As some science fiction would have it, in the future we will have things mostly taken care of for us. Although there will always be limits, money will no longer be an issue, or at least it will be a distraction in life. But is this really the direction the world is heading? It’s hard to see what job couldn’t be replaced by a robot in the span of a career now, or what competitive advantages humans will even have left in couple decades. This discussion has sharpened around a proposal for Universal Basic Income (UBI), which as you might guess means receiving a check from the government every month just for being a human.

Over the past year or so, as the topic has trended, I’ve been following discussion of UBI on a number of forums and discovered a fairly wide gulf between two positions whose proponents might be characterized as “technologists” and “economists.” The technologists are pessimistic about the ability of their projects to solve inequality without specific government policies. The economists, on the other hand, insist that things will return to normal equilibrium after the financial crisis and accompanying global imbalances recede. What’s been frustrating is that the terminology used on both sides is so different that there seems to be a lot more disagreement than there really is.

I won’t try to recreate these arguments in full, but if you’re interested in UBI and the discussions surrounding it you’ve probably heard their basic contours. The technological argument is that exponentially increasing computing power will eventually result in superhuman intelligence, and various versions of this story assign it benevolent or malevolent motives. We are approaching a moment like the dawn of humanity in natural history, where all previous assumptions will be thrown out the window — except that it’s the dawn of the robots. Much of this discussion focuses on cyber security, but there is also an unmistakable economic element.

Economists, for the most part, are not having any of this. Think about physicists’ reaction when young earth creationists suggest that maybe the speed of light could have changed over time. Maybe it could have. Maybe nothing is real. But as a scientist, your job is to find the fundamental constants that underlie everything, so economists look to the past as a guide to the future. Here you will see counterarguments referencing the Industrial Revolution and other periods of technological change: 95% of farming jobs have been destroyed through automation and other efficiencies, yet we don’t live in poverty.

The process of creating new sectors to replace the old ones destroyed by innovation is not at all straightforward, however, and there is still plenty of room for technological fudge factors. The economists are right to pick on the quantitative thinking implied by concepts like “technological unemployment.” According to the marginal worldview, everything has a price.The resulting situation is better understood as “technological deflation.” Although some textbooks refer to this process as “benign deflation,” this is a freshman-year simplification and it’s easy to show using the basic models how it could turn into something worse.

I think the real academic economists realize this possibility, but are a bit shy in public. In fact, a lot of people on this side of the debate are not academic thought leaders, but people in industry and talking heads on TV who may not understand the implications of their model when historically unusual conditions are inputted (with respect to anyone highly qualified who may disagree with any of my points.) People making the same argument I am in public have been laughed out of the room, giving the impression that UBI is something that’s far outside of the mainstream of economic thought.