“Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free” – Dire Straits, 1985.

How would you like an extra $1,500 in your account each month – courtesy of the government? A University of Oxford study from 2013 estimates that 47 percent of U.S. jobs may be at risk within the next two decades because of artificial intelligence and automation at the hands of robots, further estimating that workers making less than $20 per hour have an 83 percent chance of losing their jobs.

Enter: Universal Basic Income (UBI), providing a minimum payment for each person for life, working or not. Universally changing the definition of “work,” people could choose what to do with their time including absolutely nothing.

How is that different from the welfare programs today? Today’s welfare is crammed with restrictions, requirements and “incentive traps” that penalize recipients who try to work. Example: food stamps are dropped when income crosses a minimum threshold. Advocates say that the no-strings-attached aspect of UBI would allow a huge reduction in existing social welfare programs that are notoriously expensive and inefficient.

Because of automation, workers won’t be able to shift to another job as routine, predictable, assembly line, agriculture and service industries replace workers with machines. UBI could lead to a better-educated workforce with options of pooling UBI for entrepreneurial risk. Health care could be rolled into the equation.

Mark Zuckerberg says, “We should have a society that measures progress not just by GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful.”