Andrew Yang is running for president with an appealing offer: He wants to give Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 free money each month.

His other policy proposals include universal Medicare and statehood for Puerto Rico. Though his controversial ideas make his candidacy a longshot, Yang, a 43-year-old father of two, hopes at least to draw attention to what he says is a looming employment crisis.

A successful tech entrepreneur himself, Yang expects that the proliferation of industrial robotics and artificial intelligence will put millions even tens of millions of people out of a job. Worse, he says, America is completely unprepared to cope with this shift in the employment landscape.

So hes running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 on a platform of universal basic income (UBI) with the tagline lets put humanity first. He hopes that a $1,000-a-month stipend for all U.S. citizens can ease the pain of a future where much less human labor will be needed.

I think were going through the greatest transition in human history and were dealing with it terribly, Yang said. Were dealing with it by pretending its not happening.

With average monthly rents easily topping $1,000 in big U.S. cities, Yangs proposed UBI wouldnt be enough for most people to live on, or at least not enough for the kind of life most Americans prefer. Instead, he believes it would supplement peoples current income and help ease financial anxiety for the underemployed. In April , the presidential hopeful announced he would put his UBI proposal into action and provide a New Hampshire resident with $12,000 throughout 2019.

Endorsements for Yang poured in after he announced his candidacy in February especially from the tech industry, which has been having a love affair with the concept of UBI. Yang received high-profile media attention from outlets such as Vanity Fair and The New York Times .

Preparing For An Automated Future

Growing up, Yang wasnt the most popular kid in school. In his book The War on Normal People , he describes his childhood in self-deprecating fashion: I grew up a skinny Asian kid in upstate New York who was often ignored or picked on like one of the kids from Stranger Things but nerdier and with fewer friends.

After graduating from Brown University and Columbia Law School, Yang brought his talents to startups, eventually helming a test-prep company that was later acquired by Kaplan in 2009. Yet he couldnt shake the feeling that things were getting worse for the average American.

Yang took the money he earned from the sale and used it to set up a nonprofit, Venture for America, to create jobs in cities hit hardest by the financial crisis. But along the way, he became convinced that new job creation could no longer keep pace with automation.

UBI enthusiasts often point to studies predicting that the pace of automation is about to hit warp speed. One widely cited Oxford University study, for example, estimates 47 percent of jobs in the U.S. are at risk of being automated in the next 20 years.

President Donald Trump was elected in part, Yang said, because Americans were becoming impatient with the steady loss of secure middle-class jobs.

Donald Trump diagnosed the problem very powerfully, and hes president because of it, Yang said. The issue is that the solutions are nonsense: Hating immigrants, trying to freeze time or turn the clock backwards. We have to do the exact opposite. We have to accelerate our society and economy forward.