As technology and automation rapidly remake a very different future of work, some economists predict that women will benefit the most from the coming disruptions. Although women have no doubt been hardest hit by the COVID-19 economy, in the coming years, women-dominated caring jobs--like nursing, teaching, and providing child and elder care--that aren't easily replaced by machines will be among the fastest-growing occupations and thus more likely to be "future-proof." It's not that many women's jobs won't be automated away. Just as men-dominated mechanical and machine operating jobs are predicted to disappear, so too are women-dominated administrative and clerical jobs. But most of these future-of-work predictions assume women will continue to dominate the care economy. And all because men aren't expected to care.

It's now generally accepted that as artificial intelligence (AI) advances into fields of work that were formerly considered skilled labour, a huge number of manual and white collar jobs are likely to disappear. These are the kinds of jobs that require learning and applying patterns, unemotional calculation and mechanistic problem solving. Think: medical diagnosis, legal contracts and engineering. Read more: AI doctors and engineers are coming – but they won't be stealing high-skill jobs Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins recently suggested AI will free us up to focus on the caring work uniquely suited to humans. Currently much care work is low paid, unpaid or invisible – and mostly done by women.

Better Life Lab is a partnership of Slate and New America. In an age where every day brings more doomsday forecasts of massive technologicallybdriven unemployment, from driverless cars to A.I. robots as caregivers, journalist Annie Lowrey set out to answer a question: Is it possible to live in a world where we get what she calls "wages for breathing"? This week her findings come out in Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World. We spoke about what the idea of giving every American cash--no strings attached--would mean for work, gender inequality, and American identity, and whether it's actually a policy that could pass in the U.S. given the current climate of tying even the most basic benefits to paid work. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.