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White House: US Needs a Stronger Social Safety Net To Help Workers Displaced by Robots (recode.net)
The White House has released a new report warning of a not-too-distant future where artificial intelligence and robotics will take the place of human labor. Recode highlights in its report the three key areas the White House says the U.S. government needs to prepare for the next wave of job displacement caused by robotic automation: -- Fund more research in robotics and artificial intelligence in order for the U.S. to maintain its leadership in the global technology industry. The report calls on the government to steer that research to support a diverse workforce and to focus on combating algorithmic bias in AI.
-- Invest in and increase STEM education for youth and job retraining for adults in technology-related fields. That means offering computer science education for all K-12 students, as well as expanding national workforce retraining by investing six times the current amount spent to keep American workers competitive in a global economy.
-- Modernize and strengthen the federal social safety net, including public health care, unemployment insurance, welfare and food stamps. The report also calls for increasing the minimum wage, paying workers overtime and and strengthening unions and worker bargaining power.
The report says the government, meaning the the incoming Trump administration, will have to forge ahead with new policies and grapple with the complexities of existing social services to protect the millions of Americans who face displacement by advances in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. The report also calls on the government to keep a close eye on fostering competition in the AI industry, since the companies with the most data will be able to create the most advanced products, effectively preventing new startups from having a chance to even compete.
-- Invest in and increase STEM education for youth and job retraining for adults in technology-related fields. That means offering computer science education for all K-12 students, as well as expanding national workforce retraining by investing six times the current amount spent to keep American workers competitive in a global economy.
-- Modernize and strengthen the federal social safety net, including public health care, unemployment insurance, welfare and food stamps. The report also calls for increasing the minimum wage, paying workers overtime and and strengthening unions and worker bargaining power.
The report says the government, meaning the the incoming Trump administration, will have to forge ahead with new policies and grapple with the complexities of existing social services to protect the millions of Americans who face displacement by advances in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. The report also calls on the government to keep a close eye on fostering competition in the AI industry, since the companies with the most data will be able to create the most advanced products, effectively preventing new startups from having a chance to even compete.
It's called education, and self motivation. Unfortunately, we seem to be lacking in those qualities as a nation these days and the more nimble and aggressive third world countries are hammering it home. This is a problem that the free market could easily solve, given an opportunity to do so.
Citizens beware of the pending doom brought on by mad-scientists creating an army of robots that will take away your jobs, raise your children, sex your wife, and transport themselves in flying cars.
You must be prepared to be coddled by your government in order to survive. It is only by further relinquishing your free will and self motivation that you will flourish.
This is all, carry on.
We need to end college for all and replace it with an more trades like system where you don't need 2-4+ years of class room to get a job with an 20-60K+ loan.
and / or change college accreditation so that tech / trade schools get more respect and make it so that colleges can update there Curriculum faster with less bs like.
Accreditation prioritizes the wrong things. Historically, accreditation has focused on things like how many professors have PhDs, whether a college has a mission statement, and whether degree programs require a broad, general education as well as a specific major. Critics, including Margaret Spellings, the education secretary under President George W. Bush, have argued this misses an important point: whether students are learning. Most accreditors now require colleges to define the outcomes they want for their students and measure whether they're meeting them, but it gives colleges a lot of leeway on what those outcomes are.
Also make the loans be discharged in Bankruptcy so that the school and banks have skin in the game.
The report also calls for increasing the minimum wage, paying workers overtime and and strengthening unions and worker bargaining power.
Lifting the cost of humans isn't going to help them compete against machines.
"Invest in and increase STEM education for youth and job retraining for adults in technology-related fields. That means offering computer science education for all K-12 students, as well as expanding national workforce retraining..."
There's a valid reason we don't have a massive surplus of neurosurgeons or nuclear fission experts. The field of STEM takes brainpower.
A lot of jobs that will be replaced first by automation are not exactly jobs that are mentally challenging, so they are rather fitting for a certain portion of the general populous. That's not meant to be a derogatory statement, it's simply stating fact. You can't expect to shove the entire field of displaced laymen into a STEM curriculum and expect everyone to actually succeed, and yet that appears to be the grand plan here. Toss advanced mathematics against little Johnnys brain all you want, but if he doesn't get it then he's likely never gonna get it. Mental capacity varies from human to human. Always has, always will.
I'd also love to hear what the master plan is for human employment once AI comes along and starts doing STEM better than any human could ever dream.
In the end this political pandering really won't matter. The disease of Greed will ultimately win. Those in control wouldn't have it any other way.
What legacy? I will admit that he was handed a crappy deck when he got into office, and that the reinvestment act did help. However, what he needed to do is stop the giant sucking sound and stop businesses from moving manufacturing to China and knowledge work to India, leaving nothing but McJobs behind in most of the country. Instead, Obama presided over more gun control laws passed in three years that ever were passed in the history of the nation (which has caused crime to rise.), a healthcare plan that insurance companies used to their advantage (I know people who are single paying $500 more a month than in 2010), a Chamberlain-esque foreign policy which caused a power vacuum and gave us Daesh (with enemy attacks on US soil every month or two in their name), and allies, for the first time since WWII, have been left to their own devices to fend for themselves, with broken promises of protection or help.
Of course, the Dems point at Wall Street and cheer. Those numbers mean jack shit for the average person because that wealth flies overseas never to be seen in the US again. In reality, unemployment is still high. Even the tech sector jobs are tenous at best. You have to completely reinvent yourself every 6-12 months or you are on your ass. Don't know what kubernates, terraform, or the platform of the hour is? Better learn now before you have to learn while unemployed.
As it stands now, there is arguments on who gets the share of the pie, but Obama's policies have caused the pie to shrink for everyone involved with the biggest disparity between rich and poor in the nation's history. You can't run a country on service jobs and expect it to survive. You also can't contract out a military's items to foreign companies and expect it to work (like US planes to India.)
The US government did this during the 1930-40s using the WPA project. It employed millions and you probably use the stuff they built every day without knowing it.
So its the fault of "I'm going to build a wall and stop illegal immigration" that we have more illegal immigrants?
Schrodinger's immigrant:
Simultaneously takes your job and is too lazy to work.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
the problem is people like you only see education as a means to an end, that end being a job.
but education is its own end in its own right.
the ability to get a job from it should be seen as a bonus, not the goal.
we've taken the reality that certain jobs require an education and turn it into "the only reason education is important is employability".
that is a perversion and it will be our downfall.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
the problem with safety nets is that eventually they becom hammocks.
The guy who worked a deal, by making a phone call, to save 1000 jobs at Carrier is the one who doesn't care. While the CURRENT president who couldn't be bothered to make that call at ANY TIME before was too busy playing golf?
You also are delusional. I don't think its possible to have adult discussions on relevant topics with liberals anymore. You all are literally making shit up that is the complete opposite of what we see.
Trump is for more illegal immigration according to you.
Trump doesn't care about keeping jobs in the US according to you.
The literal TOP TWO things he campaigned on and has already done something about without even being inaugurated yet. Yet you support Obama, who has been in charge for EIGHT years and hasn't done anything about these issues that you say are important to you.
Yes, Trump's election is now obvious. I don't see how anyone could have doubted his win at this point. Just listen to a liberal blame a guy not in charge of anything for what their hero has failed to do for 2 terms. You all are completely insane.
And? The rich have been lounging in gilded hammocks built by the poor for millenia, why shouldn't the poor get in on the action as well?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
what happens when that jumps to 15% or higher?
Slums and shanties will crop up/grow bigger. I don't see any kind of 'safety net' helping those people out. You're the US, and helping people is commie bullshit.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Purpose, probably useful, sure, I however do not understand why purpose seems to equal payed labour to you (and lots of other people). Are you suggesting voluntary work, or just being social to your neighbor has no purpose? I use these examples, because it is not certain that people even have the capability to always find "more meaningful" work if the "repetitive menial" labour has been automated. And why stop there? I suggest we are entirely capable of automating even "more meaningful" work. And then what?
Figuring our what purpose people have, if they do not need to work for basic Income, is one of the goals of experimenting with it.
The next big hit will be the trucking industry. Everyone thinks Google's self driving cars are pretty cute, right? Fewer accidents, vision impaired people can get to the grocery store, your car can drive your drunk ass home from the bar safely? All good, right?
Two things about that. First thing, they want this for the trucking industry. Don't tell me they're not working on it because they absolutely are. First article, second article.
Second thing. Truck driver is the most popular profession today. First article, second article.
The USA is set to lose 3.5 million jobs, just as soon as we get this tech ironed out. And it doesn't matter who the president is. Trump, Hillary, Vermin Supreme - it'll happen no matter what. It has nothing to do with politics, NAFTA, any of it. It's progress, it's capitalism, and it's going to happen.
People need to look a little farther afield than simple manufacturing to see how automation will affect the economy.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
He used the laws to his advantage while operating a business? Wow, color me surprised.
It's hypocritical for Trump to demand that other companies put America first and then excused himself from doing that himself because everyone else is doing it.
Do you take advantage of any/all tax deductions you can claim? If you do I think that makes you a greedy self serving hypocrite.
Yes. But I'm also not publicly advocating that the rich should pay more in taxes while using the same legal strategies that the rich use to reduce my tax bill.
He used the laws to his advantage while operating a business? Wow, color me surprised.
Not every business owner exploits every person they can to make as much money as possible. There are others who still take advantage of every tax incentive, but vocally lobby politicians to change the rules. Trump on the other hand has done nothing in his life to fix any of the problems be claimed to care about on the campaign trail. It was all just campaign rhetoric; he was just doing what it took to win. While all politicians do this to some extent, you can at least see people like Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton walking the walk in their professional and personal lives. Trump on the other hand is a pure opportunist.
Do you take advantage of any/all tax deductions you can claim?
Yes, but I also vote for candidates who will almost certainly raise my taxes because I think it's the right thing to do. You can play by the rules to ensure you are on an equal playing field as everyone else but still publicly try to promote a better way. Many wealthy people, like Warren Buffet for instance, do just that.
Trump visibly flopped all over the place even during the campaign season because he had no convictions backing up any of his positions. He has been vocal during his "thank you tour" that many of his statements were just tried out during campaign rallies and he stuck with the ones which gave the most applause. He is a con man through and through, and unfortunately we currently have a climate where it is very hard for the common person to identify misleading rhetoric or even complete lies.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Yes!
Not-having-to-work (i.e. losing jobs) can be viewed as our goal within all economic systems. No matter where you are on the spectrum of Adam Smith to Karl Marx, our time above-ground is a scarce resource. Every-fucking-thing that is expensive, is ultimately expensive because it used up someone's time, where that person sighed and walked a few more steps toward their dusty, eternal grave, working on your whatever, instead of living their life. The dollars are just a measurement of how much life you asked someone else to give up. It's a count of the grains of sand that fell to the bottom of someone's hourglass.
Jobs are bad. When a politician says he's going to create or save jobs, he is offering you a quicker, more intimately-embracing death. The more he envisions you toiling, the less you should envision yourself skipping through fields, rocking out to great bands, performing science experiments, climbing mountains and skiing down them while drinking Mountain Dew as explosions go off behind you, reading novels, or flying around in starships to go find green-skinned women to bang.
People become truck drivers for the money. If you want to spend your life driving around, there are vastly more pleasant ways to do that than driving a fucking truck. They are ticking down the limited seconds of their life, working instead of doing what they want to do. Good riddance to those jobs.
What should we do about the consequences of increased leisure time, in our legacy-saddled economy? Shit, I didn't say I have all the answers (sounds like Obama is proposing one idea, though). But can't we all at least get to where we agree that it's basically a good thing?!? Until we realize that increased leisure time for humans is a good thing, of course we're not going to figure out how to handle our victory, because we'll be putting all our effort into undoing or preventing it! It's disgraceful that people are using words like "blame" for the lost jobs, instead of "credit."
I'll be happy that my widget didn't cost some trucker (and yay, the trucker wasn't me!) two days of his life to transport, and instead it only cost some maintainer 12 hours to keep the robot running. And then eventually I'll feel bad about those 12 hours of maintenance being too many. Can't a robot maintain that other robot?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Yes, class warfare has been rampant for millenia, and is alive and well today - mostly perpetrated by the rich. Or do you think it's a coincidence that the ratio between the highest and lowest paid employees in large companies has exploded from ~30 to 1 to well over 600 to 1 in the last century?
More to the point, I'm not talking about punishing anyone. The simple truth is that every dollar in a rich person's wallet was put there, directly or indirectly, by a poor person's labor. What is wrong with the poor demanding a larger share of that wealth?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You do realize that BOTH could be going on by different illegal immigrants? If you're going to make a smug comment... better to not be one that makes you look like you have cognitive level of a gold fish.
And you have the sense of humor of a chapped ass. If you cannot get a simultaneous joke relating Schrodinger's cat, and two of the most popular memes about immigrants, then you are in the wrong place.
Funny how the alt right pepe's and the left wing Social Justice Warriors are so damn identical.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.