Robots haven’t yet replaced most people’s jobs. But as the nature of work changes and machines become capable of taking over more tasks, it’s incumbent on society to think ahead.

That was the message from Next:Economy, a San Francisco conference on the future of work on Monday and Tuesday sponsored by O’Reilly Media, a Sebastopol company focused on technology developments.

“A tsunami of labor disruption” lies ahead, said Andy Stern, a former Service Employees International Union labor leader who’s now promoting the idea of universal basic income, meaning a regular cash payment to all citizens regardless of their income levels. “Something like Hurricane Matthew is coming our way that is very disruptive potentially. We’d be foolish as a country … just to sit around and say it’s not going to happen, or education or the market will solve the problem, because they won’t.”

Mountain View’s Y Combinator, an incubator program for tech startups, is now experimenting with the income concept, preparing a pilot that will give about 1,000 Oakland residents guaranteed income for five years.

Universal basic income is “like what Alaskans get from the Alaskan Permanent Fund (which puts a share of oil revenue into a fund to pay residents dividends into the future) or in Monopoly, getting $200 when you pass Go because you need money to play the game,” said Natalie Foster, a fellow at the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative.

Why would Y Combinator delve into a radical notion so far afield from its usual mission of nurturing a new generation of billion-dollar unicorns?

“YC has a front-row seat to some of the technological changes through the companies that apply and they fund,” said Elizabeth Rhodes, who oversees the project. “It’s seeing the software and hardware that could put people out of jobs” even while wealth becomes more concentrated and income inequality grows.

YC is keeping a close lid on details of its Oakland experiment to protect the privacy of participants. Instead, Rhodes discussed some factors it will investigate, such as how it affects people’s well-being, their interaction with health services and how they spend their time. Do they become more socially and civically engaged? Do they work less?

The logistics are a big hurdle with questions about implications for taxes, existing benefits and other regulatory mechanisms. It’s not that easy to just give people money, in other words.

Stern, who recently wrote a book, "Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream," said this is a pivotal time. “The next big chapter in our social and economic history (could determine) what the world looks like: ‘The Hunger Games’ or the top part of Maslow’s needs hierarchy. ... This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move up the needs hierarchy and give people the kinds of choices never seen in the history of the world.”

Adding impetus to the idea that looming tech changes could soon supplant millions of jobs, Stern said, are developments like Uber’s Pittsburgh experiment with driverless cars, and the advent of driverless trucks (also an area where Uber is pushing forward through its acquisition of San Francisco’s Otto), which threaten millions of truck drivers and associated jobs.

Uber’s Rachel Holt, head of North American operations, disputed the idea that the ride-hailing company’s need for human labor will go away. “Even down the line there will always be a combination of human and self-driving cars,” she said. Holt said autonomous vehicles would spur a “huge ecosystem of other jobs.” The only example she gave was meal delivery. If an autonomous car brought food to your corner through UberEats, “there won’t be a little robot to bring food up to your house for a very long time.”

Some 5 million people will lose their livelihoods by 2020 to machines and artificial intelligence, said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, quoting figures from the World Economic Forum. That’s one reason LinkedIn, recently acquired by Microsoft, is charging into online training through its $1.5 billion acquisition last year of Lynda.com, which provides courses on the Internet across thousands of fields.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid