Elon Musk, the billionaire futurist who founded Tesla Motors as part of his master plan to transition humanity to solar energy and started a private aerospace company, SpaceX, as part of another master plan to found a colony on Mars, has some concerns about robots. The possibility of a Skynet-type robot takeover, Musk says, is not far away, given current advancements in artificial-intelligence research and development. He’s so worried that last year he and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman launched a nonprofit organization to promote safe artificial-intelligence research and ultimately “benefit humanity as a whole.”. Musk expects his fellow tech luminaries will help pour as much as $1 billion into the initiative.

Musk, like many in Silicon Valley, has also become obsessed with the question of what will happen when artificial intelligence and advanced robotics combine to take human jobs. “People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things,” Musk told CNBC in an interview published Friday. But millions of people will also be out of work, made obsolete by robots that can do the same jobs at a lower labor cost. The solution, Musk muses, will be for the government to provide a universal basic income to everyone in the country, establishing a baseline wage as technology displaces human workers. "There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation," Musk told CNBC. “Yeah, I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen.”

The problem of robots replacing human workers isn’t abstract or even that futuristic. Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been destroying some jobs (in textile manufacturing, for example) while creating new ones (computer scientists). But many in Silicon Valley are now concerned that advances in artificial intelligence mean humanity is now at a tipping point where robots may soon be able to replace so many jobs that large swaths of the population will be unemployed—and this time, not enough new jobs or industries will be created to offset the damage. Already, self-driving technology threatens to upend the livery and trucking industries, putting millions of Americans out of work. Last month, Uber sent its first autonomous truck on a beer run to test its self-driving technology. A human operator stood at the ready, and Uber insists its technology is only designed to give drivers a reprieve when they want to rest, not replace them entirely. But Musk sees the writing on the wall. At first, he says, truckers eventually won’t be needed in the same numbers as they exist now. Later, the trucking industry will likely replace individual truck drivers with fleet operators, overseeing entire fleets of self-driving trucks. "Actually, it's probably a more interesting job than just driving one [truck]," Musk mused.

But the societal effects of such a massive economic shift will require an equally ambitious, large-scale plan to manage the fallout. And Musk isn’t the only leader in Silicon Valley turning his attention to basic universal income. Altman has already conducted his own basic-income study, which has led to a pilot program being implemented in Oakland. “I believe that we should view it as a basic human right to have enough money to afford food and shelter,” Altman told Bloomberg, referring to the study. “It’s an idea [that] makes sense to most children.”