What this does, more to the point, is put millions of people out of work, and ruin the Teamsters union as a side effect.
This was never about self-driving cars. This was always about wiping out an entire employment sector and piping even more profit up to the top. And yes, that is a bad thing.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Futuro... We've a few things wrong in these threads. Two different (three, really) drives, two inventors. Interesting summation.
The inventor had the hypothesis before he had the device, so it isn't a True Scottman drift. He hypothesized, he wrote about it, he formed a company to own it (that being how science works now). A few brave people tested it, and it seems to work. Each successive test excludes the factors that could have invalidated the previous tests, and now NASA has a group on it. And, it seems to produce a thrust. Okay, interesting.
We'll all be sad, should it come to nothing, but at this point the inventor has a hypothesis to cover the effect, described a machine to produce the effect, and now we have machines that seem to produce the effect. I've read his hypothesis, and damn, I don't have that kind of math or science and never will. But, you know, if he described an angel-making machine, and someone built the machine and made an angel, at some point you have to look at the damned angel flapping away in front of you.
Well, one killer test would be to build a thruster, install it on a spacecraft, and see if the spacecraft accelerates. If it does, we drop the microphone.
Cold fusion - fusing hydrogen by using chemical bonding compression - is not a fraud. It is a legitamite hypothesis, peer-reviewed and all. Probably not impossible, merely difficult to do. The test in the eighties wasn't a "fraud". They thought they had it licked, and it turned out they didn't. What they really did wrong, however, in those early Reagan era years of science privatization, was to try to keep their idea a patented secret so they could make some $$$$$. Standard procedure today, and a major, if not the only, cancer on science today. Science came of age in an era where everyone shared their results. Now it is about the precious, precious money. Universities especially have contracted that cancer. Science is crawling when it should be leaping. Fun fact: Tony Stark's arc reactor is a cold fusion power generator. Note the main ring he installed into the unit was pure palladium - the famous matrix used in the eighties experiment.
"Impulse" drive is just a sciencey-sounding name Roddenberry gave his spaceships' sub-light drive. He had no idea of what he was talking about. According to the "tech" books, it is a photon drive (convert mass to energy, point it thataway, get thrust).
This is a virtual-particle drive, a theoretical exploitation of quantum weirdness. No free energy, just free thrust without expending mass. The Dean Drive in the fifties was claiming a free-thrust vacation, and a lot of people fell for it. So we take it with a lot of skepticism. But never say never, esp. if something seems to be happening.
There are other groups testing it, but US scientists don't trust their results. NASA people doing the test gives it more cred in the US. And yes, poor Mr. Shawyer, who is roundly ignored by just about everyone. He put his neck on the line for advocating his hypothesis, and NASA gets the credit.
With space drives, you want tiny forces that you can run indefinitely. We're used to rockets that go BOOM and burn for ten minutes, but they are useless for high-speed space travel. For really high speed, you need only tiny acceleration that goes on and on and on.... it adds up to huge numbers. A hundredth of a G gives you the solar system in weeks rather than months, months rather than years. One G gives you the stars, excepting the bit about hitting radiation and random objects at ludicrous speed, the real head scratcher (186000 mile-long cylinder every second - how much junk is in that volume, and as for photons, you're slamming into them and jacking the frequency up into the x-ray/cosmic-ray range. Like a nuclear accelerator from hell in there).
I've been following this for a while. Observations:
Only a small contingent are talking about warp drive, and only in the most hypothetical way, and not in direct connection with this.
The researchers aren't required to explain the effect, just demonstrate it. As for the explanation, the inventor has a hypothesis; it was that hypothesis that led him to design the machine, so there is a chain of reasoning involved. Not a random goose chase. The man just is being ignored, as he has little standing in that world.
Something seems to be happening. Without predjudice to their future careers or reputations, scientists should look into this if they like. It certainly is worth a bit of funding, considering the possible payoff. Science ain't a business. Shoot for the stars, avoid hitting London.
The people talking breathlessly about space drives should keep it in their pants for a while. It clouds the discussion. Scientists love to debunk; they aren't fans of real life science fiction. Oddly.
It is really fun to read about.
And, as Heinlein sadly noted in Expanded Universe in an essay, space travel is really stalled out because rockets are too damned complex, expensive, and dangerous. If we ever leave earth, we need X-drives of some sort. Even if they aren't possible, we need to make them anyway. The universe as-is doesn't get final say about what is possible. Quantum drives don't exist until intelligent life creates those. Same with space warp drives - non-existent, until clever little masses of carbon make them for the very first time.
Welfare cut to the able bodied happened a quarter century ago. Two years max is all you get. You can't cut much more. It simply is not a factor in school failure; poverty is, race is, the flight to the suburbs is. The failure is schools in California was due to Proposition 13, btw, the tax freeze. California had the finest schools in the country before prop 13. Almost free universities, too. They were tax-cut to death. It would do well to remember that. This is a long game to basically kill control over corporate power.
Schools ARE mandatory, by the US Constitution. They are simply ignoring it and running to steal what they can as fast as they can, before anyone notices.
Government is not a business, cannot be run like a business, and has different goals than a business.
Government RUNS business. Corporations are government critters - they are circumscribed and defined by nothing else but laws. Corporations are our toys.
Government is/was run by academics, who are interested in good governance, rather than getting rich. Lying is considered bad form in academica, and leads to bad results. That's why science works; fibbers get weeded out, rather than kicking out the people who annoy the powerful, or eliminating those who don't make money for the powerful.
Business is run by self-involved, well, thieves is a good word - well-regulated thieves and liars. They admit no principle but the Win. They have no morals, no conscience, and no limits. They are in it for the sheer joy of kicking the ass of people who get in their way. They are absolutely lousy at compromise and when installed in any capacity in interacting with other countries, go into full guns-and-bribery mode. Look at what the W. admin did to us and Iraq for that yummy oil. And they did it on our credit card, and let laughing.
Government for the Corporations, by the Corporations, will be hell on Earth, a permanent feudal power structure that will be damned unkillable. It is the ultimate nullification of the age of enlightenment, the death of science as we know it, and makes fascism look like a kid playing with toy soldiers.
Corporatization of the public schools. The final blow to public America.
No businessman does this for the sheer joy of giving. They want something, and they will take it. They want properly trained corporate citizens, with skill sets that are widespread and therefore cheap to rent. Amongst other things, depending on the billionaire. Zuck just wants kids that don't care about privacy and love to give him money. Other billionaires want Jesus, dead commies and Muslims, and lots of power.
I've been fuming for months now that the rollup of public schools into private hands, now accepted as a natural process that no one should stop, will be a setup for the next step. Koch brothers-type billionaires will start buying all the little education ompanies and mom-and-pop schools that everyone thought were so charming and a Good Idea. That certainty was reinforced when the Koch brothers themselves started saying, a few months back, that they were intending to forward a new, American-correct, proper view of history that should be installed in classrooms - corporate friendly, pro-Jesus, anti-science, Ayn Randian horse manure. Not to mention Rupert Murdoch's little empire is now stating a school chain in the US - think of it as Fox Schools.
We deserve it. They're going for the kids, now, when no one is looking. Next up, in ten years: Generation FoX.
Microsoft didn't fire its entire IT department. Disney did. They are a stark example of fuck-you-ism and the lie behind the H1B expansion, the fabrication that they can't find qualified workers so they need indentured labor from abroad. Here they are saying, we just don't want to pay local rates, so fuck you, America!.
Capital is so overwhelmingly victorious that they aren't bothering to pretend it's about worker shortages anymore. They don't give a flying fuck about their country; they believe their only responsibility is to make money. They are wrong; corporations are government creatures, not private entities. They've no existence other than governmental laws that grant them their superpowers. That existence comes with requirements, and one of those requirements is that they exist for the good of the country that was gracious enough to let them enjoy their legal immunity and ability to print money. The idea they have no other god but money is their own notion, brought into law by their own lobbying efforts, and it is wrong. They have obligations to their community to provide jobs, to obey laws about the effects of their pollution, and in other respects act like the human beings they bought laws to say that they are. You want power? You also get responsibility. Right now they get the former and dismiss the latter.
The seed was planted decades ago when we decided not to publically fund political campaigns and instead left it to private donations. Soooooo, corporations are people, money is speech, speech is unlimited, money is unlimited, congress and Presidents can't be elected without enormous private wealth donating to their elections, so inevitably rich corporations bought the country. Rather cheaply.
Fix? Eliminate private financing of elections. No PACs. No backdoor corporate campaigns. No money whatsoever necessary to run for office. Free access to the internet for speeches and such, but no cute games with fake personas and perception management. And oh, yes, set the computerized election counting machines on fire, because you ^&%(##s, there is NO WAY they will let the vote go so overwhelmingly against them if they can simply tweak the elections results. Canada manually counts paper ballots in less than four hours. An elections system you cannot understand, own, or deconstruct is a system that is designed to hide cheating.
Sounds like we have a consentus. Too bad it's about 15 years too late, but let's clean up the fragments of what we had and try to move on without the semi-slave labor.
Except that the problem already happened, and is happening. The wars, the pollution, the animal die-off, the climate change, ther rising oceans, even the srrveillance (why that is is too long to go into) is caused by reaction to: too damned many people. The slack off in population growth did not happen. China has dropped the ball and is now shooting towards three billion. The brakes will go on, one way or another, by the Four Horseman method or the by the new fifth Horseman named Intelligence riding his pink unicorn, but the catastrophe is ON and will be ongoing for a very, very long time.
Population growth always outgrows resources, if unchecked. That is mathematics.
I agree about resource management. Even Heinlein agreed that it was poor management that caused poverty, even during overpopulation emergencies. However, and this is important, the type of management necessary is 180 degrees opposed to the type of government and libertarian business philosophy we are committed to. The management would have to be absolute and need overwhelming power over private interests, so we can't. We can't even build trains overland because the people who own the land want too much cash to make it affordable. We can't make people stop taking long showers during a drought emergency. We're not capable of submitting to an authority that would require sacrifices from us.
"Once people get a little bit of education and the ability to enjoy leisure time, they funnily enough stop having kids."
A stunning example (to me) Mexico. Super Catholic. Yet their insane population growth has abruptly dropped to 2 kids a family, in one generation. Damn. All it took was a little more money than utter poverty wages, exposure to outside ideas, and people fixed their own problem (in Mexico, that problem is overpopulation, over and out).
Creativity is self-learned, I find. But I'd never put my kid in anything other than a Montessori.
Now, the empires (corporations) want a factory system for creating creative people. Hence the coding intitiatives and STEM programs that governments are suddenly shoving down schools' throats all over the world. They aren't doing it to make wealthy citizens. They are demanding it so they can drive down creative costs to a commodity level. A billion Montessori kids are a billion paper-hatted geniuses working 29 hours a week for minimum wage (or capped management salary for 50+ hours a week). Rare creativity is valuable; abundant creativity will create poverty among the brilliant. A free market of force-fed STEM students (all in debt to banks and schools profiting enormously from them for the rest of their lives) wandering from joe-job to joe-job just as crappy as any deep-fryer position. If you don't have 1) rare skills or 2) collective bargaining power to demand more than the utter minimum possible pocket of change, the armies of the ingenious will be corporate compost.
Hell, why not. While we're at it, why don't we automate the student process. Dump the students and educate AIs instead. Computing solutions always work, just ask any nerd about self-driving cars.
At some point, and it seems that that point is arriving now, people will realize that the driving force behind technological change, as far as money people are concerned, is to eliminate jobs, and that the good jobs are not realy being replaced, and cannot be replaced. AIs grading papers gets rid of more pesky teachers who make a living wage. A self-driving car doesn't fit the picture until you realize that millions of people make a living *driving trucks*, and self-driving trucks will eliminate their jobs (in theory, if it works, and I don't see it working) and make oodles of money for capital and kick millions of truck drivers, along with all the taxi and Uber car drivers, out without a dime. (Uber is VERY interested in self-driving cars. Guess why).
Some jobs are being made. And capital is desperately trying to commodify and cheapen such labor, to the point of demanding governments force coding classes on all kids. There are such jobs, but no where near enough, and those are mostly dropped onto cheaper kids, not newly dumped middle-aged workers.
Asimov was on point, decades ago, when he wrote that inevitably automation would eliminate most jobs, and that the biggest problem - in his view, opportunity -- would be finding something for people to do. I would say that people without purpose are the most dangerous force for destruction and stupidity on the planet - worse than global climate change.
Capital and people who work for capital, and neoliberals and business conservatives who support capital, tend to have well-paying white collar jobs and live among other people of their class, and don't see anything amiss. They're fine. Step outside into the vast middle grounds of the world, and you'll see a growing sense of we're-being-fucked that will require an endless army of pepper-spraying drones and surveillance to keep from erupting into riots someday soon.
You already have them. The white people left the cities and formed their own little planets, complete with nearly-total white schools. By default, the cities became nearly all black and, since the money and employment ran away, poor.
Slashdot Mirror
What this does, more to the point, is put millions of people out of work, and ruin the Teamsters union as a side effect.
This was never about self-driving cars. This was always about wiping out an entire employment sector and piping even more profit up to the top. And yes, that is a bad thing.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Futuro...
We've a few things wrong in these threads. Two different (three, really) drives, two inventors. Interesting summation.
The inventor had the hypothesis before he had the device, so it isn't a True Scottman drift. He hypothesized, he wrote about it, he formed a company to own it (that being how science works now). A few brave people tested it, and it seems to work. Each successive test excludes the factors that could have invalidated the previous tests, and now NASA has a group on it. And, it seems to produce a thrust. Okay, interesting.
We'll all be sad, should it come to nothing, but at this point the inventor has a hypothesis to cover the effect, described a machine to produce the effect, and now we have machines that seem to produce the effect. I've read his hypothesis, and damn, I don't have that kind of math or science and never will. But, you know, if he described an angel-making machine, and someone built the machine and made an angel, at some point you have to look at the damned angel flapping away in front of you.
Well, one killer test would be to build a thruster, install it on a spacecraft, and see if the spacecraft accelerates. If it does, we drop the microphone.
addendum: not a patented secret. Just a secret, leading up to a patent someday.
Cold fusion - fusing hydrogen by using chemical bonding compression - is not a fraud. It is a legitamite hypothesis, peer-reviewed and all. Probably not impossible, merely difficult to do.
The test in the eighties wasn't a "fraud". They thought they had it licked, and it turned out they didn't. What they really did wrong, however, in those early Reagan era years of science privatization, was to try to keep their idea a patented secret so they could make some $$$$$. Standard procedure today, and a major, if not the only, cancer on science today. Science came of age in an era where everyone shared their results. Now it is about the precious, precious money. Universities especially have contracted that cancer. Science is crawling when it should be leaping.
Fun fact: Tony Stark's arc reactor is a cold fusion power generator. Note the main ring he installed into the unit was pure palladium - the famous matrix used in the eighties experiment.
"Impulse" drive is just a sciencey-sounding name Roddenberry gave his spaceships' sub-light drive. He had no idea of what he was talking about. According to the "tech" books, it is a photon drive (convert mass to energy, point it thataway, get thrust).
This is a virtual-particle drive, a theoretical exploitation of quantum weirdness. No free energy, just free thrust without expending mass. The Dean Drive in the fifties was claiming a free-thrust vacation, and a lot of people fell for it. So we take it with a lot of skepticism. But never say never, esp. if something seems to be happening.
It is depressing how many people just don't read. Mention math or science, and writers just zone out and start looking for clickbait points.
There are other groups testing it, but US scientists don't trust their results. NASA people doing the test gives it more cred in the US.
And yes, poor Mr. Shawyer, who is roundly ignored by just about everyone. He put his neck on the line for advocating his hypothesis, and NASA gets the credit.
With space drives, you want tiny forces that you can run indefinitely. We're used to rockets that go BOOM and burn for ten minutes, but they are useless for high-speed space travel. For really high speed, you need only tiny acceleration that goes on and on and on.... it adds up to huge numbers. A hundredth of a G gives you the solar system in weeks rather than months, months rather than years. One G gives you the stars, excepting the bit about hitting radiation and random objects at ludicrous speed, the real head scratcher (186000 mile-long cylinder every second - how much junk is in that volume, and as for photons, you're slamming into them and jacking the frequency up into the x-ray/cosmic-ray range. Like a nuclear accelerator from hell in there).
I've been following this for a while. Observations:
Only a small contingent are talking about warp drive, and only in the most hypothetical way, and not in direct connection with this.
The researchers aren't required to explain the effect, just demonstrate it. As for the explanation, the inventor has a hypothesis; it was that hypothesis that led him to design the machine, so there is a chain of reasoning involved. Not a random goose chase. The man just is being ignored, as he has little standing in that world.
Something seems to be happening. Without predjudice to their future careers or reputations, scientists should look into this if they like. It certainly is worth a bit of funding, considering the possible payoff. Science ain't a business. Shoot for the stars, avoid hitting London.
The people talking breathlessly about space drives should keep it in their pants for a while. It clouds the discussion. Scientists love to debunk; they aren't fans of real life science fiction. Oddly.
It is really fun to read about.
And, as Heinlein sadly noted in Expanded Universe in an essay, space travel is really stalled out because rockets are too damned complex, expensive, and dangerous. If we ever leave earth, we need X-drives of some sort. Even if they aren't possible, we need to make them anyway. The universe as-is doesn't get final say about what is possible. Quantum drives don't exist until intelligent life creates those. Same with space warp drives - non-existent, until clever little masses of carbon make them for the very first time.
Welfare cut to the able bodied happened a quarter century ago. Two years max is all you get. You can't cut much more. It simply is not a factor in school failure; poverty is, race is, the flight to the suburbs is. The failure is schools in California was due to Proposition 13, btw, the tax freeze. California had the finest schools in the country before prop 13. Almost free universities, too. They were tax-cut to death. It would do well to remember that. This is a long game to basically kill control over corporate power.
Schools ARE mandatory, by the US Constitution. They are simply ignoring it and running to steal what they can as fast as they can, before anyone notices.
Government is not a business, cannot be run like a business, and has different goals than a business.
Government RUNS business. Corporations are government critters - they are circumscribed and defined by nothing else but laws. Corporations are our toys.
Government is/was run by academics, who are interested in good governance, rather than getting rich. Lying is considered bad form in academica, and leads to bad results. That's why science works; fibbers get weeded out, rather than kicking out the people who annoy the powerful, or eliminating those who don't make money for the powerful.
Business is run by self-involved, well, thieves is a good word - well-regulated thieves and liars. They admit no principle but the Win. They have no morals, no conscience, and no limits. They are in it for the sheer joy of kicking the ass of people who get in their way. They are absolutely lousy at compromise and when installed in any capacity in interacting with other countries, go into full guns-and-bribery mode. Look at what the W. admin did to us and Iraq for that yummy oil. And they did it on our credit card, and let laughing.
Government for the Corporations, by the Corporations, will be hell on Earth, a permanent feudal power structure that will be damned unkillable. It is the ultimate nullification of the age of enlightenment, the death of science as we know it, and makes fascism look like a kid playing with toy soldiers.
Corporatization of the public schools. The final blow to public America.
No businessman does this for the sheer joy of giving. They want something, and they will take it. They want properly trained corporate citizens, with skill sets that are widespread and therefore cheap to rent. Amongst other things, depending on the billionaire. Zuck just wants kids that don't care about privacy and love to give him money. Other billionaires want Jesus, dead commies and Muslims, and lots of power.
I've been fuming for months now that the rollup of public schools into private hands, now accepted as a natural process that no one should stop, will be a setup for the next step. Koch brothers-type billionaires will start buying all the little education ompanies and mom-and-pop schools that everyone thought were so charming and a Good Idea. That certainty was reinforced when the Koch brothers themselves started saying, a few months back, that they were intending to forward a new, American-correct, proper view of history that should be installed in classrooms - corporate friendly, pro-Jesus, anti-science, Ayn Randian horse manure. Not to mention Rupert Murdoch's little empire is now stating a school chain in the US - think of it as Fox Schools.
We deserve it. They're going for the kids, now, when no one is looking. Next up, in ten years: Generation FoX.
Microsoft didn't fire its entire IT department. Disney did. They are a stark example of fuck-you-ism and the lie behind the H1B expansion, the fabrication that they can't find qualified workers so they need indentured labor from abroad. Here they are saying, we just don't want to pay local rates, so fuck you, America!.
Capital is so overwhelmingly victorious that they aren't bothering to pretend it's about worker shortages anymore. They don't give a flying fuck about their country; they believe their only responsibility is to make money. They are wrong; corporations are government creatures, not private entities. They've no existence other than governmental laws that grant them their superpowers. That existence comes with requirements, and one of those requirements is that they exist for the good of the country that was gracious enough to let them enjoy their legal immunity and ability to print money. The idea they have no other god but money is their own notion, brought into law by their own lobbying efforts, and it is wrong. They have obligations to their community to provide jobs, to obey laws about the effects of their pollution, and in other respects act like the human beings they bought laws to say that they are. You want power? You also get responsibility. Right now they get the former and dismiss the latter.
The seed was planted decades ago when we decided not to publically fund political campaigns and instead left it to private donations. Soooooo, corporations are people, money is speech, speech is unlimited, money is unlimited, congress and Presidents can't be elected without enormous private wealth donating to their elections, so inevitably rich corporations bought the country. Rather cheaply.
Fix? Eliminate private financing of elections. No PACs. No backdoor corporate campaigns. No money whatsoever necessary to run for office. Free access to the internet for speeches and such, but no cute games with fake personas and perception management. And oh, yes, set the computerized election counting machines on fire, because you ^&%(##s, there is NO WAY they will let the vote go so overwhelmingly against them if they can simply tweak the elections results. Canada manually counts paper ballots in less than four hours. An elections system you cannot understand, own, or deconstruct is a system that is designed to hide cheating.
Sounds like we have a consentus. Too bad it's about 15 years too late, but let's clean up the fragments of what we had and try to move on without the semi-slave labor.
Except that the problem already happened, and is happening. The wars, the pollution, the animal die-off, the climate change, ther rising oceans, even the srrveillance (why that is is too long to go into) is caused by reaction to: too damned many people. The slack off in population growth did not happen. China has dropped the ball and is now shooting towards three billion. The brakes will go on, one way or another, by the Four Horseman method or the by the new fifth Horseman named Intelligence riding his pink unicorn, but the catastrophe is ON and will be ongoing for a very, very long time.
Population growth always outgrows resources, if unchecked. That is mathematics.
I agree about resource management. Even Heinlein agreed that it was poor management that caused poverty, even during overpopulation emergencies. However, and this is important, the type of management necessary is 180 degrees opposed to the type of government and libertarian business philosophy we are committed to. The management would have to be absolute and need overwhelming power over private interests, so we can't. We can't even build trains overland because the people who own the land want too much cash to make it affordable. We can't make people stop taking long showers during a drought emergency. We're not capable of submitting to an authority that would require sacrifices from us.
"Once people get a little bit of education and the ability to enjoy leisure time, they funnily enough stop having kids."
A stunning example (to me) Mexico. Super Catholic. Yet their insane population growth has abruptly dropped to 2 kids a family, in one generation. Damn. All it took was a little more money than utter poverty wages, exposure to outside ideas, and people fixed their own problem (in Mexico, that problem is overpopulation, over and out).
Creativity is self-learned, I find. But I'd never put my kid in anything other than a Montessori.
Now, the empires (corporations) want a factory system for creating creative people. Hence the coding intitiatives and STEM programs that governments are suddenly shoving down schools' throats all over the world. They aren't doing it to make wealthy citizens. They are demanding it so they can drive down creative costs to a commodity level. A billion Montessori kids are a billion paper-hatted geniuses working 29 hours a week for minimum wage (or capped management salary for 50+ hours a week). Rare creativity is valuable; abundant creativity will create poverty among the brilliant. A free market of force-fed STEM students (all in debt to banks and schools profiting enormously from them for the rest of their lives) wandering from joe-job to joe-job just as crappy as any deep-fryer position. If you don't have 1) rare skills or 2) collective bargaining power to demand more than the utter minimum possible pocket of change, the armies of the ingenious will be corporate compost.
Hell, why not. While we're at it, why don't we automate the student process. Dump the students and educate AIs instead. Computing solutions always work, just ask any nerd about self-driving cars.
At some point, and it seems that that point is arriving now, people will realize that the driving force behind technological change, as far as money people are concerned, is to eliminate jobs, and that the good jobs are not realy being replaced, and cannot be replaced. AIs grading papers gets rid of more pesky teachers who make a living wage. A self-driving car doesn't fit the picture until you realize that millions of people make a living *driving trucks*, and self-driving trucks will eliminate their jobs (in theory, if it works, and I don't see it working) and make oodles of money for capital and kick millions of truck drivers, along with all the taxi and Uber car drivers, out without a dime. (Uber is VERY interested in self-driving cars. Guess why).
Some jobs are being made. And capital is desperately trying to commodify and cheapen such labor, to the point of demanding governments force coding classes on all kids. There are such jobs, but no where near enough, and those are mostly dropped onto cheaper kids, not newly dumped middle-aged workers.
Asimov was on point, decades ago, when he wrote that inevitably automation would eliminate most jobs, and that the biggest problem - in his view, opportunity -- would be finding something for people to do. I would say that people without purpose are the most dangerous force for destruction and stupidity on the planet - worse than global climate change.
Capital and people who work for capital, and neoliberals and business conservatives who support capital, tend to have well-paying white collar jobs and live among other people of their class, and don't see anything amiss. They're fine. Step outside into the vast middle grounds of the world, and you'll see a growing sense of we're-being-fucked that will require an endless army of pepper-spraying drones and surveillance to keep from erupting into riots someday soon.
You already have them. The white people left the cities and formed their own little planets, complete with nearly-total white schools. By default, the cities became nearly all black and, since the money and employment ran away, poor.