Rather, I'd say it needs people working full time. With things like basic income, this can be decorrelated from "money" a good deal.
A product like the Alto doesn't get done by a few hipsters subsisting on "basic income".
But, to quote Wayne Gretzky:
I skate to where the puck is going to be,
not where it has been.
It is tempting to look at an FPGA and say that it only costs $10. Or maybe even $1000 for the top end. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Designs that go into a high end FPGA could easily require 10 man-years of engineering time. That's for a single FPGA hardware design itself, not the system it goes into, not the associated software.
Once you need to do those sorts of things you won't find the right people by recruiting basic income hipsters that are lounging around at your local Starbucks. And you will need money to pay the considerable non-salary expenses, even if you could convince all the people to work for nothing but equity.
Right now, it's relatively cheap to do software-only things. Which explains why there are so many of those sorts of startups. But it's not cheap to design and build physical things.
What would be the Alto of today designed with hardware from 2030, not with a cheap FPGA from 2015?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs
As an example of the type of research being done, you must be willing to build something that will be considered commodity in 15 years time at today's price.
You won't get there with basic income.
Just don't agree it is enough to innovate at Xerox PARC scale, as what is being discussed is funding, not salaries.