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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.
Why not just have a bigger army? It'll be needed sooner or late.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nice plan Demoncrats:
1. outsource jobs (NAFTA, etc)
2. bring whole 3rd world into country
3. blame AI (scapegoating)
4. insist workers must pay for whole 3rd world
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.
Obama will issue all sorts of feel-good proclamations and what-have-you between now and 1/20/17, just because it will look good as part of his legacy, which he is busily imagining and crafting. It's a waste of time to afford these any real discussion. He's not serious about any of this stuff at this point, why should we be?
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.
Easy. Just become President of the US.
but no one trained to do them. So instead of improving our educational system, POTUS wants to pay people to do nothing. Yikes! And by improving our educational system, I do not mean throwing Federal dollars at it. We already have the most expensive system in the world with pitiful results. CrankyOldEngineer believes that any child can and should learn math and science, if we hire teachers that are qualified to tech these subjects. By jobs that need doing, I do not mean current openings on the want-ads. The human race needs doctors, engineers, and all kinds of skilled people, but we've created incentives for the wrong professions.
COE
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.
Let's not have more people on the dole, please. We need a better answer than that.
I remember, years ago, some African ambassador was touring government housing in the UK. I suppose he was supposed to be impressed that unemployed people got houses for free from the oh-so-generous government. His comment at the end of the tour was something like "How soul deadening, these people have no purpose in life. I'd rather be poor.". Coming from an African who knew what poverty was, it was a powerful indictment of social safety nets.
People need a purpose in life. If we are going to be displaced from our jobs, then we need a different purpose. Being freed from repetitive, menial labor should allow us to do something more meaningful. Just putting ever more listless people into a lifelong holding pattern is not the right answer.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Those are all good objectives and policies, but it doesn't seem to address the issue at hand: not all people can do jobs that require "advanced" training. Roughly 10% of the US workforce is effectively unemployable today: what happens when that jumps to 15% or higher?
You effectively have two options that I see to support this ever increasing population: subsistence living (barter, hunt, scavenge), or wealth transfer. Rural people seem to prefer the former, while urban folks prefer the latter. Not sure if either is sustainable.
It's catching people who write these (and other) stupid prediction stories.
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
"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.
Ok lets start funding it by cutting the lifetime "retirement" checks of the President and Congress
Obama did absolutely nothing in 8 years and it shows.
Mitch McConnell saw to that, didn't he?
But the reality is that we are no closer to "AI" than we were in 1960. And the robots that might displace workers are incredibly lame. Robots are good for some tasks, like assembly line welding, but useless for other tasks like assembling Ikea furniture.
Bush legacy: 2008 USA GDP: $14.7186 trillion, EU GDP $19.02 trillion (EU dwarfs US economy)
Obama legacy: 2016 USA GDP of $18.56 trillion, EU GDP $16.97 trillion (USA dwarfs EU economy)
"Chamberlain-esque foreign policy which caused a power vacuum and gave us Daesh...." blah blah blah... lots of words, and fuck all reality. An enemy so weak it's reduced to cutting people's heads off one by one because he has no major weapons. More people choke on burgers.
Trump future legacy: Strip away the lies about his businesses, and he's a bankrupt crook running an investment ponzi scheme. Good luck with that lying sack of unelected shit. But hey, a muslim, BE AFRAID AND DON'T QUESTION why Trump just asked Deutsche bank for yet another extension on a bridge loan.
If some task is automatable, it will get automated. There's no way we can stop that. Not that we should, as it is not a bad thing in itself, mind you.
The problem coming is the concentration of production power, meaning that a tiny fraction of the population will be capable of producing almost all the goods. How is the rest of the population going to bargain? When a few have the factories and access to capital and resources, what can I offer in exchange for bread? My work alone, which is what most of us hev been trading with, will not be enough anymore.
So, if automation is good, but concentration is bad, what we (as a society) should do is prevent concentration of automatas. Let's forbid that automatas belong to legal persons, and only allow them to be owned by people. Induestries can get automated as much as you want, but the benefits from this will not create a social divide between owners and populace.
Great plan Einstein. Meet the challenge of manual labor being replaced by automation by putting more people into manual labor. What could possibly go wrong.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
It will one day be said, "It started with McDonald's." The question is, will we be there to hear it, or will it be a robot's contemplation of their evolutionary predecessor.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Sure. And the pain for the replaced workers was probably pretty high, but in each case it was a small part of the economy, and changes were relatively gradual in the grand scheme of things.
I think we're on the cusp of an unpresidented [sic, lol] change right now. We're not talking about replacing one part of one industry at a time, we're facing the elimination of a huge amount of manual labour. And beyond that, we're facing the replacement of a whole swath of "intellectual" tasks. Sure, there will probably still be jobs at the top. But we don't need to lose all jobs before it becomes a huge factor in society. US unemployment peaked at 10% in 2009, and that was pretty much economic armageddon. Automation could easily cause a similar rate or higher.
And I should add that none of this is necessarily a bad thing. Society has always adapted, and I'm sure we will again. But we will make the transition a whole lot more pleasant if we think about it ahead of time and plan for it.
"White House: US Needs a Stronger Social Safety Net To Help Horse Shoe Makers Displaced by Automobiles"
Just shut the hell up....mod redundant.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
I've always thought that temporary, transient measures make a lot of sense to alleviate the problems faced by workers in a transitioning industry, to be financed either by mayor players in it or by the government (financed by taxes to the mayor players in the industry), and consisting of early retirements, training in new procedures, or temporal subsidies to the dying industries so that they can adapt. The really bad companies would disappear anyway, but many others could find a way to survive in a new niche, without their workers having to file for bankruptcy.
A smooth transition will benefit society as a whole much more than the recession produced by the economic crash of the failing companies. Had luddites have a safety net, they wouldn't have done the machine-being that have them a bad name.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
It's funny how these things go from a few "wackos" talking about robots taking over manufacturing, to the US government actually acknowledging there may be a problem with the system sooner than we think. I do think people are trying to lay the groundwork now, to minimize the negative effects. I could imagine some pretty bad methods of "population control" to use a euphemistic term if we tried to carry over the current system with majority unemployment being the norm.
Of course, this is a parting shot from the outgoing administration -- given Trump's cabinet picks, I foresee some pretty nasty congressional fights and an eventual dismantling of most social programs. The Social Security system may be handed over to hedge funds and banks for safe keeping, Meidicare may become a voucher system that just enriches the insurance companies, and what little welfare there is left may be taken away. I'm happy the current administration is getting it on the record that we've been warned...it could be an interesting historical footnote or maybe a wake-up call.
The fact is that even though "AI" isn't nearly as thrilling as the pundits claim, it is good enough at this point to displace a huge number of very vulnerable people. People aren't working assembly line or fast food jobs because they love the work...they're doing it because it's the only thing they're capable of. That's the first problem -- a lot of people are poorly educated, and a great number of those won't benefit from additional education resources getting thrown at them. Median IQ is 100 -- there's a lot of people at or below that. Unless you want to start engineering society to model "Brave New World," you either need to find something for these people to do, or allow them to do nothing and stop complaining.
The next iteration is what I'm worried about -- professionals could easily have their roles reduced. Doctors and lawyers are a good example -- most of medical and law school is designed to select for people with photographic memories and dump volumes of information into their brains. When that knowledge doesn't need to be kept in someone's brain anymore, the status of the professional holding it is reduced. Same thing goes for IT -- I'm in systems architecture so I'm designing stuff and coming up with procedures, and it's obvious where things are headed. Hands-on IT work is almost at the point where we just need to tell someone to plug in cables, remove hard drives, etc. Development is moving offshore and increasingly done as a series of pre-formed code components and microservices. Note that this also goes for almost every office job out there too. Working in corporate IT, I see so many generic C-strudent business majors from Big State University performing an updated version of a 40 year old process. It sounds like a good idea to increase productivity by automating and replacing them, but I haven't lost sight of the fact that these people are having kids, buying products and living in communities. Take them out, and no one's around to buy the things your company is making in their fully automated factories.
Lots of people are saying this will never happen and that anyone who suggests it will is a Luddite. Maybe so, but I don't see anywhere for most workers to go -- there's no retraining for jobs that don't exist in the modern AI world. It's going to require a radical rethinking of how we define work, wealth, etc. And if it isn't done very carefully, it will lead to a very bad end. Imagine the uproar when you tell everyone that the retirement savings they worked for all their lives won't need to be saved up by future generations, or that we have to enact more social safety programs for the 80% and rising unemployed people out there. If this is done badly, it will lead to the owners of businesses hoarding everything for themselves or calls to control the population in certain ways.
Obama had a Democratic super-majority in both the House and Senate, until they passed the "Affordable Heathcare act", and the People massacred them in the mid-term elections.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
We've heard this before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I think it's imperative that we bring the term "cybernation" back into everyday use.
Because their factories are making card too fast for the market to bear (and presumably dropping the price would result in lower profit overall). So yeah, it's already happening.
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You effectively have two options that I see to support this ever increasing population: subsistence living (barter, hunt, scavenge), or wealth transfer.
Well if Trump actually decreases criminality in the cities, there will not be as much bartering, hunting and scavenging.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
What you mean is, you succesfully prevented him from doing anything for 8 years. Well done
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
Nope, doesn't make more sense second time around. Sorry. Try posting it a third time.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
In this country. We can't all be highly educated office workers. What the hell do you think would happen to your wages if even 10 million more people competed for your job? What you're suggesting is that people pull themselves up by their boot straps. What you're ignoring is that is literally physically impossible.
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Those workers who are displaced by robots can just do like the others that made Obamas economy, "Great".
They can use up their unemployment and then not work at all. Just go out and, "Pursue their dreams". That way they will not be unemployed. They will just be part of an alternative way of life.
I could be wrong though. Permanent unemployment benefits all the people that want it should be a great way to make things work.
Fucking Idiots
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
"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."
I call BS on this one. The two companies with arguably the most data anyone has ever accumulated in history are both incapable of producing new products, despite the fact that they know everything about everyone.
Google's only innovation was its advertising platform. It's a cash cow. That cash and the data in its search/mail systems has failed to yield anything new and innovative beyond incremental improvements in search.
Facebook's only innovation was leveraging privilege to build a social network. Remember the early days where it was just limited to Harvard students and then a few other universities and then finally everyone else? That was a brilliant strategy to create artificial scarcity to build demand. They also leveraged that time of limited users to fine tune the platform and create a social network that was generally acceptable to a broad user base. Since then, they've made a ton of money and collected a lot of data (granted, it's mostly people's family pictures and political rants) but haven't done anything innovative.
Innovation will always come from the small disrupters. Both companies made their innovative moves when they were small.
-Chris
Great plan Einstein. Meet the challenge of manual labor being replaced by automation by putting more people into manual labor. What could possibly go wrong.
What do you suppose the timeline is for automation to replace plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, carpenters, masons, and painters?
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.
3 types, you forgot the people insightful enough to buy stock in the companies that purchase the robots to make the "obscene profits" that they will share in through dividends. Wait for it, "But you have to be rich to buy stock, only the Rich get richer", sorry that's just loser thinking that you've been programmed to think to keep you poor, vulnerable and easy to manipulate. Sure some stocks are quite pricey making buy-in all but impossible for most of us worker-driods, but there are always Mutual funds and 401Ks. If even those are out of your budget you can form a stock club, just follow these instructions and where it says lottery, just substitute stock.
Who knows, maybe if the Democrats don't ass-rape you too bad with capital-gains taxes, there might even be some left over for your kids when you die!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
jobs that a monkey can do (plumbing, carpentry, drywall, yada yada)
I'm guessing you've never tried to do any of those, except yada yada.
Here is an article on the other side of the argument.
tldr: article suggests safety net disrupts market reorganization in these scenarios by removing incentive to relocate and/or retrain, leading to multi-generational poverty
http://reason.com/archives/201...
Wreck the economy to the point that it's cheaper to ship jobs overseas.
Have local workers demand exorbitantly high wages (I don't get out of bed to flip burgers for less than fifteen dollars!).
Employers respond predictably by cutting hours and automating where they can...
Now the administration wants to carebear people displaced by automation.
Never mind that they're the assholes that ultimately CAUSED this shit to happen.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Or turn to crime and rob and murder people like you.
I think that, the new round of automation will kill a lot of jobs, that the those jobs that will disappear won't be replaced by new unexisting jobs.
Replacing jobs like taxi driver, truck drivers and related to driving transport machines is worrisome cause they represent a lot of the currently unskilled jobs available.
Also, replacing fast food restaurant workers will have a massive impact, even if these jobs are low quality jobs but they represent entry level and a way to get at least some basic income.
This will have a big impact, mostly cause what we do for a living is not only a way to provide our material needs but also our status.
Having a large percentage of the population with no possibility of getting a job, no income, and no status, it is a sure way for society to degenerate.
This will bleed into the middle classes, while the "safe" jobs get snuffed, like medical doctor, lawyer and others. Doesn't mean there won't be a need for them, it is just that will need less not more.
Now, think what a person that doesn't have any means to provide for themselves, what will they do?
- We, can expect a big increase in drugs consumption of the potent type, and alcohol.
- Sex industry would grow.
- Steady growth of petty crime, and possibility of high civil unrest.
- Systemic collapse of infrastructure.
- Breakdown in social cohesion, and morals will be either very loose or very strict.
Given the current political biases that complain against people living on welfare, at same time their solution is to time warp into the 19th century and privatize everything.
I find that libertarians, conservatives, neo-liberals and liberals are tottally out of tune with reality, there is a complacent ignorance of history, a tunnel vision that prevents any sensible action outside of a narrow field of interests.
Keynes was right when he said: "The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." and "Ideas shape the course of history."
Some of us aren't so empty that we can't find better things to do than work all day. A factory job or digging ditches or cleaning house for the well to do is just as soul deadening of you ask me. I could be writing games or music or my little toy apps or reading or cycling any I of a dozen cool things besides making somebody else rich.
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As soon as Lawyers and Doctors can't get jobs the government will realize it's an issue. Until then it is just a lazy person issue.
And why is it not sustainable? Because the greedy business owner who owns that assembly line wants to keep all of that $75K for himself?
This is what I don't get about business owners. They complain bitterly about "crippling regulations" and "job killing policies" but they're immeasurably better off than people they employ. Regulations are not expensive to comply with. Spending a few extra minutes filling out paperwork once a year isn't going to kill your business. Paying for reasonable worker safety equipment isn't going to bankrupt you. And, if paying employees a reasonable wage will bankrupt you, then you shouldn't be in business. I have absolutely no sympathy for wealthy restaurant owners making huge profits, then claiming that they can't pay someone $15 an hour. Business owners benefit from tax loopholes that wage owners can only dream of...they pay significantly less tax percentage-wise than individuals. Big companies pay zero or get refunds. The minimum wage complainers earn double an average employee's hourly salary on the first restaurant check, and the amount they pay in salary is tax-deductible as cost of goods sold.
Obama who was the first president since Eisenhower to win consecutive elections with 51% of the vote and more popular than the incoming president-elect? Yeah, a total failure.
"Modernize and strengthen the federal social safety net". Do they imply they are going to just change it, or actually pay more welfare to more people? And like fast food chain leaders have already said "If you raise the minimum wage, we replace the people with robots". I imagine if you are going to actually increase welfare spending, you (the US government) are going to need to just borrow more money. Perhaps a few hundreds of trillions from China to fund it, with a deal that says it's due to start being payed down after 2100. Where the premise is that future technologies will enable massive savings and generate massive incomes, so that by 2100 paying back those trillions over the next decades will be easy enough.
AccountKiller
Just read Marshall Brain's Manna again. not great prose but a clever short story about exactly this.
It's a shame Australia is already occupied or we hold just ship them all their like the British did during the early industrialization. Maybe this is what the Mars Express people have in mind.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Will he try to build a wall around robots?
Table-ized A.I.
Another limp DOA idea saying "RETRAIN EVERYONE INTO STEM!"
As the soon to former Disney IT workers already know, training is not part of the balance sheet.
So onlong as a country exists with cheaper labor and government puppets of the oligarchy who place profiteering as the only goal, workers from "advanced" countries have little future. Tariffs where meant to level the playing field against countries with no labor laws, no intellectual property laws, no environment laws, no health and safety laws and government covered health care. Hiding behind the veneer of "globalism" and "anti-protectionism" only protects the wealthy, not the people.
Not! Quite obviously, millions of humans still don't have enough food to eat. The planet is a giant sludge pit that would take us centuries to clean up, including scooping plastic waste from oceans and scrubbing or counteracting CO2. We might want to establish a beachhead on another planet if that does not work out. The industrialized society with niceties like running water does not exist in most of the world. Population is aging and elderly care is incredibly labor intensive.
Tackling those things will require all human labor that we got, even with maximum use of contemporary automation. Remember too that robots are not environmentally clean to manufacture and operate and anything requiring more than 5 minutes of physical force has to be tethered to a power source.
So why don't we let people of 24th century worry about how to run their Star Trek economy and concern ourselves with doing backbreaking labor required of us today? Not all is best managed by a commercial corporation, and not all challenges are physically located in continental US. But people can vote for governments to undertake public service tasks and travel on ships and airplanes right?
I think that people only tend to pop up and comment when they disagree.
Until I read your comment, I was just sitting back pleasantly surprised to see Obama's office take note of the trend. It didn't occur to me to post "Yes, agree!"
Take off every 'sig' !!
"Invest in and increase STEM education..."
Here's how the political emphasis on increasing STEM graduates is working out at my institution:
- Create a mickey-mouse "quantitative reasoning" class with no algebra content and give college credit for that.
- Remove basic algebra as a general-education requirement, since no more than about 25% of the students can pass it (no matter how many times they take it, how many different instructors teach it, or how easy they make the tests).
- Slash all the higher-level courses out of all the STEM associate's degrees (probably linear algebra, differential equations, calculus III, organic chemistry, etc.), because people should be given credit for math prerequisites like basic algebra, precalculus, trigonometry, etc. instead.
This being the culmination of the CUNY Decade of Science.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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
Litter cleanup, child-care (for parents with full-time jobs), elder-care, landscaping and gardening of public buildings and land, jury duty, local organic community farm, neighborhood security patrol (monitor only), QA gov't documents, monitoring legislators...
There are plenty of tasks that could be done, but it's difficult to justify the expenditures for such under the current economy setups we use.
Perhaps we need more "work-fare". You get a check from the gov't, but you have to spend 3 days a week on one of the designated tasks.
Yes it is "make work", but it's work towards a better-quality of society by doing tasks that are useful and wanted, but not necessarily economical by current standards. And it gives people a sense of purpose, community involvement, and maintains a degree of discipline.
We just have to figure out new economic paradigms that allows the benefits and profits from robots to trickle down into society. It will take experiments, some of which may fail. The idea that we can philosophize or write equations sitting in an armchair to figure it all out has to be tossed. The lab is Main Street.
Table-ized A.I.
Popularity isn't a measure of achievement. Being too much of a coward to do anything is often a good way to avoid growing disapproval.
Painters? 10 years. Masons, 10 years. Rough Carpentry us a factory setting, 10 years. The rest are much harder because you need machinery that is effective for those jobs. Repair work for a very long time.
Being too much of a coward to do anything is often a good way to avoid growing disapproval.
Right. Obama played it safe by implementing the Republican health care plan (RomneyCare) instead of the public option. Very cowardly.
You bring all the capital, you assume all the risk, you create jobs, and actually wanting to make a profit for your effort is "greed." Thanks for the clarification, komrade.
$7 million for 1000 jobs over 10 years, about $700 per job per year in a TAX CUT not spending.
I'll note when it was the fad to boast about jobs "created or saved", the Obama administration was routinely bragging about projects that had costs in the tens to several hundred dollars per job per year range (for example, this bragging about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which had $250k spent in stimulus per job "created or saved" for jobs that lasted from a few months to a few years, until the stimulus went away). That's two to three orders of magnitude better than anything the Obama administration does.
-- Fund more research in robotics and artificial intelligence in order for the U.S. to maintain its leadership in the global technology industry.
This is crap. The first country that gets human-like scalable AI wins. Period. It wins the wars. It wins the economic race. It wins everything.
The domain of solvable problems may be limited, but humans will never be able to address it as well as effective AI.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The Luddites really got started in the early 1800's. The full impact of the benefits of mechanization didn't happen for 80 more years. That means a whole lot of Luddites starved to death. A social safety network would have enormously smoothed the transition and prevented untold human suffering. And one more thing; AI is unprecedented in the history of automation. "new jobs have always been created" is not a reason to believe "new jobs will always be created."
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
...a strong, vibrant, open, and fluid economy.
So what's your solution then? Force everyone to work for pennies an hour?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Could not agree more. You're talking about the step-after-the-step, though. In the short term people are going to suffer. Greatly. We don't have an Elon Musk style universal income just yet. But eventually we will. We'll have to - there won't be any other options to keep everyone alive. If you buy food with money, and there aren't jobs to give you money, what other choice would we have? And what good would all those factories be in that case? Nobody would be able to buy all those goods.
From a certain point of view, an economy and it's attendant government is simply a method of distributing goods. I'm not saying anything new there. Everyone from Smith to Marx says pretty much the same thing, they just disagree on how to proceed. But there is an underlying given in all their proofs though - scarcity. They all assume scarcity. We only have so much food, how best to distribute it? Communism? Capitalism? Something in-between?
All of those arguments though are outdated. Automation is about to eliminate scarcity. The old arguments will go along with it, since a foundational principle of them will suddenly be invalid.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I got into a debate with someone on this exact point. I would not be surprised if in the future, fleet vehicles are all there are.
We've seen how successful Uber is, the whole concept of distributed travel. The next logical step with self-driving cars would be a fleet of them maintained by a single corporation similar to Uber. Imagine a phone app that summons a car and a monthly fee like Netflix. Tell me that wouldn't be a smash hit! A monthly fee, about the same price as a car lease payment. No car maintenance, no insurance payments, no stopping at gas stations. No tickets, no parking fees. You can watch Netflix while it drives you to the store, then to your friend's house, then home. Stop by the pub and have a drink, why not? Drunk driving is a thing of the past - you're not driving! And the computer driving is safer than a person could ever be. Humans don't have 360 degree vision or radar.
Press a button and take me anywhere. I'd be the first in line for that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Wait, you believe his major accomplishment as President was being elected? I guess we are all in complete agreement then.
Simply tie the offer of welfare to a sterilization program. Easy.
Wait, you believe his major accomplishment as President was being elected?
Not just elected. But elected with 51% of the votes in consecutive elections. The last president to achieve that was Eisenhower, and before him it was Roosevelt. That alone puts him in the history books.
Hypocrite isn't really as bad a thing as people make it out to be.
People aren't working assembly line or fast food jobs because they love the work...they're doing it because it's the only thing they're capable of.
The level of condescension in your post is pretty sickening. Did you ever consider that some people are stuck in menial jobs not because they're incapable of doing anything else, but rather because it's the only job they could find? No, you didn't. I'm sick of all these UBI discussions revolving around the premise that most people are capable of nothing more than pouring coffee and cleaning the floors. How smug and superior you are.
The left would love if some form of UBI was passed, buying votes with unsustainable entitlements. Just write off all those idiots who are incapable of doing anything but flipping burgers and give them some pittance so that you can feel morally superior.
What comes next? You basically get to dangle entitlements like a carrot to get people to vote for your candidates?
...Americans jobs disappeared, i.e. when cheap goods started flooding in from Mexico and south-east Asia, we didn't see the Whitehouse do much about that. If anything, they cut spending on social security and education. Will it be any different this time around?
The voters saw what he was doing and stopped him. Good on them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How many people actually painted on negatives of films like 'Forbidden Planet'?
Painters drywall, paint and get fucked up on the job. It's what they do.
One of my proudest moments was when a painter asked for something weaker than 'Trainwreck', because he couldn't do his job when smoking it. Made me proud of my garden. That was as high a compliment as the Nam vet that cried, because it was like the stuff they smoked over there.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There are tens of millions of food-insecure people in the US today. We have homeless. We have people who are considered unemployable by the very companies and individuals you are imagining will solve the problem of hunger. We have people not getting adequate medical care. We have huge numbers of seniors living in poverty.
Your statement is self-deluded nonsense. As with most "things would be fine without government / with smaller government" tripe-spouting.
You are cordially invited to come back and say this again when we don't actually need social safety nets. Then your words will mean something (other than the fact that you live in your own echo chamber, and are demonstrably afflicted with either inherent dishonesty or a profound case of cognitive dissonance.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I found your mistaken assumption.
No need to thank me.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Trump wants to bring about the world of Robocop. Strangely, it seems a lot of people seem to want that as well even though odds are they will be some of the first in those shanties.
~X~
Who the hell said "pennies"?
And why does lack of support for exorbitant wages for unskilled jobs always get met with the bullshit "pennies" line?
The main problem is that many of these unskilled jobs where people are demanding high wages simply don't justify those sorts of wages. Nor were they intended to be lifelong careers, regardless of advancement.
And the more people who keep packing into these jobs, and demanding higher wages and essentially a job for life, the sooner these jobs are simply going to disappear behind a robot.
What isn't being acknowledged is that these entry level positions are gateways into career paths BEYOND those jobs. The people working them simply have to have the damn motivation to actually ADVANCE themselves. Rather than "settling" into an unskilled job and expecting it to support a lifestyle.
I'm sorry, this is a land of opportunity. And most people WASTE it.
But hey, it's a free country as well. And people should be free to fail and, if they're too lazy to grow beyond that? They should be free to fucking starve as well.
Cruel and inhuman? Maybe. But I worked my ass off to get where I am. I am sick of having ever more of MY earnings taken to support people who won't (not CAN'T, WON'T) take advantage of their opportunities.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I am not against progress, but there is a social cost that partially offsets the gains. We seem to regard this a collateral damage and want to ignore the people that are hurt in the name of progress.
This. This is exactly what I was trying to say, thank you.
I think the future is going to be wonderful, I really do. I agree with that fellow upstream who thinks that jobs steal your life from you. When we figure out a way to automate everything so that's not the case it will be wonderful. But we have to get there. It won't happen all at once, and some of the intermediate steps will be painful. When trucks become automatic and 3.5 million workers are suddenly unemployed, what then? We won't have a safety net in place yet. What are these poor people going to do in the meanwhile?
When we solve the scarcity problem - and we will - we will need to rethink the entire concept of work and income. I don't think anyone has really done that yet. What happens when the amount of work society needs from you permits you to retire at 25 instead of 68? We need to start planning for that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I agree. The number of dollars spent per job allegedly "created or saved" is bigger for Obama.
It isn't a public option he implemented, it's a way to funnel guaranteed revenue to the health insurance companies. If you think ACA is public health care, you don't know what actual public health care is.
The government still needs to help alleviate the massive joblessness resulting from the loss of the buggy whip industry! Right now, those poor displaced workers are just barely getting by on thankless jobs like software development, movie script writing, game design, biotech, 3D printing, etc.!
get your facts straight.
that was a loan.
the us government made a profit off the deal.
care to try again?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
oh wait, youre not talking about the auto bailout loan, but the FIXING THE ECONOMY thing?
that just makes your claim even stupider tryng to somehow proclaim trump better than obama.
Trump would have to make a carrier type deal every week for 6.5 years to match just the autobailout's jobs saved, let alone the moneys involved.
but stacked up against the whole fixing the economy thing? forget about it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The stock market is a good way to magnify income differences, not shrink them. Stocks cost money, and lots of people simply don't have the money to invest. Wealthier people have more money to invest, and given enough automation the end result is a small number of people owning most of the economy, and not needing to employ most of the rest.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The Senate supermajority was actually rather short, not starting until Franken's election was settled and ending when another Senator (Kennedy?) died.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
$7 million for 1000 jobs over 10 years, about $700 per job per year...
Sounds like we are going to need to build up a new office to give out these $700/yr/worker tax breaks. That's a big undertaking, because I'm sure many businesses will come, hat in hand, looking for a handout from the government. After all, why would Carrier be special? If we favor them, but not others who rattle sabers about shifting jobs overseas, then the government is playing favorites.
I don't often agree with Sarah Palin, but she put it fairly well: "When government steps in arbitrarily with individual subsidies, favoring one business over others, it sets inconsistent, unfair, illogical precedent. [...] Republicans oppose this, remember? Instead, we support competition on a level playing field, remember? Because we know special interest crony capitalism is one big fail.” That's not inconsistent with her earlier statements, she was one of the ones railing against the government "picking winners and losers."
in a TAX CUT not spending
A tax cut IS spending. It reduces the incoming budget receipts but not the rest of government, so this ends up going onto the national debt, just like any other government expenditure (though I believe in this case, it's a state expenditure).
It isn't a public option he implemented, it's a way to funnel guaranteed revenue to the health insurance companies.
Correct. That's the Republican plan formerly known as RomneyCare.
If you think ACA is public health care, you don't know what actual public health care is.
Under the ACA I'm able to buy insurance. Previously, under the "bend over and get ass raped by the insurance companies" plan, I went without insurance for years because it was expensive and provided little in actual coverage. That's the plan Republicans wants everyone to go back to since Obama took a page out of the Clinton playbook and co-opted their agenda.
that was a loan.
You're thinking of TARP.
the us government made a profit off the deal.
Where did the borrowers get the cash flow and profits to pay off the TARP loans? The economy didn't completely collapse, but it did drop in activity by a large amount and those huge liabilities didn't magically vanish. They simply didn't have the money then to pay off those loans and they probably still don't.
But the federal government does have more than enough money running through it to pay off TARP loans. I don't know how those loans were paid off - whether by another loan, purchase of the worst debt, or an outright gift of money, but I know who did it.
And at this point, what does it matter that TARP "made a profit" when the Feds have put a lot more than that into the businesses that originally received TARP funds?
Trump would have to make a carrier type deal every week for 6.5 years to match just the autobailout's jobs saved
The alleged jobs saved. I don't take those numbers seriously. I'm pointing that even when we take those numbers at face value, we're looking at huge costs per job "created or saved". My view is that Trump doesn't need to do a carrier type deal every week. He just needs to undo part of the mess of the last eight years, such as removing the Obama obstructions on oil drilling and pipelines, to give a notorious example or cleaning up the health care mess even a little (for example, removing the incentive to employ people part time).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was almost going to foe you because of your post but then, whenever I might block someone, I look at their journals and other posts.
The first journal, 10 - decade - years ago was about Apple fanbois buying anything with the apple logo.
So I decided not to.
As you can tell I am anti-apple.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
As I said, sorry that's just loser thinking that you've been programmed to think to keep you poor, vulnerable and easy to manipulate; if you can buy loto tickets, you can buy stocks.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds