing science, not for money, but for recognition or passion.
That's a bit too idealistic. Maybe some of the stuff was started this way but by and large all hobby projects that are now widely used depend on paid people working on it full time/a lot. The Linux kernel is a great example.
But I agree with your overall point. Software has a good chance of "leading the way" mostly because of the lack of required starting capital to get first traction for an idea (a person and a laptop) and the theoretical high mobility of the workforce (a lot can be written basically everywhere, local is only required for customer contact).
Software also has a good chance of being the exception to the rule, not just because of the lack of capital and coordination needed to start writing it but also because the open source software movement is pretty unusual in creating stuff people would happily pay for for fun.
Most people's hobbies aren't that useful
The software world is built on the back of stuff that was made, not for money, but out of a labor of love, or to impress others, or to scratch our own itch. Our servers run linux, but linux was mostly just linus hacking around. The free software community is about helping each other and building cool things. Most programming languages were birthed not for money, but because the person building them cared about it a lot and wanted to solve a problem for themselves.
UBI would let people who wanted to make stuff actually make stuff, not have to flip burgers 9-5 just to go home and feel too drained to code or write or do whatever it is they really want to do.
There are countless examples throughout history of people building great things and advancing science, not for money, but for recognition or passion.