It’s probably fair to say that in the history of politicking, few politicians have publicly declared what to do about America’s crumbling malls, or how to provide free marriage counseling for all, or how to make filing taxes fun. But Andrew Yang, who’s gunning to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, certainly has—and those are the more minor concerns among a dizzying list of 80 policy positions on his campaign website.

It’s an indication that Yang is running a rather methodical, data-driven, science-happy campaign. He’s applying that approach to more standard-issue problems like labor, climate change, and the economy but giving them a decidedly tech-forward approach: how (and why) we should define robots, what use might geoengineering have in saving the planet, and whether the government should embrace universal basic income and give every American a $1,000 check.

Yang talked with WIRED about all this and more in a recent interview.

(The conversation below has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Matt Simon: You've been talking a lot about automation. We've had waves of automation before, but now with robots and AI, things seem different. Why wouldn't it be a transition like we saw in the mass mechanization of agriculture, where people shifted into other jobs?

Andrew Yang: Four million manufacturing workers lost their jobs over the last number of years. According to economic theory and the precedent you just referred to, then these 4 million workers would get retrained, reskilled, and relocated and find new jobs in another industry. In reality, nearly half of them left the workforce and never worked again, and of that group nearly half filed for disability. It's very lazy to say, “Hey, decades ago something happened to farming workers, so magic will ensue this time.” You can very clearly see the magic was not there for the manufacturing workers; the magic will not be there for the retail workers or the call center workers.

MS: There's this fallacy that if you're a truck driver and you get displaced by self-driving trucks, folks will say, “Oh, we'll just teach you how to code!” I think that’s presumptuous and insulting.

AY: That's exactly right. Why would we even think we can retrain coal miners and truck drivers to become software engineers? The only reason we think that is we've been brainwashed to equate economic value and human value, where if workers have lost their value in the marketplace then we think, OK, we have to transform you into something that does have value even if that transformation is totally unrealistic.

MS: So what about a robot tax? You replace a job with a robot, you get taxed, and we use that money for retraining.

AY: I'm a fan of some kind of transfer of value from the people that are in a position to benefit greatly from new innovations to help cushion the blow for people who are going to be displaced. And so a localized robot tax, as they're considering in San Francisco, may make a lot of sense.

I will say that in a lot of contexts, it's hard to figure out what's a robot. And so the example is if CVS replaces a cashier with an iPad, are you going to tax them on that? And are retailers in a position to be able to pay those taxes? And what's the appropriate level of taxes you're using as a baseline? The whole thing actually gets very difficult when you try to apply it economy-wide.

It's one reason why I'm proposing a value-added tax, which would end up serving many of the same goals. If you look at a company like Amazon, which is obviously going to be one of the biggest winners from artificial intelligence, it paid zero in federal taxes last year. We need to get some of the gains that Amazon's harvesting. You could go around trying to tax the robots in Amazon's fulfillment centers, but it would be much more efficient and harder for them to gain if we just passed a value-added tax, which would give the people a tiny sliver of every Amazon sale, every Google search, every robot truck mile.