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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.
That's fine for the intelligent among us, but what will those in the bottom half of the bell curve do?
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.
"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.)
How could the government give them purpose? The proposal is basically that we keep them from dying. To give them purpose in a dystopian automation future would require makework projects if there's nothing left for some ever increasing percentage of the population to train towards. You could pay them to grow a community garden, for example, but then you need money for the plot of land, and if a fiscal hawk comes around they're going to notice that it is cheaper to hand out bread.
"Why not just have a bigger army?"
But what is someone comes along and creates an even bigger army of robots (or clones) and puts them out of work?
I find your lack of faith disturbing
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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.
Education != intelligence
I think the real issue isn't formal education but vocational towards jobs that are needed and offer a formal retraining when such jobs go out of date.
The fact is you can't do the same job every day for the rest of your life. Even us software developers workers over the past 40 years (full career) needed to move from COBOL to C to Perl to what ever is new now Python/.Net/Java/Node.JS.
To survive today you need to be well trained. Formal education is valuable because such people know how to teach themselves. However for many we need continued training on new ways to do things to keep our skills up.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
A Day in the Life of a True Freedumb Loving Conservative:
Joe Conservative wakes up in the morning and goes to the bathroom. He flushes his toilet and brushes his teeth, mindful that each flush & brush costs him about 43 cents to his privatized water provider. His wacky, liberal neighbor keeps badgering the company to disclose how clean and safe their water is, but no one ever finds out. Just to be safe, Joe Conservative boils his drinking water.
Joe steps outside and coughs–the pollution is especially bad today, but the smokiest cars are the cheapest ones, so everyone buys ‘em. Joe Conservative checks to make sure he has enough toll money for the 3 different private roads he must drive to work. There is no public transportation, so traffic is backed up and his 10 mile commute takes an hour.
On the way, he drops his 12 year old daughter off at the clothing factory she works at. Paying for kids to go to private school until they’re 18 is a luxury, and Joe needs the extra income coming in. Times are hard and there’re no social safety nets.
He gets to work 5 minutes late and misses the call for Christian prayer, and is immediately docked by his employer. He is not feeling well today, but has no health insurance, since neither his employer nor his government provide it, and paying for it himself is really expensive, since he has a precondition. He just hopes for the best.
Joe’s workday is 12 hours long, because there is no regulation over working hours, and Joe will lose his job if he complains or unionizes. Today is an especially bad day. Joe’s manager demands that he work until midnight, a 16 hour day. Joe does, knowing that he’ll lose his job if he does not.
Finally, after midnight, Joe gets to pick up his daughter and go home. His daughter shows him the deep cut she got on the industrial sewing machine today. Joe is outraged and asks why she doesn’t have metal mesh gloves or other protection. She says the company will not provide it and she’ll have to pay for it out of her own pocket. Joe looks at the wound and decides they’ll use an over the counter disinfectant and bandages until it heals. She’ll have a scar, but getting stitches at the emergency room is expensive.
His daughter also complains that the manager made suggestive overtures towards her. Joe counsels her to be a “good girl” and not rock the boat, or she’ll get fired and they’ll be out the income.
His daughter says she can’t wait until she’s 18 so she can vote for change or go to the Iraq War.
They get home and there’s a message from his elderly father who can’t afford to pay his medical or heating bills. Joe can hear him coughing and shivering.
Joe turns on the radio and the top story is a proposal in Congress to raise the voting age to 25. A rare liberal opinionator states that it’s an attempt to keep power out of the hands of working class Americans. The conservative host immediately quashes him, calling him “a utopian idealist,” and agreeing that people aren’t mature enough to make good choices until they’re at least 25.
Joe chuckles at the wine-swilling, cheese eating liberal egghead and thinks, “Thank God I live in America where I have freedom!”
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
So its the fault of "I'm going to build a wall and stop illegal immigration" that we have more illegal immigrants?
By looking at previous actions instead of campaign rhetoric, you can easily see Trump gleefully supports outsourcing. There are plenty of business owners who have found ways to make money supporting US manufacturing and jobs, including in the apparel industry, and you will not find Trump among them. He cares about making money and stroking his ego.
Trump has no interest in anyone but Donald Trump, and the more people I talk to who are oblivious to this fact the more clear it is how demagogues gain power.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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 Tesla auto plant for one?
And I seem to recall hearing hat McDonalds, etc. are looking to automate their fast-food "assembly and sales factories" as robots are reaching the point that they can replace minimum-wage serfs at cooking and assembling standardized "food" while simultaneously saving costs and never sticking their dicks in the mayonnaise.
American manufacturing has been growing for several years now in terms of goods produced; however, the new plants employ far fewer humans than the old ones, almost entirely skilled labor maintaining the machines, so there's not really much point building them in expensive, heavily taxed cities where people will notice them. Even if the urban expenses were the same, It's probably often still cheaper to build a new robotic factory than trying to refit an existing human-centric one that probably built something else anyway.
And yeah, there's China too - they're beginning to heavily automate their factories as well, as robots are becoming cheaper than even the poverty wages their factory workers typically earn.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
So you think, somehow, that Trump is going to implement laws that will make his businesses less profitable?
All you guys in the rust belt bought into the big con, hook, line, and sinker.
The actual number of jobs 'saved' is around 730. Trump was claiming about 300 jobs that weren't going to Mexico to begin with.
Furthermore, Carrier is getting paid $7 million to keep those jobs in the U.S. That's not exactly a sustainable method of retaining a U.S. workforce. Nor is it necessarily a desirable one. How many more companies are going to line up for a payout to keep jobs in the U.S., now that they know it's an option that the President-elect could take?
And let's get something straight. Trump doesn't give a shit one way or the other about illegal immigration. It was a talking point, nothing more. He's already been backing off the proposal for a border wall AND he's already been backing off full deportation of illegal/undocumented immigrants.
Illegal immigration numbers have been going down for years. Current estimates have it at the lowest it's been since 2003.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
You can't have it both ways. When Obama bailed out the largest automaker with a *LOAN*, you trumpettes cried foul and pledged not to every buy anything from "Government Motors" or those greedy unions. Trump comes by and saves like half of the jobs that Carrier is sending to Mexico by *GIVING AWAY* taxpayer money and it's all "he's a genius deal maker" and "MAGA" with you folks. The hypocrisy is astounding.
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.