The time for instituting a universal basic income is closer than most think.

The rapid pace of workplace automation — encompassing everything from robots flipping burgers at fast food joints to performing routine hygiene at the dental clinics — means skilled and unskilled laborers will soon be out of work. However, out of work should not mean out of money.

Replacing the standard minimum wage and even a comfortable living wage is the universal basic income.

UBI is a guaranteed fixed weekly or monthly payment to workers who have no future of employment as the result of being replaced by robotics.

A UBI has been advanced for decades by economists and political leaders ranging from Milton Friedman and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to British philosopher Bertrand Russell and Dr. Martin Luther King.

King championed the notion of a guaranteed income for all. It is noteworthy that King would have espoused a basic income.

He wrote in his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” that “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

Fans of the 1960s sci-fi television series “Star Trek” were introduced to a future where the Federation of Planets ended poverty through the use of “credits.”

King was someone who grasped the future of increased workplace automation and a workforce that would idle as the result of being supplanted by technology.

The future dreamed of by King and “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry is already upon us. Increasingly, there are more human laborers than jobs to fill.

To not enact a UBI in the face of advanced robotics is to ensure a restive population that will make the late 18th and early 19th century rebellion by anti-industrialization textile workers in England seem like a minor labor disturbance.

Policymakers can invest now in establishing a nascent UBI or they will surely pay later for their lack of action.

The consulting company McKinsey estimates a third of the American workforce will be replaced by robots by 2030, equaling some 70 million workers. No politician would face a more hostile voting population.

Legislators have a simple choice — begin instituting a UBI today or face an angry population in 12 years or less.

A UBI should not even be a political issue. Workplace automation cuts across political demographic lines.

Conservative rural areas in the United States are going to experience a 97 percent automation of farm jobs. The situation is no better in other manual jobs, with construction workers looking at 88 percent and truck drivers facing 79 percent automation of their jobs.

Workers in conservative Fresno, California, will lose 54 percent of their mainly agricultural sector jobs to robots, while liberal San Francisco will see robots replacing over 42 percent of the labor force in numerous white-collar professions.

Critics of the UBI argue that workers will become unproductive to receive a free handout. The argument is specious.

UBIs will ensure that basic human needs will be met, which will allow people to engage in other pursuits, including scientific research, art and writing in a modern renaissance era amid rapid global automation.

— Wayne Madsen is a progressive commentator and a graduate of the University of Mississippi.