A combination of public works and guaranteed welfare (not, by the way, a dirty word) is the best top-down solution for the short term. But the bottom-up situation has even more potential for a more equitable economic system. What we’re seeing, on a small but growing scale, is a world where energy and even power may become increasingly decentralized, and communities are building more on local and regional levels, creating organizations that benefit more of their members. Worker ownership — which, for obvious reasons, combats income inequality directly — is becoming more common, and these organizations are talking to one another locally. Even something as simple as the farm-to-school movement means that economies are becoming more local and communities are supporting their own businesses.

The historian and economist Gar Alperovitz, who details these efforts in his book “What Then Must We Do?” (a Tolstoy quote about, essentially, inequality), recently said to me, “The political game is beginning to resemble a checkerboard strategy: Some of the squares on the board are clearly blocked, but others are open. The goal, of course, is to expand the number of squares that are receptive to democratization efforts — not just to restore economic health and sustainability in struggling communities, but to demonstrate viable alternatives.”

NONE of this is short term, but neither are the robots taking over tomorrow, and it’s safe to say that nearly all the humans on Earth 20 years from now would prefer an economic system that would guarantee a decent life, whether their “rulers” are heartless robots or merely gazillionaires. We just need to do short-term work with a long view, and remember that few predicted the great changes of our time: the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring. Nineteen years ago, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages blessed by other states — and look what’s happened since.

Between the recession (which is only over if you were making real money to begin with) and the crushing of our spirits by death-ray-wielding, 40-foot-high titanium monsters, perhaps there’s time to reimagine society.

It’s not as if this question hasn’t been well considered. There was Karl Marx, whose analysis was largely correct but whose reputation was soiled by the alternatives developed in his name. There was Edward Bellamy, whose popular 1888 book “Looking Backward” anticipated a kind of Internet and the ease with which things are made and delivered, and painted a picture of cooperation instead of competition, describing in sensible detail what was once called a socialist utopia. (We’d have to pitch this differently, of course, as both those words are forbidden in neoliberal society.) And there was even John Maynard Keynes, who suggested that a 15-hour workweek would eventually be considered full-time.

And why not? We need equally big thinkers now, and dreamers, and we need to be acting with them.

We have achieved a level of social equality barely imagined by progressives 50 years ago, but economic equality has gotten much worse. No one knows what the world will look like in 50 years, but if we resign ourselves to dystopia — in which capital has full control, as it nearly does now — we’ll surely have one.

Let’s resolve to build something better. In the long run we know that we’ll make the transition from capitalism to some less destructive and hopefully more just system. Why not begin that transition now? If there is going to be a global market that will further enrich capitalists, there must be guarantees that the rest of the population can at least afford housing and food. And things can be even better than that: We’ll have the robots work for us.