In January 2016, technology incubator Y Combinator announced plans to fund a long-term study on giving people a guaranteed monthly income, in part to offset fears about jobs being destroyed by automation. “I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale. So it would be good to answer some of the theoretical questions now,” Y Combinator president Sam Altman wrote in a blog post at the time.

“Giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached” is necessary to achieve true “equality of opportunity” and could “eventually make real progress towards eliminating poverty,” Altman wrote. He said the group hoped to provide a basic income to a group of Americans for five years.

Now, nearly three years later, YC Research, the incubator’s nonprofit arm, says it plans to begin the study next year, after a pilot project in Oakland took much longer than expected. “Although it’s frustrating for funders, it has been good from a research standpoint,” Elizabeth Rhodes, YC Research’s project director, wrote in an email to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf in mid-July. WIRED obtained the email through an open-records request.

In April, the nonprofit signed a contract with the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center to help manage the study, which will give unconditional cash transfers to 3,000 participants in two states, and is expected to begin in early to mid 2019, Rhodes says in an interview. The locations will not be finalized until next month, but will encompass a region, not just a city, and it will not be Oakland. One thousand people will receive $1,000 per month while a control group of 2,000 people gets $50 per month. Some participants will receive payments for three years and some for five in the study, called “Making Ends Meet.”

The study reflects growing interest around the globe in the concept of a universal basic income; the approach differs from most existing US social-service programs, which are based on some level of need or include work requirements. Silicon Valley technocrats have gravitated towards basic income amid rising public anxiety around inequality and job loss from automation. But their gestures have been criticized as self-serving, especially as some tech luminaries fight taxes that would support basic services to the same low-income families.

A project in Stockton, California, funded in part by Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, is further along, although smaller in scale. Last week, Stockton released a report detailing plans to give 100 low-income families $500 per month for 18 months, paid from a $1.2 million fund donated by The Economic Security Project, a nonprofit that Hughes co-chairs, and other tech donors. In November, notices will go out to 1,000 randomly selected residences in neighborhoods where the median household is $46,000 or less to let residents know they may qualify.

The University of Michigan research center is also collecting data for another large-scale basic income project, called “Baby's First Years,” being led by Greg Duncan at University of California Irvine. The project is recruiting 1,000 low-income new moms from hospitals in four cities, half of whom will receive an unconditional $333 per month, while the control group receives $20 per month.

Recent basic-income projects have been funded by governments in Finland, the Netherlands, and India. Previous efforts in Brazil, were also funded by private donors. The largest current study, in Kenya, is backed by the nonprofit GiveWell and Google.org.