It has now been nearly 14 years since I joined the “gig economy” – long before the term was invented. Since the summer of 2002, I’ve been linking together a series of work assignments – some very short-term tasks, others very long-term relationships – to produce a stream of revenue instead of a salary.

By 2014, the Freelancers Union calculated that about 53 million Americans had become independent workers, as I am, whether voluntarily or not. And the disappointing jobs data released last week, showing that half a million people dropped out of the workforce altogether, disillusioned by their inability to find work, is a reminder that these conventional salaried jobs are probably going to become more difficult to find in the coming years.

Why? Well, for all the reasons they already have been tough to find. Companies choose to interpret their mandate to maximize profits for shareholders in the narrowest possible way, and so cut their workforce to the bone, even when it’s not absolutely necessary.

And more of those jobs will soon be on the block, thanks to new technologies, argues Andy Stern in Raising the Floor, a book to be published next week by PublicAffairs. That’s hardly a revelation: automation has been transforming the world of work for decades. But Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), has spent the last several years pondering what this might mean not just for work, but for incomes, and society.

“A job is really a modern invention, something that is a phenomenon of the industrial revolution,” he told me. Stern has reached the conclusion that this time there’s a reasonable probability that the wave of change might not simply result in one kind of jobs (like buggy-whip makers) being replaced by others (automakers, mechanics, long-haul drivers, engineers designing highways, and so on). Software and robotics, he fears, may result in there being fewer jobs to go around at all, leaving more Americans unemployed or scrambling to knit together a crazy quilt of self-created jobs: driving for Uber part-time while making furniture to sell on Etsy in the evenings at home.

The result? “The United States of anxiety,” he quips. Stern argues that we’re heading, at a rapid clip, towards a situation where we not only have income inequality but a far greater degree of income insecurity than we experience today.

His solution is to throw his weight behind proposals for a universal basic income.

Universal basic income, or UBI, is precisely what the moniker suggests: provide every citizen over the age of 18, regardless of any other consideration, with a monthly stipend that is sufficient to cover their basic living expenses. Stern suggests that should be $1,000; I’d quibble with it. That might work if you’re supplementing a minimum wage job, but not if you’re replacing government assistance programs. It certainly couldn’t support a single disabled adult living alone in a large city, paying for her own health insurance, with no other form of government assistance, for instance.

Recipients would be free to go out and earn more, but once they reached a certain threshold (again, the levels remain up for debate), tax policy would ensure that the UBI payouts would be clawed back. So, if you’re making $100,000 a year in addition to your $12,000 in UBI, your UBI payments would be refunded to the government through the tax system. On the other hand, if all you can earn, through your Uber/Etsy/Airbnb/TaskRabbit gigs, is $17,500 a year, you’d have your extra $10,000 as well. (As a side note: this also will help address the likely future plight of America’s baby boomer retirees; as the Government Accountability Office announced last year, half of all households aged 55 or older have no retirement savings at all. Nothing. Nada. Rien.)

Unusually, UBI draws support from both sides of the political spectrum. As an idea, it can trace its roots back to Thomas Paine, decidedly on the radical end of the spectrum, and by the 1960s it had won the support of Martin Luther King Jr. Oddly enough, however, Richard Nixon also liked the idea, as did libertarian Milton Friedman. Today’s odd couple might be Stern and Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who, apart from their mutual support for UBI, couldn’t be further apart on most political issues.

There’s plenty of opposition, of course. Recipients of UBI could simply put their feet up, take the money and not work, creating social tension between them and those who work. But how would that be any more damaging than the current social tensions created by the ever-widening wealth gap, and the fact that those on the right side of it can protect their children from the consequences of the new challenges of the jobless world?

Meanwhile, those on the left worry about government placing downward pressure on UBI payments, once they have been established, in the same way that conservatives have waged a war on the right to any form of government support for the poor, disabled, single parents or other groups. That’s a real concern, and would have to be addressed in the way that UBI is structured, perhaps by requiring that a supermajority of Congress be required to alter it. For his part, Stern believes that simply making the program universal would help address this, giving everyone a sense of ownership, making UBI as untouchable as social security is today. “Many wealthy people are aware that their kids could have a tougher life than they do,” he says.

Stern reserves his greatest criticism, perhaps, for those who argue that a 21st-century version of Roosevelt’s WPA program, or some kind of incremental effort to adjust to the short-term effects of change (rather than contemplate radical change), is the right way to go.

“Guaranteeing jobs, as in the WPA, is a non-starter,” he says, flatly. And as for those who want to debate whether it’s better to tweak the earned income tax credit and adjust the minimum wage – that’s well and good, but those approaches should be combined with real-world tests of the UBI idea in the United States.

“We can’t afford not to do that,” Stern argues. “We had a 9/11 commission about who missed the terrorist attacks. It would be criminal not to at least plan for the possibility that this kind of radical change – a future with fewer and fewer jobs – is possible. The luxury of the elite is to be wrong and to have no consequences for being wrong.”

Switzerland’s citizens just rejected a proposal to provide an income floor for the country’s citizens, but that’s just one initiative. Finland is forging ahead with test runs, and communities elsewhere are poised to do the same. In Canada, Manitoba has run an experiment, and Ontario is preparing to pick a town or city to conduct its own test run.

In the United States, suitably enough, it seems as if it will be the private sector rather than government that gets the ball rolling. Late last month, Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator picked Oakland, California, as the site of a pilot program. Families, including both employed and unemployed individuals, will get cash payments of between $1,000 and $2,000 monthly for between six months and a year, and researchers will study what they do with the money – and how it affects their financial and emotional wellbeing.

Maybe it’s not the magic bullet that Stern and others believe it to be. But we owe it to those whose ability to earn a living has been disrupted by all those disruptive new technologies we celebrate to see what it looks like in practice.