“This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out,” Pope Francis said in his Easter Sunday message to popular movements and organizations.

The Pope’s remarks were initially reported as speaking about a “universal basic income,” since the Spanish phrase “salario universal” can also be translated that way.

So, what was Pope Francis proposing? A universal basic minimum wage, or a universal basic welfare income?

The latter notion, of a universal basic income, is currently favoured by many Silicon Valley technologists. They anticipate artificial intelligence is going to put very large numbers of humans out of work in the coming decades, so we need an economic plan right now to prepare for the huge changes coming.

Bill Gates has proposed a “robot tax” on the rapidly emerging artificial intelligence technologies, so that money from that tax can be used to deal with the economic earthquakes the robots will bring.

Populist politicians who are scapegoating immigrants over economic disruption are missing the point. Lost jobs are not an unplanned side effect when an economic system prioritizes maximum extraction of profits. Closing borders won’t suddenly make people more important than profits.

Job losses are already built into our economic operating system as an essential feature, as a way to increase profits. This brutal economic reality will become clearer as more and more robots arrive, displacing more and more humans.

It is our entire economic way of life, therefore, that needs to be rethought and reprogrammed. But can ideas like a robot tax actually help humans?

The Pope’s Easter message wasn’t setting forth a detailed plan, but rather making a necessary appeal to first principles of justice.

He was speaking about what we need to do, both during and after the pandemic, for humans who are left behind by the current system.

“My hope is that governments understand that technocratic paradigms (whether state-centred or market-driven) are not enough to address this crisis or the other great problems affecting humankind,” said the Pope. “Now more than ever, persons, communities and peoples must be put at the centre, united to heal, to care and to share.”

It is a first principle that the human person matters more than political systems and markets, which leave many people behind. If so, then what does justice require?

The Pope was addressing the people who are hardest hit by the pandemic: “I know that you have been excluded from the benefits of globalization. You do not enjoy the superficial pleasures that anesthetize so many consciences, yet you always suffer from the harm they produce. The ills that afflict everyone hit you twice as hard.”

The pandemic is thus making a deeper reality more visible. Those who have benefited the least from the status quo arrangements of politics and the economy are now clearly the ones being hit hardest.

Think of it as an advance preview of the economic future that artificial intelligence will bring. More people will be staying at home or working from home because robots will make the usual workday obsolete. Already Zoom has transformed our households, catapulting them into the future.

“Many of you live from day to day, without any type of legal guarantee to protect you,” said the Pope, indicating the wider problem he saw the pandemic bringing to the fore. “Street vendors, recyclers, carnies, small farmers, construction workers, dressmakers, the different kinds of caregivers: you who are informal, working on your own or in the grassroots economy, you have no steady income to get you through this hard time ... and the lockdowns are becoming unbearable.”

The Pope insists the rights of such people not be forgotten. Not only must they be cared for during the pandemic so their right to a basic living wage or income is legally affirmed; the Pope said we also need to reflect on how “life after the pandemic” can guarantee “universal access” to “trabajo (work), techo (housing), and tierra (land and food).”

I think the best idea to guarantee such universal access is not just a universal basic wage, or even a universal basic income, but rather “universal basic capital.”

Universal basic capital (as discussed in the book Renovating Democracy by Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen) would make every human in the country a shareholder in the profits generated by the companies building the robots.

A robot tax is one way to begin configuring universal human ownership of the technologies of the future and best realize the Pope’s proposal.

Think of it as the Pope does: as a much-needed investment in “Team Human.”