Sooner rather than later, a robot is going to be able to do part or all of what you do for a living. In response to this and other pressures, the Canadian province of Ontario is gearing up to launch a basic income trial this summer. For a limited period of time, and in three regions across the province , the government will be giving people a living wage, for free and with no strings attached, and seeing how the hell it goes, eh?

Across the country, 42 percent of the workforce is at high risk of being automated out of a job, according to a recent report from the Brookfield Institute, a Toronto think tank. The time seems is ripe for a fresh debate about basic income, and Canada's 150th anniversary isn't just a time to reflect on the country's past—it's an opportunity to look towards the future.

It's not the first time that Canadians have flirted with the idea. In the 1970s, the Manitoba government experimented with a basic income in the town of Dauphin. As a result, poverty was virtually eradicated and high school completion rates went up.

"You're going to reduce the poverty rate, and it's going to give people more control over their lives," Forget said. "They can invest in intellectual capital, they can get job training, and they can make longer-term decisions instead of focusing on how they're going to feed the kids. Today, unlike in the '70s, most people finish high school, but we may see higher completion rates in other kinds of education and training."

Aspects of a basic income will benefit future generations just as it did people in Dauphin decades ago, according to University of Manitoba professor Evelyn Forget , who has extensively studied the Dauphin experiment and others around the world.

It's extremely important to note is that a basic income won't necessarily result in one outcome or another on its own. There are external factors—including legislation governing how automation will be implemented—that will determine things like how many jobs are available, or if there is a job market to speak of.

As for how a basic income would function alongside increasing workplace automation, there are two paths before us. In the first, the current labour market is preserved by artificially slowing the introduction of robots into the workforce with a tax. This also preserves how companies capture profit in a labour market, and protracts the usefulness of the threat of replacement by a robot if workers ask for too much.

As capitalist industry has already done over the last century of automation, new jobs will be created, but they won't necessarily be better jobs. Basically, our unending march of misery toward the heat death of the universe will continue apace as long as the state continues to prop up capitalism, but with robots manufacturing our running shoes instead of people.

A basic income in this case would simply act like a social safety net, not unlike those that exist today, but supercharged. If you want to be an author, you won't have to spend your nine-to-five working as a barista at a coffee shop. You could pick up some shifts a couple days a week for some extra cash on top of your basic income, and spend the rest of your time writing. Or not. If you're a full-time caregiver, you will finally be paid for all of the necessary work that you do.