You can believe there’s a Lieutenant Commander Data in our future without also believing he’ll be visiting soon. Economist Robin Hanson agrees with the former speculation, not so much the latter. Hanson thinks “super-robots are likely to arrive eventually” and will “eventually get good enough to take pretty much all jobs.”

Eventually, eventually. But what about right now or pretty soon? What about IBM’s Jeopardy champ Watson, Baxter the flexibly programmable robot, and the Google driverless car? And what about that scary Oxford paper that predicts 47% of US jobs are just a decade or two from being automated away?

Well, there is evidence that automation is already having a big impact on workers, particularly those in middle-skill jobs composed of “routine, codifiable tasks,” according to economist David Autor. And this may be contributing to the “jobless” recoveries of the past three recessions. What’s more, you can thank automation for this simple chart looking at manufacturing employment and output:

And perhaps we are on our way toward a future where a small, tech-adept slice of the population has high-paying jobs while the rest will be physical therapists and high-end butlers — if most have jobs at all. Note the current recovery where GDP is expanding, jobs are being created, but median wages are going nowhere.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Hanson thinks Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford does just that, which is why he doesn’t much like it. Ford frets that a mostly jobless, automated world is fast approaching, Hanson writes, and thus we need to soon tax the rich heavily to fund a basic income for the rest of us. The book comes out in May, but, according to the publisher description, Ford argues that “artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making “good jobs” obsolete … The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself.”

Hanson offers a numbers criticisms: For starters, that 47% job-loss figure is not rigorously calculated. And while median wages have been stagnant and the labor share of income falling, many factors are probably at play. Indeed, Autor recently wrote that “the deceleration of the U.S. labor market after 2000, and further after 2007, is more closely associated” with bursting bubbles and the rise of Chinese manufacturing than computerization. More from Hanson:

But while computer prices have been falling dramatically for 70 years, the job-displacement rate has held pretty steady. This suggests that jobs vary greatly in the computing power required to displace them and that jobs are spread out rather evenly along this parameter. We have no particular reason to think that, contrary to prior experience, a big clump of displaceable jobs lies near ahead. And then there is Ford’s fourth reason: all the impressive computing demos he has seen lately. … . Only rarely does Ford air any suspicions that such promoters exaggerate the rate of change or the breadth of the impact their new systems will have. … And of course several generations have seen A.I. demos with just as impressive advances over previous systems.

To be fair, I have not read Ford’s book, only Hanson’s critique. But even if Ford is wrong and over the long run technology and mass employment can coexist, “the lessons of the Industrial Revolution suggest that the transition could last quite a while and could be very painful,” as AEI’s Michael Strain has written.

So why not get to work on the smart policies that would equip workers for a more automated future and which are obviously good ideas on their own? Before we crank up taxes and start writing big checks to the forever jobless, how about some of these ideas from Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew in “The Second Machine Age“: (a) improve education with higher teacher salaries, more accountability, and new digital models; (b) create more startups through less regulation and more high-skill immigration; (c) loosen intellectual property regimes; (d) more government support for scientists, including via prizes; and (e) upgrade infrastructure.

Longer-term, the MIT economists would prefer a negative income tax over a basic income since the wage subsidy “encourages people to start working and keep finding more work to do even if the wages they receive for work are low.” Another option, suggested by economist Tyler Cowen, are so-called universal 401(k) plans where government would help fund tax-free retirement accounts for lower-income Americans. I would also recommend taking a look at these ideas from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on creating a more dynamic economy.

The prospect of an Age of Automation, whenever its arrival, is a good reason for policy action. Let’s just make sure they are the right policies.