Facebook, Tesla CEOs lead push for guaranteed income: 'I don't think we're going to have a choice,' Musk says

WASHINGTON – Across their three presidential debates last year, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump uttered the word "jobs" 86 times – but the word "automation" never came up. And by all accounts, nothing is going to transform the American labor market more dramatically, and likely for the worse, than the increasing trend toward automation: on assembly lines, in self-driving cars, even clerical and white-collar positions once considered unthinkable for robots to occupy. Credible projections now forecast that 40 percent of all jobs in the United States today could be eliminated by 2030, just 13 years from now, have led futurists, labor market analysts, and leading CEOs to ask what will become of all the workers soon to be displaced by technology, and whether industrialized democratic societies, seeking stability in such a radically reshaped economic environment, might benefit from some orderly redistribution of wealth. And leading the charge are two of America's most prominent titans of the digital age. In a commencement address to graduates at Harvard University last month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the coming wave of automation and displacement will require "a new social contract" between the government and the governed.