Yeah, that guy ain’t my kind of candidate. He opens with this:
New technologies – robots, software, artificial intelligence – have already destroyed more than 4 million US jobs, and in the next 5-10 years, they will eliminate millions more. A third of all American workers are at risk of permanent unemployment. And this time, the jobs will not come back.
I’m not a career politician—I’m an entrepreneur who understands the economy. It’s clear to me, and to many of the nation’s best job creators, that we need to make an unprecedented change, and we need to make it now. But the establishment isn’t willing to take the necessary bold steps. As president, my first priority will be to implement Universal Basic Income for every American adult over the age of 18: $1,000 a month, no strings attached, paid for by a new tax on the companies benefiting most from automation.
His tone seems to be attacking the very notion of automation and the productivity increases it provides.
There’s no reason why the government should punish industries which utilize automation. That suggests that there’s some rationale behind disincentivizing that.
Thanks. Everything is broken and most of our politicans are unwilling to be bold. We didn’t get Civil Rights or the New Deal by “triangulating.” :)
Not my take at all. He’s right about automation, but what are we going to do when there are more people than jobs? His answer is that UBI is the first step. I don’t think he’s suggesting at all that we force companies not to automate.
We’re not going to agree on this (and that’s fine, we don’t have to) but IMO taxing isn’t punishment. Companies are not going to do X because they have to spend Y in taxes especially if X results in higher income etc. Besides no matter how many people are used in pursuit and support of automation there are still going to be more people than jobs. That’s going to be a problem.
You know the Google AI that beat the first human at GO? Google has developed an AI that beat that AI and it did it by learning from the first AI. How long before we have adaptive AI doing the coding? It’s not just blue collar and service jobs that are going away.
It makes one wonder what an economy in a fully robo-ized world will look like, assuming we survive long enough to see/create one.
Will we all spend all our time servicing robots that do the “real” work? (Even white collar, as seems to be a coming trend, or so I have read?) Will there be robo-doctors and robo-lawyers and human repairmen and coders? Or will there be robo-coders and robo-repairmen, and humans to repair the robo-coders and robo-repairmen?
Is it robos all the way down?
There seem to be two basic ways to view increased automation, to wit:
Oh no! Humans don’t have to work anymore!
Yay! Humans don’t have to work anymore!
Is the endgame a species of UBI-subsidized Eloi? Is that a good or a bad thing?
Sort of, more the second one than the first. I’m curious about the effect such a massive leap in wage all at once will have on people who aren’t directly affected by it. I don’t think it will lead to massive unemployment, many studies show that’s unlikely to happen, but I do think it will have an impact both socially and economically that we’ve never seen before with a minimum wage increase, just because of the scale.
There are millions of people who currently earn close to what the new minimum wage equates to (~$30K annual), but they’re not considered anything close to minimum wage now (and certainly don’t think of themselves that way). What happens to those people, their professions and the companies they work for when they suddenly become “slightly over minimum wage” earners the day after the hike? Most of them are highly unlikely to see any sort of pay increase because they either aren’t hourly employees (the teacher making $36K) or if they are they are already making $15 per hour or above (the plant worker with 10 years experience). Their economic standing won’t change, it will be just another Monday for them, except for the fact that they will be acutely aware of the fact that they are now “undervalued” for their education/experience/skill levels relative to unskilled labor, and there won’t be anything they can do about it.
Of course it is, just like targeted tax cuts are rewards for certain types of behavior. That’s WHY the government gives you tax cuts for things like mortgage interest. They want to incentivize people buying houses. Specifically taxing behavior increases the cost of that behavior, and naturally creates a force to disincentivize it.
Why?
Heh, what you’re talking about at this point is essentially solving the problem of general intelligence. Making a generally intelligent system capable of creating solutions to arbitrary problems is, to put it simply…complex. Now, at this point I’m not going to say that we’re decades away from it, just because technology is developing at an increasingly rapid pace, but right now? We’re not anywhere near that.
Once you achieve that goal, things are going to be… different. At that point, this discussion is going to be largely moot, because you will enter into an entirely new technological age. The world is going to be different in very fundamental ways, to the degree that we likely can’t actually imagine what that world is going to be like.
It’s a messaging issue for Democrats on this, for sure, but when we talk about giving someone without any substantial training or experience the basic fucking respect of a living wage and it makes people who barely earn more than a living wage with a ton of training and experience, their enemy isn’t the minimum wage worker. It’s their boss, who’s been criminally underpaying them all this time, anyway.
C’mon baby, you know I graveshit for the love of the game and the hate of the politician, not the $30,000/mo I get from my fans at patreon.com/GraveShittery
My grave shitting drone will be able to hit a grave from a cruising altitude of 20,000 feet, at pinpoint accuracy. Allowing you to hit any grave in the country with any fecal matter of your choosing.
…Camera pans across pristine mountainside. In the foreground, the camera settles upon a gravemarker…
…The camera zooms out, slowly, revealing a robot squatting over the grave…
…The camera continues to zoom out, showing the entirety of arlington cemetary, thousands of robots shitting on every grave, simultaneously…
…a human skull rolls like a tumbleweed across the ground, coming to rest next to a boot…
…The camera pans up, revealing the classic, windswept Armando…
…a single tear rolls down his cheek…
…fade to black…
