By Adam Gasiewski

Automation isn’t coming. It’s no longer decades down the road. It’s not a sci-fi fantasy. It’s here now. According to a 2017 report from McKinsey, one in three Americans stands to lose his job in the next 12 years because of automation in major industries.

There’s no sugarcoating this shift. An employee who doesn’t require a yearly salary, health insurance, time off, or an human resources department sounds perfect, because it is. A massive loss of jobs is imminent, yet this isn’t a time for fear, but celebration.

From the printing press to the industrial revolution, humans have always found ways to reduce the amount of labor required for the same output. The automation of our jobs is merely humanity doing what we do best — avoiding labor and improving productivity. Reduced labor requirements mean a shorter work week for all, but consequently, less wages. The only viable plan to compensate people for this is by implementing a guaranteed basic income, and we need it soon.

A Universal Basic Income is not a new idea; Thomas Paine advocated for it in the late 1700s. It nearly became written into American law under President Richard Nixon, and now Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang has based his whole platform around the idea. Alaska has been operating a universal fund for decades now, paying each adult citizen about $2,000 annually from the state’s oil profits, and it’s widely popular.

Similarly, we the people not only deserve, but will desperately require, compensation for the massive increase in profits that corporations will realize at the expense of our job loss. A UBI, like Yang’s proposed $12,000 a year to every adult, will be able to solve this as well as other current economic issues.

Currently, welfare programs have perverse incentives that force poorer individuals to stay within a certain income bracket to keep receiving benefits, which stifles upward social mobility. A UBI would remove this “cliff effect” and allow individuals to have more financial freedom to invest or pay off debt, instead of being restricted in what they can spend their benefits on. The middle class also benefits from this cash injection through more opportunities to invest, become entrepreneurs, and go to college.

As Yang’s plan shows, a UBI is easily financeable through the reduction of welfare, healthcare, and homelessness service spending, and a value-added tax on businesses (used by more than 80% of countries), as well as a minor tax on top earners and pollution.

And to any fellow conservatives who are apprehensive about the idea of giving everyone free money, a UBI is not in fact socialism, but the natural evolution of capitalism. The goal of human history has always been the fight against entropy, the struggle to find ways to make our lives easier. The past few decades have seen advances in this effort beyond anything we’ve achieved before, and with that comes the reward of less work.

We shouldn’t be against automation. We should welcome it as an opportunity to pass on much of our labor and free up years of our lives to devote to more meaningful things like family time, volunteering, learning new skills, or anything your heart desires.

What better policy, in a society that demands fairness and freeness for all, than to give $12,000 a year to every American, irrespective of their income, to allow them to live out their constitutional right to the pursuit of their own happiness?

Adam Gasiewski is a student at Temple University studying computer science and business. He lives in Newtown, Pa.