Tom Taylor is a candidate for Utah’s 4th Congressional District. To show your support, consider a donation at www.tomforutah.com, like him on Facebook (TomForUtah), or follow him on Twitter @TomForUtah.

As I went through the Ph.D program in robotics at the University of Utah, I spent a lot of time thinking about automation, artificial intelligence, and the roles these technologies would play in the future. We are on the precipice of seeing radical change to our economy. Unfortunately, when most people think about automation, the first visual most people think of is a robot with personality like Wall-E or C-3PO. The truth is automation can come in a lot of different forms like self-driving vehicles, or software that quietly does the work for us that millions used to do a decade before. Self-driving vehicles alone have the potential to wipe out over 4 million jobs. Advanced software practices like machine learning are arguably more potentially disruptive being able to replace radiology jobs like analyzing CT scans and X-Rays. Legal work, music composition, and even software developers could also be on the chopping block.

History has shown us that automation creates new jobs where previous ones were lost. Is there any reason to believe that “this time is different?” Yes, in fact, there is. There are two main factors that make the upcoming automation disruption concerning. First, the speed with which automation is likely to displace jobs is unprecedented. Second, we are seeing a trend in our economy where new technologies aren’t bringing enough gains in productivity to offset the gains that are going purely to capital — in other words, right now jobs are simply being replaced with machines instead of creating new and better career paths. These economic indicators predict that if we don’t do something about this, we could find ourselves in a world of mass unemployment, where the middle class has disappeared, and all of the money is concentrated in the hands of very few.

Despite these concerns, it is the wrong idea to fight automation. Instead, we should embrace automation and change the structure of our economy so that we can all reap the benefits. Automation has the potential to lead to an increase of freedom in our lives where our lives aren’t dominated by banal tasks and we can choose the projects we work on. Imagine a world where the core necessities of life were completely taken care of by machines. Our food production could be completely automated where robots cultivate our farms, load the harvest on a self-driving truck which then delivers the food to a sorting facility where drones deliver the food to our doorstep.

When automation takes care of our needs, our lives can be filled with the pursuit of our passions. How many artists chose not to refine their talents to the level necessary to create a masterpiece because they had to work full time to provide for their families? How many scientists couldn’t fully pursue their research because they needed to follow the work that was likely to be profitable? How many musicians gave up on their dreams because they couldn’t afford a place to live? How many entrepreneurs didn’t pursue that revolutionary idea because they had bills they had to pay and couldn’t afford to take the risk? We could be sitting on the precipice of a golden age that is being held back by the need to obtain food, clothing, and shelter.

The country that finds a way to utilize automation to grant freedom to the largest number of its citizens will become a leader in the world economy. We can create an economy in the United States that allows all of us to reap the benefits of automation and not just the wealthiest among us that had the means to buy the robots. We need to be willing to experiment with economic mechanisms that can solve this looming problem such as a guaranteed jobs program, negative income tax, or a robust universal basic income. None of these have been tested to the point where we know the full ramifications they will have on a large scale economy, but now is the time to find out.

As automation continues to accelerate, we are at a crossroads of which future we will live in. Will we live in a world where all of the wealth is consumed by those that were fortunate enough to own the machines that take over our economy, or will we put public policies in place that ensure that all of us will share in the gains and grant ourselves an increase in freedom and happiness? I choose the latter and that is one of the reasons I am running for Congress. As a robotics engineer, I am uniquely qualified to help guide us into this New Era. Let’s build a future our children and grandchildren can be proud of.