It's Time To Ignore Petty Politics and Focus On 'Transformative' Tech: Eric Schmidt (techcrunch.com)

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman at Alphabet in an interview said that we need to focus more on the possibilities of advances in biology and medicine as well as AI. But he feels people are spending "all our time arguing about political issues that are ultimately not that important." He urges people to stop doing that and work on things that are transformative. He added: "We've gone from an era where we thought about solving problems that were very, very big," he said. "We now define them as problems of special interests. Everyone's guilty. I'm not making a particular political point here." Schmidt seemed excited enough about the possibility of medical breakthroughs that Rose asked him: If he was starting over today, would he be more likely to go into computer science or biology? "Both are having a renaissance," Schmidt said.

Comments

Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec?

[Opportunist]

It's all really lovely and swell that we're on the verge of making incredible medical and scientific progress and certainly we, as a species, should put our minds to such ideas.

It's just hard to argue that to people whose most pressing problem isn't curing cancer but finding a place to park the car they live in 'cause they got evicted. They might have a different idea of "important".

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[Anonymous Coward]

... They might have a different idea of "important".

And if we listen to them, we'll find them parking spots and new apartments. If we listen to Eric, maybe we'll cure cancer. Let's listen to the guy in the ivory tower.

Not a Dichtotomy

[gurps_npc]

It's not an either/or situation - we can argue about EVERYTHING.

If your point is that some people are bad at arguing and making no sense, that's one thing.

But claiming that an argument isn't important enough to fight about just makes you look stupid.

Because the people that are getting screwed over by X definitely want to fight it.

Re:Not a Dichtotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not an either/or situation - we can argue about EVERYTHING.

No we can't!

The problem is

[Kierthos]

If we don't pay attention to politics (and oftentimes, even if we do), thundering idiots who don't have the slightest understanding of science, technology and so forth get elected. And proceed to use that lack of understanding like it was something to be proud of when they pass laws.

You get idiots in Congress who don't know the difference between weather and climate, or claim that we don't have to worry about rising sea levels in coastal areas because "God promised he would never flood the earth again".

We get politicians who want "small government", unless it involves regulations on your genitals, which they seem inordinately fond of passing.

We get ones who can't even understand email regulating the Internet, ones who aren't doctors regulating medical procedures, and so on. People passing laws based on their religious beliefs and then getting a case of chapped ass if anyone dares compare it to Sharia law.

If we don't pay attention to it, it just gets worse.

Re:The problem is

[bluefoxlucid]

The problem is politics *are* a form of technology, and we really are looking at the stupid stuff.

I disagree with Bernie Sanders because he has a political solution--raise minimum wage and institute a Basic Income, but no ideas on how to fund it or how it would affect the economy. He talks about creating jobs, but doesn't understand where jobs come from; he uses the same "Our infrastructure is falling apart and we'll create jobs by rebuilding it" argument as everyone else, and the basic premise is untrue, while the supposed outcome is also backwards (inefficient and ineffective spending decreases wealth and ends in a net reduction of jobs). Bernie's job creation and minimum wage policies are essentially trickle-down economics.

On my end, I've started working on economic theory exploring the *mechanisms* of economies, rather than *measurement*, as a basis for policy-making; as such, I have actual plans for a Basic Income in the form of a Citizen's Dividend, including transitions, risks, risk controls, and all the reasoning of why it works and how it impacts an economy. I also have reasoning *against* a minimum wage; the Citizen's Dividend is meant to accomplish what MW proponents envision a MW is for while sidestepping all the negative side effects MW opponents *and* economists recognize (including the ones that are wholly made-up).

That's the difference: people have political ideals--religion, morality, humanitarian, common-sense--and they ride on these as policy. You get "Businesses Must Pay" and then minimum wage increases, and then jobs vanish and people become poorer and you hope the nudge was small enough that population expansion and natural economic growth exceeds the loss, and then you can say, "See, there was no decrease" (i.e. sans-MW-increase, +2,000,000 jobs; MW-increase, +1,400,000 jobs, claim you created 1,400,000 jobs because there's no way to measure the other outcome since it never happened). Nobody says, "Wait, wages make the base wage," or, "Wealth is the per-capita productive output, and so the efficient application of labor is what makes wealth."

Nobody sits down and reasons out the cause-and-effect of policy on the economy, on education, on crime, on individual freedom and quality of life, or on anything else substantial; they reason out the cause-and-effect of policy on VOTES.

Re:The problem is

[pr0fessor]

A Citizen's Dividend of 17% would end poverty.

I keep seeing this but a 17% dividend of what?

Re:The problem is

[JackieBrown]

We get politicians who want "small government", unless it involves regulations on your genitals, which they seem inordinately fond of passing.

Democrats are the ones that keep changing the laws or bringing up these issues. The people you are complaining about are just reacting to that. They are only creating new regulations in response to the new regulations that Obama just created or the ones he just destroyed.

People passing laws based on their religious beliefs and then getting a case of chapped ass if anyone dares compare it to Sharia law.

This just shows how ignorant you are of the world. Countries with Sharia law murder those with different sexual orientations or other crimes against morality. And usually murdering those people in the most painful, inhumane way possible.

Re:The problem is

[bluefoxlucid]

Adjusted Gross Income (the amount of money on which businesses and individuals pay taxes--for businesses, we call it net profits). I did the math in 2013, and the cost of welfare was 17.2% of AGI while the Dividend was slightly-cheaper. I advocate a long-term fixed flat funding rate for the Dividend as a way to ensure the baseline standard-of-living grows at the exact same rate as the economy.

I did a lot of work identifying risks, costs, and transitional considerations, as well as generating a variety of long-term tax plans. The two major issues I'm still dealing with are a temporary top tax raise (I don't want the top tax bracket above 40%, but the blunt instant-transition is 43%; that actually puts $17,000 more income into the hands of consumers at an $80k income level, so a staged transition would reduce the shock as well as the peak) and a bootstrapping problem (if you start with $0, no friends, no charity, and no possessions, the first 3-4 months are financially-tight because utensils, pots, and pans cost a significant amount of money). It's viable, but not *perfect*.

The basic concept is on my blog. The only transitional consideration I've publicly addressed is Social Security retirement; I've put in some analysis of HUD in particular alongside this. Because the Dividend pays enough for food, clothing, and personal care, plus a remaining combined family (children) welfare system (1.4% cost) covers families with children, food stamps and related support are obviated; however, HUD recipients require continued assistance until the markets adjust to the availability of a stable income.

Notably, while I target the complete elimination of homelessness and hunger by creating a stable bottom-end consumer who can afford housing (224sqft per person), there are huge advantages to the working poor. HUD is a particular pain point, with 75% of Americans qualifying for HUD going directly and PERMANENTLY onto a waiting list and NEVER RECEIVING BENEFITS; and, despite food stamps, 50 million Americans live with food insecurity, not getting enough to eat every day. The lift for families on HUD would allow them to move into non-baseline housing (they have incomes, albeit low), and the transitional concerns are that such a move is natural *and* requires the market to locate, prepare, and market that housing.

There's also consumer market considerations outside the poorest of poor.

I did tax liability computations and found that, comparing to today's Federal taxes (including OASDI), my tax brackets leave the single-adult, minimum-wage household with $6,229 more take-home income; the two-adult, married-filing-jointly, one- or two-minimum-wage household with $14,600 +/- $50 additional take-home income; the two-adult, married-filing-jointly, median-income ($54,462) household with $12,892 additional take-home income; and some significant range of married-filing-jointly, two-adult households including the range of $80,000 to $144,000 (the top 10% Americans households make over $144,000) an additional $17,227.

Amusingly, a married-filing-jointly household with an $84,290 pre-tax income actually takes home exactly $84,290 (before state taxes). Below this, they take home more than their actual wage. Above this, they take home less.

At $1,000,000 anual income, your take-home is $9,126 higher; at $10,000,000, it's $116,874 lower (1.17% additional effective tax rate); and at $25,000,000, it's $326,874 lower (1.31% additional tax rate). Scaled to the median income ($54,462), an additional 1.31% tax would represent $713/year or $59/month in additional taxes; nevertheless, I consider such tax bumps unfortunate, and would want to move slowly into them and then reduce

Re: The problem is

[Archangel Michael]

Over 99% of climate scientists say that humans are the primary reason.

Primary reason for what, exactly? The Ice Caps being gone by 2015 (Al Gore) ? The Greening of Africa? The record low number of hurricanes in the Atlantic for the last 10 years in spite of all the dire predictions to the contrary?

Also, I would LOVE to point out that Consensus isn't science. Once upon a time, Piltdown Man was consensus science. Turned out to be a manipulated hoax. If the data is not reliable, the predictions fail, then the result is NOT science, it is something else.

Further, Science has yet to prove that it is a bad thing. Warm, wet, CO2 is great for plants.

Meanwhile, all the rain in Texas, I've heard plenty of "Global Warming/Climate Change" where it is nothing but weather. The problem here, is EVEN if AGW is happening, the RESULTS have been nothing like what was predicted, but we should trust the 99% of scientists who believe it, but are wrong on so much of it.

Again, I am not doubting Man's impact of the environment. But there are MUCH better arguments for it than AGW. Stick to those, and I'm with you.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[Anonymous Coward]

People getting evicted or not does not affect Schmidt's bottom line.

Refocusing people on profitable technologies, which he will benefit disproportionally from, does.

Same mindset as "the taxpayers should pay for teaching kids coding from the fourth grade".

Somehow, in his mind, that his "ideals" for others are synonymous with his profits, is not politics.

In other words...

[aicrules]

Please stop trying to out my candidate for the lying, cheating, felonious hack that they are and work on tech ideas that I deem important as a distraction.

Hold the front page

[Oxygen99]

Man rich enough to transcend politics tells those who aren't to stop worrying about it.

Things that are transformative usually involve transforming things for the worse as well as the better. Politics should protect people from that.

you first, Eric

[turkeydance]

put aside your politics first

And I should care because?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see now. At a big tech company, or anywhere for that matter, if you want to get anything technologically important done you first have to win the politics game to even get your chance up to bat. I'm sure he doesn't have this problem as chairman, but his employees do. Now he's a small fish in a big pond, and he's essentially whining that he can't just have his way. Whaa crybaby, whaa.

Benefits of technology?

[ajyand]

Only proper politics can facilitate technology reach lowest strata of society, not a seemingly philanthropic board decision. Technology has been shaping politics over last few centuries and more of that in the last two decades. Both are equally important because sooner than we expect, both will be indistinguishable.

Re:Benefits of technology?

[ajyand]

Schmidt wants to say, "leave the politics in the hands of the influential ones." and promises the possibility of a cure to cancer. Welcome to the United States of Alphabet.

Eric Schmidt needs a boot party

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your political issues are not that important." Right. Anyone's concerns over an impossible national debt, never-ending war, loss of privacy, job insecurity, the disappearing middle class -- this is meaningless drivel for the little people; the proles; the rubes; according to Eric Schmidt. Spoken like a true one-percenter. I'm not surprised he thinks that way. None of these problems affect him. So perhaps what needs to happen, is that he needs to be directly affected by it. It's time for Eric Schmidt to have a boot party. Does anyone else agree?

Transformative -

[Anonymous Coward]

Transformative is making sure everyone
- has a place to live
- has food on the table
- has access to health care
- is safe from violence
- is treated with respect regardless of whatever

Those are big problems.

Re:Transformative -

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, you made that politically personal.

I was thinking of social structure violence
- violent crimes stemming out of poverty and drugs
- police violence
- spousal violence

There are fundamental problem with the current social structure.

Re:Transformative -

[Archangel Michael]

Violent Crimes stemming from Poverty ? Define "poverty" and explain why lots of poor people NEVER commit violent crimes?

I would suggest to you, that violence stemming from Poverty is caused by lack of opportunity based on very low expectations (a kind of subtle racism), and dense public housing (city size cages). If you treat people like zoo animals, feeding, clothing them, housing them in cages, expect them to act like animals. If you treat them like equals (not lessor but equal) and hold onto expectations you have for everyone else, then I would suggest to you, that the results would be different.

And by "poverty" you mean, "Still richer than 80% of the worlds population", right?

Police are violent because we have them "policing" things that shouldn't be crimes, drugs, prostitution, selling cigarettes without a government license etc. However the statists want to control everything, requires taxes on everything, requires licenses to operate a business. Hell, even selling lemonade is a crime, if you don't have a license.

Imagine for a second, that the police were charged with actually PROTECTING rights instead of violating them. (I am a libertarian)

Spousal Violence is not a social Structure I've ever heard of. It is almost universally condemned, and the few outliers are not from American Culture, but rather 3rd world cultures that do not value women at all, but as property.

There is a fundamental problem with our current social structure, and that is that power is gravatating away from the people, into the elite political class. You can see the people are finally recognizing it with Trump and Sanders (two sides of the wrong coin). The solution is to remove power from the ruling elites (two parties) and give it back to the people directly, and locally. Where if you don't like how you're being ruled, it is much easier to change it.

I dare say, that if you were to ask a singular question in a poll, you'd find nearly unanimous decree from all over the political spectrum: "Does the Federal Government have your consent to govern your life to the degree it currently is governing?" A good followup (for clarity) would be "Do you believe the Federal Government govern your life too much, too little, or just about right? "

And that is the problem with our politics. IMHO I believe most people think Government has too much influence in their life, but that they believe that more government influence over others is what is needed to fix their problems. Not realizing that their solution is exactly their problem. ;)

Re:Transformative -

[thinkwaitfast]

That sounds like a local city problem, not national. If you live in the US, there are plenty of places to live as inexpensively as SE Asia.

Re:Transformative -

[Fwipp]

(I am a libertarian)

Don't worry, we can tell.

Re:Transformative -

[ultranova]

Or, perhaps you're one of the very quiet "I hate Trump" people, who sort of condemn the violence, but not really.

Mod parent up. This has been the major weakness of us on the left for far too long: the willingness to tolerate unethical behaviour or even outright violence in the name of our goal. Soviet Union demonstrated where attempts to build a better world with the power of the dark side will inevitably go, yet some people apparently still think they can use it when it's convenient without having it dominate their destiny. It's time to stop being useful idiots and start building a better tomorrow, not just one where the monster in charge wears our insignia rather than those of our enemies.

Sorry to have to explain this...

[argStyopa]

...Eric, ALL problems that affect more than a single small group are ultimately political.

To think anything else is staggeringly naive.

Look at climate change; many people misunderstand that it's a question of science. Not really. Ultimately, it's a question of focus, resources, and priorities which are POLITICAL questions. To deny that people are politically collectively vested in the results is fundamentally misunderstanding the very nature of the question.

It doesn't help that (in the US at least) that politics as a field has come to be populated by some of the most despicable characters in our society. We keep electing them mainly because it matters so little: firstly, we have no ability to draft 'our best citizens' for the roles of leadership, and they're staying the hell away from the grubby business. Second, the US is (at least perceived to be) eternal; there's no existential crisis and thus little perceived need to really give a shit about who's running things - vote for one party, and one bunch of people & their friends get rich. Vote for the other, and a different group and their friends get rich instead.

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[neoritter]

Eric sounds like a fucking cult leader.

Social issues

[rsilvergun]

Good luck getting anything real done with how important social issues like abortion, gay rights, gun control and religion/prayer in schools exist. Regardless of your opinion on these subjects they dominate most of the world's politics. They're great wedge issues. See, a substantial number of people in this world have a vested interest in preventing humanities problems from being solved. After all, what good is being rich if nobody's poor.

You mean those evil things called "jobs"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation from Schmidt-ese to English:

“all our time arguing about political issues that are ultimately not that important," = "why are people worried about losing their jobs? I don't care about that! I only care about myself! "

“not doing enough things that are transformative.” = "We want to create technology designed to make sure people can't earn a living anymore, but we are getting huge push back from ordinary people! The horror!!"

"Schmidt dismissed concerns that AIs could eventually become smart enough to be a threat to humans. "

Because he makes money off of it, and only cares about himself.

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, most of what that troll says is accurate. His big mistake is in thinking that everywhere else on the planet is any different, conveniently ignoring similar problems and atrocities in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and just about anywhere else on the globe. One could, by replacing the proper nouns in the rant above, make it a rant about any continent or even country in the world. Anyone want to play ad-libs below?

But...

[roc97007]

The last movie was TERRIBLE. Why would... wait what? Never mind.

Re:Eric? Politics can & has killed people.

[BoRegardless]

Whole countries have been taken down because of political decisions, so I don't consider it "Petty."

Germany essentially does not have long term debt or unfunded liabilities of consequence because they know the effect from their post WW1 collapse. Nicaragua is seeing the result of petty politics today. Argentina arguably has been held down for a century by bad politics. Brazil has its problems today because of politics. China had it.

Schmidt looks at himself as omniscient now.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[bluefoxlucid]

You mean the labor force that stably holds around 58% of population, but has experienced a labor force bubble to 69%, and is now coming down as the population ages and retires?

Do you mean the labor force people complained about in the early-2000s because housewives started working to get a second income, claiming it was impossible to survive on a single income anymore?

Do you mean the labor force which continues to grow year after year, even as it shrinks as a proportion of the total population, and reduces itself by 2% marginal population while increasing its rate of employment 5%?

More new jobs have appeared than new Americans. America has become prosperous, and its population has expanded as the wage slave society has broken away, allowing desperate two-income families to become one-income families with more economic freedom. People have painted the change as the destruction of the American economy as the labor force participation rate grew ("We're getting poorer! Housewives must work alongside their husbands or their families starve!") and as it shrinks ("We're losing jobs! Well, not actual jobs, we've got more of those as a percentage of population... but less of the population is expressing a NEED to work! They must have just given up on living!").

I can't tell which of you are liars and which of you are fools.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[tomhath]

It's just hard to argue that to people whose most pressing problem isn't curing cancer but finding a place to park the car they live in

You're mixing two things that shouldn't be mixed. People working on transformative technologies versus arguing politics should follow Schmidt's advice.

And yes, there is also a social problem with a segment of the population who can't or won't work to support themselves.

Different problems for different people to solve, neither should be ignored.

.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[bluefoxlucid]

I would rather end homelessness and hunger because I already have the solution to that *and* I'm genetically immune to cancer. It helps my argument that ending homelessness and hunger saves more lives and improves quality-of-life for more Americans than finding a cancer cure, although I'm not sure it helps my argument enough to cover for the fact that I personally benefit a hell of a lot from the change, too.

Re:Eric? Politics can & has killed people.

[swb]

Argentina could have basically been further developed than most European countries by now if they would have had saner politics.

I can't even say I really grasp the political divisions there -- it doesn't even seem to follow the basic left-right axis, it's like its following some z-axis of its own making.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[Opportunist]

In this economy, you're better off without a job than you would be with a lot of the jobs that are offered...

Re:A computing "renaissance"? What the fuck?!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only computer science that matters is applied computer science. What's applied computer science? It's computer science knowledge put to work using hardware and/or software.

Advances in machine learning described in some obscure academic journal getting dusty on some obscure shelf in the basement of some college library are useless. These advances implemented using software are much more relevant.

Besides, your example of machine learning fits into what the GP wrote:

Machine learning is shaping up to be all about advertising to us, and collecting our personal information so we can be advertised to more "effectively".

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[Opportunist]

That's maybe fine for you, but how do you explain to them the difference between not having a cure for cancer and having one but not being able to afford it?

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[rickb928]

"Europe is far more racist than the United States, and that's despite strong prohibitions against hate speech."

And so we confront the problem - hate-thought. Good luck making that illegal.

All politics is someone's morality.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[rickb928]

And ensuring, in America, that 22% of children conceived will never, ever get cancer. Or anything else.

Sounds difficult, but it isn't

[fustakrakich]

I mean, he's asking us to toss aside billions of years of evolution, natural primal instinct, conditioned reflex, etc... In the grand scheme, we are acting little different than the dogs pissing on fire hydrants marking their territory and the moneys flinging their poo. In theory, as humans, we do have the power to *flip the switch* and stop acting like animals. Like everything else the choice is personal.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[jellomizer]

The issue is that I haven't heard anything new out of politics for a while.
Party A: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.
Party B: Wants less government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.

Now the special interests groups swap around over time.

So politics will go to normal progress if they like it they will give it money if they don't they will not.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[Anubis IV]

Agreed. There's no bright and shining future for everyone if we ignore the present civil unrest, particularly if things ever escalate beyond being "civil". We don't live in a vacuum, so while he may be right about what our long-term priorities should be, the amount of attention we can dedicate to them is dictated in large part by how things are operating in the short-term.

Money doesn't make you smart.

[bmo]

Eric Schmidt bloviated:

"all our time arguing about political issues that are ultimately not that important."

Politics is what drives famines, for example, you fucking tool, not lack of food. We have plenty of food and medicine to go around. It's the politics of /getting it there/ to where it's needed, like drought and war zones. Politics is what kills people, or spares them, depending on a lot of things (but mostly greed, ultimately), none of which are the global capability of technology, shelter, medicine, or food, because we have a lot of all of that (artificial scarcity is artificial).

Politics aren't important? Fuck you.

"I got rich, therefore my opinion counts" - said the "Great Man" of Thomas Carlyle (and Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand, and a whole lot of other people who are dead wrong).

No it doesn't. Not more than anyone else who is also as badly informed as you.

--
BMO

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[Anonymous Coward]

rather than focusing on the collective ascension of the species

Would that be communist style "collective ascension" or Nazi-style "collective ascension"? What is your preferred method for dealing with people who disagree with you? Lobotomies, psychiatric drugs, Siberian camps, or gas chambers?

Re:A computing "renaissance"? What the fuck?!

[fbobraga]

Linux is much less stable and usable than it was 10 years ago.

not for non tech-savy users

focus on the bottom line

[thrig]

"The American model got us through the last 30 years."

Robber baron inequality levels, some romping good fun via foreign military and financial adventurism, not a little biosphere damage, and how's the middle class doing? A good exercise might be to take a walk by the Interstate and see how many homeless are living there.

"“Both are having a renaissance,” Schmidt said."

A renaissance? What long dead culture are we copying from in computing and biology? Or is this some new use of the term renaissance? If so, what does this use of renaissance mean? Feel-good technobabble? Other?

"political issues that are ultimately not that important...I’m not making a particular political point here"

Yes, they are. Yes, you are.

"more than just a medical bill"

Explain why Americans pay that big fat medical bill and yet only have life expectancies on par with Costa Rica? How exactly will throwing yet more tech at that wallet to see what sticks help (anything but Google's bottom line)?

yeah, right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Special Interest groups found a way around the majority rule : Courts and media.
Rich people and Corporations found a way around majority rule: Brib... errr.... lobbyists.
And the original voter qualifications are being diluted ( landowner or business man, professional, tradesman... : ie, a productive member of society ).
And now Eric pretends to be Jack Handy - "Deep Thoughts"... LOL!

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[ShanghaiBill]

getting caught up in political garbage rather than focusing on the collective ascension of the species

The problem with "getting rid of petty politics" is that the only way to get rid of it is to impose one viewpoint. So how do we fix the transgender toilet issue? Do we tell the TG people to just shut up and use the toilet matching their birth gender? Or do we override the democratic rights of the people of North Carolina? To most people, one or the other of those is "obviously" the right solution, but we don't agree on which one. So who gets to decide? And how do we force the "losers" to accept the decision (especially if they turn out to be the majority)?

People don't even agree that "transformative technology" is a good thing. There is strong opposition to GMO. Many people fear AI. Workers don't like robots "stealing" their jobs.

Anyway, I don't really see "petty politics" as impeding tech. If anything, it is the other way around. If the politicians are busy arguing about toilets, they have less time to interfere with the economy, regulate innovators, and "pick winners". The last time the economy was truly "booming" was when the politicians were focused on Bill Clinton's blowjobs.

Can't. Politicians declared us enemies

[Kohath]

One of the 2 candidates proudly declared a large fraction of our fellow Americans "enemies". How can we ignore politics when the political leaders who are supposed to represent us and serve the entire population are "proud" to call every third or fourth American an enemy?

Re:Bill Clinton doesn't agree

[Altus]

Some of it is Bush's fault. Much of it is Clinton's fault, no wonder he would rather badmouth Obama than take a hard look at the policies that created the crash in the first place

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[fluffernutter]

Personally I think the politicians keep arguing about toilets because the solutions to all the *real* issues will not be liked by their rich friends. Politics have become too dependent on money, so politicians are not likely to make decisions that will get them less money. The elephant in the room is that something needs to be done with companies who have become too large and drain too much from the economy but that will never happen under current system.

Re: Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a se

[pr0fessor]

They are not going to shank you in the kidney... they'll shank you in the throat and take the kidney.

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[ShanghaiBill]

the solutions to all the *real* issues will not be liked by their rich friends.

Rich people invest in transformative tech innovation. Poor people don't. They spend their money on food, rent, etc. By saying the law should be more progressive and less favorable to the rich, you are engaging in petty politics and impeding transformative technology. Petty concerns like jobs, livable wages, and clean drinking water are exactly what Eric Schmidt (personal net worth: $9B) is complaining about.

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[RabidReindeer]

You do realize that the point Schmidt was making was that we spend too much effort obsessing over "isms" and not enough over actually doing constructive things?

What am I missing?

[WaffleMonster]

The big data will revolutionize medicine meme has been going strong for over two decades and counting.

I often hear this rhetoric about high technology and innovative companies like 'Google' and 'Facebook' .. in many cases the same biological breakthrough meme is inevitably invoked in some way.

Just last week CNN's Fareed Zakaria ran a promotional interview with a toll from Linked In of all places with the very same nonsense about technological innovation, medical breakthroughs and all almost verbatim.

Actual worth in terms of "positive" contributions to society of these advertising firms seems to me to be completely overblown and divorced from reality.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[BoberFett]

That's short sighted. Technology is democratizing and breaks down more barriers than political bickering ever will.

Books and literacy were the province of the wealthy and the high priests who could afford scribes to duplicate texts. Modern literacy rates would not be possible without movable type and the printing press.

Even once those technologies existed the spread of information was limited by gatekeepers who had the ability to publish using expensive machinery until things like Xerox machines and later the internet made publishing cheap or even free.

Even in your own example, isn't one of the largest reasons that people go bankrupt is because of medical issues? Instead of arguing about Obamacare, how about we just cure cancer and then we don't have to worry about going bankrupt and lose your home because you got cancer.

For a technology focused site, this place really has some myopic contributors.

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[Anonymous Coward]

The petty politics of the day are designed by the rich upper class to keep the plebs like us in check. We can't get anything done as a society because people are screaming and injuring people over labels such as race, sexual orientation, and gender. Worse still, they have pumped money to teach young impressionable and uncritical minds that there are millions of variations of sex and gender.

And until every one of those have proper representation, we are not allowed to focus on advancements and can only focus at diversity. These same people attack meritocracy, the idea that if you do good work it you will succeed regardless of what your person labels are, because despite it being the clear answer they want people who have non stem field degrees to get into stem field jobs.

I feel I will only be taken seriously by these same people if I add the following: if you disagree with me, it's misogyny.

To be blunt, you are very wrong

[SuperKendall]

.There's no bright and shining future for everyone if we ignore the present civil unrest,

Yes there is. To be very blunt, the people involved in the unrest really do not matter to technical advance. Only a small percentage of them would be of any use even if they could be interested in technical advancement, so frankly it is better for technical people to ignore civil unrest - beyond finding somewhere to work that is more isolated from the practical effects of same, which is what they have done with Silicon Valley.

Civil unrest will always come and go in waves, I would argue it is basically utterly irrelevant compared to advancing technology which drags forward all of humanity, willing or not.

Re:To be blunt, you are very wrong

[ultranova]

To be very blunt, the people involved in the unrest really do not matter to technical advance.

To also be very blunt, technical advance doesn't create a bright fututure - or have any impact at all - unless you can get its fruits into the hands of people. And that's pretty difficult to do if they're preoccupied with killing you.

Only a small percentage of them would be of any use even if they could be interested in technical advancement, so frankly it is better for technical people to ignore civil unrest - beyond finding somewhere to work that is more isolated from the practical effects of same, which is what they have done with Silicon Valley.

To continue being blunt, Silicon Valley is neither self-sufficient nor a fortress. Should civil order break down, it's not going to be Galt's Gulch, it's going to be a tomb, with the only question being whether the "technical people" get lynched or starve first. And even in the unlikely event that Silicon Valley would emerge more or less intact, with the rest of the country collapsed it won't be able to afford to feed a large population of "technical people" who aren't immediately productive.

Civil unrest will always come and go in waves, I would argue it is basically utterly irrelevant compared to advancing technology which drags forward all of humanity, willing or not.

And yet more bluntness: civil unrest comes and goes in waves. Sometimes it goes because people get what they wanted, and sometimes because the entire society crumbles and results in another Dark Age. Seeing how what people want typically amounts to bread and circuses, and we have an abundance of both, wouldn't it make more sense to appease the unwashed masses than letting the situation escalate?

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[ganv]

Taking us back to the original post. Jobs for people with training in computer science and biology usually pay pretty well. The problem is that they require extensive training and society has a hard time prioritizing education to provide the training people need.

I wouldn't go to computer science or biology today. Both are oversaturated with people thinking they are the ticket to a great career. I would look at applied physics and some of the science based engineering disciplines. A new science and computation based approach to mechanical, aerospace, civil, and chemical engineering is changing the world. Bioengineering and environmental engineering are growing rapidly. If you can build the math and computer skills to make it, those are the big growth areas of the 21st century. Molecular biology is really really complicated. Messing with it usually does more harm than good. So I suspect the pharmaceutical industry is not a growth area for the next century. And the phalanxes of post-docs sorting out the pathways regulating each gene are going to soon find that the details they unearth are usually not relevant. Sure that gene is involved in cancer risk...but what are you going to do about it if the network is so complicated that external modification messes up too many other parts of cell function. (Just like everything is made of quarks and electrons, but we don't use quantum chromodynamics for engineering, everything in biology depends on molecular biology but molecular biology isn't that useful.) While everyone focuses on biology with dreams of improving health, science based tools for materials science and fabrication are changing the world. Now if only we could solve some political problems so we could train a few billion people to join the effort...

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[luis_a_espinal]

In this economy, you're better off without a job than you would be with a lot of the jobs that are offered...

I know a few unemployed people who will be happy to tell you that you are just talking out of your ass. Seriously, who the hell could possibly believe such a blatant falsehood?

Re:You can always trust Google

[codeAlDente]

Yes, and perhaps "stop all this nonsense complaining about all the wars that make a few super rich people even richer, and look, this new thing is shiny!"

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[phantomfive]

Hey, I thought you might be interested in this

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[erapert]

A far greater number of people are currently dealing with or will eventually deal with cancer than are living in their cars.
Also, to get extreme, it's possible to live in a mud hut and eat berries without dying. Cancer is terminal without treatment.

lol

[superwiz]

from the article: "The best place to keep your information is Google". Even if that's true at this very moment, what happens when a new pharaoh comes (who did not know Joseph)? Without a committed legal regime which makes it dangerous for public officials to spy on private citizens without a cause, this promise is as meaningful as a politician's election promises. It's backed by nothing.

We don't have the maturity to use the tech we have

[Atrox666]

All our computers and phones are spying on us. We haven't even got enough enlightenment and wisdom to use agriculture, banking systems and gun powder to make the world anything but a worse place to live. As soon as pervasive automation takes hold we'll probably mothball most of our population and just give them enough to get by through some minimum income situation.

Re:Eric? Politics can & has killed people.

[ultranova]

Germany essentially does not have long term debt or unfunded liabilities of consequence because they know the effect from their post WW1 collapse.

Germany is doing well because it's the strongest economy in the Euro which is set up so that wealth flows there from everyone else. Whether that was the plan all along or just the result of economic fundamentalism I can't say, but it's taking the whole EU towards disintegration, at which point Europe will return to being the warzone it used to be - and that means Germany, as the strongest nation here, is going to end up making another error of judgement and subsequently burned to the ground again sooner or later.

In other words, Germany is just as dumb as the rest of them, it just manifests in different ways.

Re: Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a se

[dgatwood]

It isn't that politics needs to go away, but rather that politics needs to focus on providing direction (translation: funding) for technological solutions to the problems. For example, I've been saying for about the last fifteen years that we need to stop wasting time arguing about abortion, for two reasons:

• Politicians don't really want to change things in either direction; they just want to use it as a way of scaring the voters into voting for them, which makes it a moot point.
• The right to life and the right to choose are orthogonal. A mother keeping a child growing inside her and the child's survival are, in fact, independent of one another. The only reason our society thinks that these two positions are contradictory is that we've been trained by politicians to see them as contradictory.

More significantly, the only reason our country isn't spending money to actually solve the underlying false dependency is that politicians have kept us so focused on the bogus debate that we haven't even noticed that the debate is moot. Right now, several teams of scientists (mostly outside the U.S.) are steadily working on developing artificial womb technology. When they get it fully working, it will be possible to quite literally transfer a placenta and embryo from the mother into an artificial incubator and grow it to term. That means no more contradiction, and no more need for this pointless and completely inefficacious debate.

Think about it. With science, we can be in favor of allowing a woman to choose to not have a baby while still being in favor of protecting the child's right to life. Technology can eliminate the entire reason for all that useless bickering that won't ever change anything anyway, all while opening up new possibilities for people who for whatever reason are unable to have children naturally. And once we have that technology, a ban on abortion won't even raise eyebrows, because there won't be any rational reason to kill a child when you can just as easily give it up for adoption in the first trimester.

People Ignore Politics Already

[avandesande]

Not enough people vote, pay attention to or understand the politics of this country.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[XxtraLarGe]

Different problems for different people to solve, neither should be ignored.

What if the "transformative technology" you're working on is captive to "petty politics"?

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[bluefoxlucid]

First red flag:

I think that a UBI is our only hope to deal with a coming labor market unlike any in human history and that it represents our best hope to revitalize American civil society.

This makes me expect an "Automation is going to permanently eliminate jobs and we are entering an age of the end of work" argument. Automation is more of the same technical progress that's continued since man learned to sharpen spears to hunt more effectively; it has some attributes in common with the Industrial Revolution, which means we should look for and control the particular danger of sudden rapid transition--that is, sudden loss of lots of employment all at once; high-unemployment markets have difficulty recovering.

We are approaching a labor market in which entire trades and professions will be mere shadows of what they once were. I’m familiar with the retort: People have been worried about technology destroying jobs since the Luddites, and they have always been wrong. But the case for “this time is different” has a lot going for it.

And there it is.

Failure is here:

When cars and trucks started to displace horse-drawn vehicles, it didn’t take much imagination to see that jobs for drivers would replace jobs lost for teamsters, and that car mechanics would be in demand even as jobs for stable boys vanished. It takes a better imagination than mine to come up with new blue-collar occupations that will replace more than a fraction of the jobs (now numbering 4 million) that taxi drivers and truck drivers will lose when driverless vehicles take over.

Answer: Anything which requires any amount of human labor to produce--including the human labor required to produce and maintain the machines, to operate the machines, to manage the logistics, to supply fuel and electricity, to market, to maintain those self-driving cars, and to sell at retail outlets--will have a non-zero price. Our ability to buy those things will lead to buying more things and more-complex things, with the amount we spend increasing as more human labor is required in total to make those things. That means jobs.

Which jobs? What jobs? I don't know. All I know is if I'm buying something, somebody is involved in making it. Until we fully-automate the production of energy--including every activity involved in building, powering, and operating the factories, right down to mining, to painting the ships, all of it--electricity (and oil, solar panels, or whatever power source we're using) will have a cost. Everything that moves will have a cost. Everything that we use will have a cost. Those costs are jobs.

To envision that there won't be jobs, I have to envision that the average consumer has piled up more money than they can spend, ever.

Advances in 3-D printing and “contour craft” technology will put at risk the jobs of many of the 14 million people now employed in production and construction.

Buildings and 3D-printed objects will become cheaper than alternatives; we'll build more of these, and we'll build more-complex versions, invoking additional labor. Some of the labor displaced will go on to producing other products--some of those may even be 3D-printed products that didn't exist before, or which were rich-people luxuries and now are common goods (cell phones made by the technological processes used in 1983 would cost $9,000 today, for example, which should tell you why none of your friends had a cell phone in 1989).

The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare.

Unnecessary risk. Medicare and medicaid are left alone in my plan because covering old people

Re:Bill Clinton doesn't agree

[Anonymous Coward]

NAFTA - lets ship our jobs overseas and let in cheap labor here.

Universal Healthcare - Failed but turned into what we affectionately call Obamacare. Rates went up anyway. Maybe because it was called HillaryCare it failed. It is setting up to be ~10-15% tax on everyone who earns money in the middle class. You think your employer is going to pay for that? They just pass the cost onto you with a smaller raise (if you get one).

Commodity Futures Modernization Act - removed much of the barriers in banks to make home ownership more affordable. It also created 2 financial bubbles so far (1999 and 2008). Looks to be setting up a 3rd.

People like to pretend that the president does not do much. But many of their actions take years to unfold. At first it is all sunshine and roses. Until someone figures out there is money to be made gaming these new byzantine systems setup by the gov.

Still wrong

[SuperKendall]

To also be very blunt, technical advance doesn't create a bright future

Yes, it does. Hard to argue with progress that has been made on all fronts. It's also hard to untwine one technical advancement from all others...

unless you can get its fruits into the hands of people.

Since people make them, they are inherently in the hands of people. But it does not even matter if no-one ends up using it because of the tangental benefits of advancement and new ideas spreading to other fields.

To continue being blunt, Silicon Valley is neither self-sufficient nor a fortress.

That's not blunt, that's being obvious. Of course they are not - but they are CLOSE ENOGUH for the moment, and if that changed technical work would simply shift location. And it's only one location...

Should civil order break down, it's not going to be Galt's Gulch, it's going to be a tomb

I fully agree with what you are saying about what happens to those places in the event of real civil downfall.

But I disagree it matters by and large to the technical elite, which will have been long gone before it gets truly disastrous (even for the EMP over SF scenario). It's also not a danger Not for the ideas and technical work, which is highly distributed.

Sometimes it goes because people get what they wanted, and sometimes because the entire society crumbles and results in another Dark Age.

Each Dark Age is progressively less dark because of advancements in technology, and there are LOTS of technical people prepared for such a thing to come to pass.

Just look at places like Venezuela - totally disintegrating, yet because of advances in technology people can still live there in vastly more comfort than places like Botswana when IT disintegrated.

In the end, people are just the expendable rocket fuel consumed by the advancement of technology and that is OK. As an individual it might be wise to prepare for the waves though.

in an interview said

[edittard]

in an interview said

Did he in German speak? Or perhaps he Yoda impersonated?

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[Pfhorrest]

Party A: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.
Party B: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.

FTFY.

Both major parties want more government control, it's just what they want control of and what they could care less about that differs.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[edittard]

You seem to be extrapolating from the past into the future. Isn't that what caused the bubble that caused the crash?

Translation:

[axewolf]

"Stop bitching you brainless slaves, when you're not working for me you better keep your stupid fucking head in the sand"

Re:A computing "renaissance"? What the fuck?!

[epyT-R]

Yeah and what will that likely be used for? To predict human behavior in order to preempt behavior of individual humans. This will make it easier to cajole them back onto the treadmill.

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[painandgreed]

All politics is someone's morality.

I would counter that most politics, and most morality, is actually someone's economics. People seem to rarely follow a policy or a morality that they think will not somehow make them money.

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[tburkhol]

Rich people invest in transformative tech innovation. Poor people don't.

Rich people invest in rent-seeking. Poor people figure out new ways to do stuff. Like Elon Musk, who turned $30k into a $300M internet-Fodor's, then turned that into an internet prepaid credit-card. Or like Eric Schmidt, who worked his way from public high school to chief of Alphabet.

OK, maybe not poor poor, but technical revolutions are not started by some rich dude looking for something interesting to do with his money. Once you're rich, your main concern becomes staying rich. Technical revolutions are started by relatively ordinary people doing something interesting, then going out and borrowing money from some rich dude.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[tomhath]

People living in their cars don't effect that problem.

Re: FUCK EUROPE

[rickb928]

If so, then their economics are really really irrational, if not totally dysfunctional.

Re:FUCK EUROPE

[Livius]

Personally I think the politicians keep arguing about toilets

What they do is *avoid* talking about it, quite skilfully, while creating the illusion that they are very passionate about whatever the voters are passionate about.

Probably because as soon as anyone actually started a rational dialogue they'd resolve the conflicts in a matter of minutes, and then they'd have to go back to things that are real problems. You know - their jobs.

Re:Eric? Politics can & has killed people.

[golden_hands]

Well said. The German path leads to more corporatism and disintegration of the EU and everything else they have actually achieved over the last 50 years to 70 years.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[phantomfive]

You'll never find someone who agrees with you completely on an issue like UBI because different people have different goals, which will lead them to different conclusions.
And I think I was right you enjoyed the article. :)

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[bluefoxlucid]

Extrapolating from the past into the future is called "planning", and it can be done horribly wrong. Eating can be done horribly wrong, too, by eating too much, eating poisonous things, or shoving the fork through your eye.

Re:Eric? Can you come out of the ivory tower a sec

[bluefoxlucid]

It's more that I disagree with them in the same way you might disagree that drinking juiced hemlock and belladonna would be good for your health.

Eric hasn't much talent, and not sure what value

[Lord_Hastur]

googel adds? many search out there droid is probably less good than ubuntu phone iphone sucks