Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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.
$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.
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.
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~
I agree that some people who are stuck in rural communities where the entire economy has disappeared are in this spot. However, I do have experience with this - I've worked several menial positions (gas station, stock clerk in a department store, fast food) and anyone who was still there beyond their early 20s was there because they were stuck there. They lacked education, and I'm not of the opinion that they were closet scientists waiting to be discovered. I can see how people think that this is condescending, mean, etc...but if you work all day with reasonably intelligent people you might assume that everyone is like that -- I assure you they're not. Education is lost on a small fraction of these people..nothing you do will help them.
As for smugness, I'm not -- I know that my job is next to be eliminated, as is anything that doesn't explicitly require human hands or a more fluid less logical brain. I do feel that people who can't help themselves need to be guided by people smarter than them...and that goes for everyone. No one is a lone wolf, expert at everything.
Another anecdote from my past -- I went to college with a guy who worked the night shift at a local warehouse for a grocery store chain. According to him, the work was miserable, hot in summer, freezing in winter, and consisted of picking, palletizing and loading groceries on trucks. But, it was a union job and therefore paid well with the shift differentials, etc. One of the things he mentioned was that there were a ton of full timers working there, and the big step for them was to graduate from part time to full time eligible union members -- because the union would ensure they would have steady work for as long as they wanted. The full timers were the only ones eligible to become forklift operators and other slightly less mind numbing jobs. This is why the old economy was so successful -- even if it was a horrible job you hated, you could get a job with very little education and have enough money to raise a family and get by. This new phase we're going into isn't going to have these safe jobs, and any that remain are going to be forced down to minimum wage. BTW, the same goes for the customer facing positions in union grocery stores - look at all the 40 and 50 year old cashier supervisors and department managers. When A&P went bankrupt and closed tons of supermarkets here, it really threw some people for a loop because they'd been working at the same supermarket chain for 25+ years and the union had to scramble to find the most senior ones jobs. Multiply this by millions and you get a taste of what's coming.