WASHINGTON, DC—Cars and trucks no longer need drivers. Executives can get digital personal assistants to read their e-mail and manage their schedules. Cities may soon send robots instead of rescue teams to save people from natural disaster areas. And medical sensors and machine-to-machine communication can now do the work of some caregivers, monitoring and helping to manage patient care.

The myriad ways that technology is creeping into the workforce and nudging out humans has long been on the minds of policy experts and economists. But some say we’ve come to a major turning point at which technology will entirely reshape employment. Ars sat in on a forum, held Monday at the Brookings Institution, to hear the latest thinking on what new technology might mean for human workers. While healthy debate ensued, one point was settled by the three panelists: healthcare needs to be decoupled from jobs.

“It’s crazy” that healthcare benefits come through employers, Nick Hanauer, an entrepreneur and author, told Ars. The future of work might see individuals being pushed out of full-time, long-term jobs and into a hodgepodge of part-time, temporary positions, such as a Taskrabbit by day and a part-time hotel worker by night. If you have a bunch of different jobs, Hanauer said, it’s just untenable for you to rely on one for health benefits.

While Hanauer was generally optimistic that humans would continue to create and find jobs however small, the two other panelists discussed the growing concern that many workers, particularly mid-level workers, would be pushed into unemployment.

Smaller and smaller companies are able to do more and more, noted panelist Scott Santens, a basic income advocate. For instance, Google, a company worth $370 billion, has 55,000 employees. That’s less than a tenth of the number of employees that AT&T employed in its prime during the 1960s.

In a companion paper for Monday’s forum, panelist Darrell West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at Brookings, referenced Harvard economist Lawrence Katz discussing the end of work. “It’s possible that information technology and robots [will] eliminate traditional jobs and make possible a new artisanal economy… an economy geared around self-expression, where people would do artistic things with their time,” according to Katz.

In such a world, universal access to healthcare would be essential, West told Ars. He highlighted the recent Affordable Care Act, which provided insurance to millions of uninsured. “From my standpoint, this is a move in the right direction,” West said.

But there’s much more to do to prepare for the “fundamental interruption” of how our economy currently works, West said. In the forum and his paper, he outlined potential solutions including a basic income guarantee, beefed up versions of earned income tax credits, and incentives to volunteer. The panelists also all called for funds for lifelong learning, which would enable employees to nimbly adapt to workforce and technological changes.