Andrew Ng Wants a New 'New Deal' To Combat Job Automation (technologyreview.com) 160
Andrew Ng, formerly the head of AI for Chinese search giant Baidu and, before that, creator of Google's deep-learning Brain project, knows as well as anyone that artificial intelligence is coming for plenty of jobs. Speaking at a conference on Tuesday, Ng said he would like to see a "new New Deal" that pays people displaced by technology to study, offering an incentive to learn new skills and reenter the workforce. From a report: Speaking at MIT Technology Review's annual EmTech MIT conference in Cambridge, MA, on Tuesday, Ng said he's visited call centers and spoken to workers, knowing that his teams of software engineers will then write software that will automate aspects of their work. "There are many professions in the crosshairs of AI teams across the world," he said. Ng, who's currently working on a startup called Deeplearning.ai that helps train people on deep-learning technology, has some ideas for helping those in jobs he thinks will be automated, from call-center workers to radiologists, truck drivers, and the like. His suggestion is for an updated version of the New Deal -- the Depression-era economic programs that invested in, among other things, getting unemployed Americans back to work -- that pays displaced workers to learn new job skills.
They can plant trees (Score:1)
Pay me now or pay me later (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a lot of things that are "pay me now, or pay me later" issues, that should be addressed:
1: No jobs or income. A guaranteed minimum income may cost something, but sure costs a lot less than having to deal with a constant insurgency of people with no hope or future, who view the only thing they can do is violence. Add to the fact that there are strong "shit stirrers" like the Nazis and Daesh, and random people who used to be just gangbangers now would have the desperation to do things never even thought of. Even with 100% gun control and none on the streets, one can still amass a death toll with a vehicle. Even with very Draconian laws with people going to prison for small things, eventually the guerrillas will win ("rednecks" in Afghanistan drove the best two war machines in all of human history, the USSR and the US out) unless the US decided to go the genocide route... and that won't happen because the press will show it to the world. So, pay me now with a GMI or New Deal jobs... or pay me later with guns, troops, mercenaries, green zones, and defending against constant incursions... which will destroy any quality of life in the country.
2: Global warming. Pay me now, or pay me later. Pay me now with moving to clean energy, redoing nuclear energy so it is trustworthy and advancing it from 1950s tech to 2010s Gen IV or thorium reactors, work on thermal depolymerization and CO2 abatement... or pay me later with ecological refugees, wars for arable land (Africa), people who have no hope and again... turn to Daesh because there is nothing left. Not just "those people in Africa". Everyone in the world is threatened by this... and paying for wars is VERY expensive.
Re:Pay me now or pay me later (Score:4, Insightful)
1A people just start doing small stuff to go to jail / prison so that the state ends paying for there room and board.
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Taxes (Score:2)
But the real question is, is Andrew Ng and the companies working on AI willing to pay a 200% sales tax on AI products to pay for the displacement?
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Really? I mean, the first one is haunting us now with sever overreach of Federal Govt. waaaaay above and beyond what the Constitution enumerates as its responsibilities and limited powers....
Hmm...perhaps we can screw with the Supreme Court again like FDR did back in his day, to allow for more "New Deal" overreach?
Yep...just what we need.
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I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further.
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And your preferred plan is what.. let the US wallow in the great depression for another 10? 20? 100 years? How long do you think it would have taken to recover if you leave the people who caused the problems (many of whom actually profited off the suffering of the masses) in charge of running the show?
Is there too much regulation? In some cases yes, in other cases no (and in a few cases there's probably not enough regulation..) But there's a whole lot of people, especially on the conservative side, who w
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"most regulations were put in place for a reason"
Fear
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Yes. But the USA has gone way the fuck insane out-of-control with its military. We could reduce our military expenditures by 75% across the board and still be way ahead for all future time.
What's Old is new again. (Score:1, Flamebait)
So far as I have perceived AI is just more advanced if-then-else routines albeit on much faster systems with magnitudes more ram than existed in the old DOS MUD days.
Humanity has a unique way of freaking itself out over shit it makes.
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While you are correct and this is definitely "weak AI", i.e. the AI without "I" and would better be called "automation", it does really threaten a lot of jobs. As it turns out, most jobs do not need actual intelligence for most of the work done. Fro example, in one Amazon warehouse, you have one human supervising and complementing 5 robots. That means somewhere between 4 and 10 people have lost that job to automation.
As to the article, that "new deal" is not going to happen. The people to be replaced are no
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Humanity also has a unique way of making shit that is worth freaking out over.
Left wing academic is left wing (Score:1)
I've crossed paths with this guy. His expertise does not extend very far beyond his technical background. His politics...well he's entitled to his opinion and that's about it.
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I assume he intends to pay people for being smart, otherwise I'm not sure what these people are supposed to do with their new education.
Maybe become professional criminals? That's one scenario I've imagined for a world of mass-unemployment that could work. A select few have jobs with astronomical pay and the masses live off of excess money stolen from the employed caste, and they arrive at a sort of symbiosis where the tolerated existence of the vast crime economy staves off any kind of catastrophic reckoni
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Or worse, start wars. Masses of unemployed young men have directly or indirectly triggered many wars, including WWII and the "Arab Spring".
New Economic System (Score:3)
Not just a new deal, a new economic system will be require as we approach the point where human labour is no longer something of value.
Re:New Economic System (Score:4, Insightful)
I expect at some point someone is going to go down the Gattaca road and that humanity as a whole will find a way to stay ahead of the curve.
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There is nothing a creative person needs more then an audience.
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Yes but we need to be in a place where the creative person is willing to do that for the joy of creation for that to work. Right now, companies are pricing select entertainment at higher and higher prices. At some point, a majority of the population won't be able to see first run entertainment. And some may never see certain entertainment.
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And some may never see certain entertainment.
It's already happening, see the Wu-Tang Clan's album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, or Kanye West's movie Cruel Summer.
(Oh wait, you can't)
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or Kanye West's movie Cruel Summer.
Wait, we're supposed to feel bad about this?
All joking aside, there's more entertainment produced today than any person could hope to consume and the best of the old stuff doesn't go away either so the problem always gets worse. In a world of post-scarcity where no one has want of food, shelter, or simple material goods, exclusive access to entertainment is the only way for society to maintain a hierarchical structure.
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That place is the post-scarcity world. There are many places where entertainment is cheap, like YouTube and free-to-play games.
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and while it may even be financially possible to do so due to increased productivity, most people tend to go a bit squirrelly when they feel they have no purpose in life.
Yeah, what will people do if they didn't have to grind away at meaningless jobs in soul-sucking cube farms or miserable retail environments for shitty pay? Take up a hobby that's personally meaningful and fulfilling or some shit?
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As can also be seen by the incredible number of people doing volunteer work, because they have no financial reason to work. I don't know whether that can scale up to fill this void, but it will certainly be a factor.
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Those people are suffering from an acute shortage of resources, quite different from a person on UBI.
A clear majority of people are working in awful-to-hellish jobs just because they need the money, I wish I lived in the kind of ultra-privileged environment that would lead anyone to think otherwise.
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Indeed. The real problem is not how to keep people fed and with a bit of spending money on top. That problem is solved, even if a lot of people have their heads in their behinds about it. The real question is what people are going to do with their time to give their lives meaning.
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Probably more than they do now. There's not a whole lot of people who think their jobs give their lives meaning -- its just a way to get money so that they can pursue other things that they hope will be more meaningful.
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Well, if it turns out to not be a problem, all the better.
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They can rebuild engines, cars, bicycles, boats; work out with weights; pursue new, novel ways of getting high; ride bmx bikes, skateboards, skates, surfboards; make/watch youtube videos; go camping for years on end; travel cheaply for years on end; teach others how to do any of the above or other things. There are many, many things we could do, time is what we could gain if we can stop being slaves to the grind and not mashed into poverty by lack of work.
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I don't think having things to do is a problem, if there's low or no cost to doing things.
The problem with people right now that go "squirrely," as you put is isn't that they don't have things they want to do -- its almost always a situation where they can't afford to do the things they want to do. Free them from that cost limitation and most people would probably do alright.
I mean don't get me wrong.. there's a lot of them who would decide that what they want to do is say, "heroine and lots of it!" Some
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Same economic system, really. Nothing's changing; people just imagine that new technology is scary and damaging.
A new economic program [slashdot.org], however, would have promise--not because of new technology, but because it's viable and useful.
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We're probably jumping the gun on it a bit given that AI is only starting to take off and there's nothing beyond hype and theory suggesting that it will ever be as big a problem as is claimed.
But that said, if it does get to that point then we'll be at a whole new era in human history. It would be the first time literally ever where our time and labor isn't worth anything. Compare the plight to that of say, horses when the automobile was introduced. Sure there's still a few niches where horses can outper
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Horses are a tool used by humans. We switched to a new tool.
Folks who actually work with machine learning pretty much see it as a hammer--or a programming language: it's amazing stuff, even though it's just another tool requiring human direction. American Express hit a wall back in the 80s and so created the Authorizor's Assistant, which reduced their workload by 70% and allowed them to scale massively--and they've improved it over the years to take in more information, make better decisions, and reduc
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Horses are a tool used by humans. We switched to a new tool.
Most humans are a tool used by other humans as well. And they will get replaced. Keep in mind that the unemployment rate during the great depression was 25%. We don't need "every" human to be unemployed to run into problems.. not even a majority of them. And a lot of it seems to be focused on things like the service industry which isn't well known for employing people who have a huge array of better options..
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Most humans are a tool used by other humans as well
Except those humans earn wages. Horses don't earn wages; we feed them because they need to eat or they die. They have upkeep costs, like oil and electricity for a machine. We don't give them the discretion to buy toys and get a college education to become a race horse instead of a draft horse.
I'm aware of unemployment rates. Unemployment in the 2008 Great Recession peaked at 10% and we've seen that first-hand. My point is unemployment isn't permanently-raised by technology; it's temporarily-raised.
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Indeed. "Work" as primary mechanism to get the wealth of society to the masses has run its course. There will be jobs left at the upper qualification end and quite a few that cannot easily be automatized, but I would expect that 80...90% of all jobs are going away and this will happen in the next 20 years or so.
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I have saved and invested ferociously since entering the workforce, and now that I'm into my 40's I have a 7-figure portfolio and no debt.
Let's say you were to retire at 65, live a simple but comfortable life of $50K/year, and die at 85. Well, 20 years times $50K/years is a million dollars - your "7-figure portfolio". Congratulations, you just saved enough for your own retirement - provided you don't live past 85. :)
Thing is though, people in countries like Denmark are also set for their retirement - total peace of mind. But they didn't have to save and invest ferociously to get there.
Currently, Americans seem to like inequality. They seem to
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Thing is though, people in countries like Denmark are also set for their retirement - total peace of mind. But they didn't have to save and invest ferociously to get there.
Of course they did. It's just that they had no real choice as to whether to do so or not. Do retirement services magically come about freely in Denmark, or do you suppose that its being funded by the massive tax rates that the Danish pay? So what practical difference is there between someone who takes that money that would have otherwise gone to taxes and saves it for retirement and the person who had to pay those higher taxes that would be used to pay for their retirement?
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The difference is that everyone is covered. That matters for the stability and general well-being of society. The less desperate people out there, the safer we all are and the better the karma all-around. Yes it will work even in a society that is not homogeneous, provided we see each other as fellow humans on a relatively short stint on the planet.
lower the medicare age (Score:2)
just lowering the medicare age can help alot / maybe have modified SS system for older people pushed out of the job market.
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Damn I wish I hadn't burnt my last mod point. AC or not I would have modded you up to the moon.
I was having this discussion with an old boss (that I'm obviously on good terms with) just a few days ago - it almost seems you are "better off" (in quotes) if you don't save like mad, because if you don't have money saved, there's no money to spend on that expensive medical condition, and you'll either get help from the government or just die. I don't know which is worse - dying or having your life savings wip
Basic Income (Score:4)
Inventing 9-to-5 is highly ineffective, nearly all of this will be wasted labor. We already have plenty of this baked into corporate workforce culture (e.g. HR, recruiters, web marketing). Instead, let people volunteer for causes they care and/or work part time jobs.
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and when the cost of doing that volunteer work is more or just about the same as the basic income?? We don't want to have a new benefit cliffs to deal with.
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Universal Basic Income (UBI) allows lazy people to be lazy and useless. That's not something we should condone, much less incentivize.
Universal Basic Employment (UBE) is a much better idea. If you want to earn money, go work. If you can't find work in the private sector, the government has infrastructure projects to build out, so go get a job from them. The rules are:
1) Government jobs are guaranteed employment, but on their terms. It's run like the military, but it's civilian service. You aren't the boss.
there are other parts of the minimum wage laws (Score:2)
there are other parts of the minimum wage laws then just the pay like not being forced to pay for tools / uniforms and other costs to work your low paying job. Or being forced to pay for dine and dash.
Re: Basic Income (Score:1)
Instead of 10hrs per month volunteer work, require 3hrs per week of one of: taking a class, teaching a class, or volunteering. Be very lax on the types of classes (history of skateboards, how to create an old fashioned picture album) to help foster creative new ideas and encourage people to do something, anything. But be strict on real world attendance to encourage real-world interaction.
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also make the class low cost and not at you need to take out a loan level.
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>We need to remove inefficiencies from the system and implement basic income with a requirement of 10h/month volunteer work for persons without dependents.
That requirement makes it almost no different than current welfare systems. It just gets paid to everyone, and adds more administration costs in trying to figure out who has dependents, and if they are doing the proper amount of volunteer work, and who is cheating the requirement etc.
The level of money controls what people will do, since right now in c
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Actually, it would reduce welfare administration costs dramatically. A lot of the current welfare system is devoted to making sure nobody gets more than they should. If everybody is supposed to get a certain fixed amount, most of that overhead goes away.
and add in more OT pay at least the 60+ levels (Score:2)
and add in more OT pay at least the 60+ levels
Is retraining realistic? (Score:2)
I hear talk about retraining workers and can't help but wonder if it's a realistic solution. The people I know that are really good at things, be it computers or music or martial arts, started doing it when they were young. How is an older, newly trained (inexperienced) worker going to compete with them?
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I hear talk about retraining workers and can't help but wonder if it's a realistic solution. The people I know that are really good at things, be it computers or music or martial arts, started doing it when they were young. How is an older, newly trained (inexperienced) worker going to compete with them?
Politically correct answer: Many people in the world have a chosen job or profession based on their natural abilities, which can often limit their capability to be retrained.
Politically incorrect answer: There are a lot of stupid people out there that can only do simple jobs. The kinds of jobs that automation will replace soon. Retraining is pointless and essentially impossible.
No, retraining is not realistic.
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In addition, many people are doing things they like. They chose those skills. They had a passion to learn those skills. Retraining will likely be very difficult if you're trying to teach someone to do something they're not passionate about.
I'm a somewhat odd individual in that I've got a number of skill-sets that are very disparate, a product of an interesting life with 3 degrees in 3 different areas and work in 4-5 vastly different careers to go along with it. But that's not most people. Most people are ex
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...You got a culinary degree and specialized in cake decorating, now a 3D frosting printer can do the job for 1/3 the cost in 1/2 the time. Do you try to stick in the pastry world? Re-train on bread baking? Try being a high-end chef? Or do you bail on your entire training and career and try to retrain on something else?
And half-way through that retraining, when the machines take over that job, when then?
This is exactly why we must Solve for Greed.
The billionaire replacing all employees with robots will realize only after the fact that it was paid employees that drove revenue. Greed blinds the billionaire to only think about short-term profits driven by automation. Greed doesn't give a fuck about long-term impact, even if it results in a bullet hole in their own foot.
Unless we solve for greed, there are few viable outcomes. We often speak of UBI as an answer, but the quality of life will be horrible due
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We must find a way to fix the wealth inequality and disparity, and eradicate a pointless desire to become a trillioniare.
I don't think that will ever happen. For most of human existence, having more stuff likely correlated with not dying. More food, more spears, more firewood, more family. I suspect that hoarding is baked into our genes at this point.
Throughout recorded history, the powerful have always amassed more than they needed, at the expense of the weak. Kings, bishops, emperors, generals and dukes alike all amassed fortunes and land. Time and time again the weak suffered increasingly under the system until they rose u
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We must find a way to fix the wealth inequality and disparity, and eradicate a pointless desire to become a trillioniare.
I don't think that will ever happen. For most of human existence, having more stuff likely correlated with not dying. More food, more spears, more firewood, more family. I suspect that hoarding is baked into our genes at this point.
Throughout recorded history, the powerful have always amassed more than they needed, at the expense of the weak. Kings, bishops, emperors, generals and dukes alike all amassed fortunes and land. Time and time again the weak suffered increasingly under the system until they rose up and overthrew it. In the age of democracy, we seem to have turned to legislation rather than bloody revolt, but it's still the same old thing we've been doing for thousands of years.
If we had been able to separate money from democracy, we might have had a bit more of a shot at minimizing greed. But not only haven't we been able to do that, at this point politics seemingly runs solely on money, not votes or popular outcry. Given this, I expect it to continue to get worse rather than better.
When taxing only estates left to descendants worth more than $5,000,000 is controversial and deemed excessive double taxation by the ruling class, we really don't have a shot at fixing greed. That's a value that should set anyone up for the rest of their life. If I had half that much money, I'd retire tomorrow. "Why should we pay taxes on a gift worth more than what 99% of people will make over the course of their entire lifetime?"
That's how close we are to solving greed.
Over the course of thousands of years, a single human trait has stood the test of time; a propensity to never fucking learn from our mistakes.
Yes, I agree. We don't stand a chance.
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Politically incorrect best answer: People can be made into Soylent Green when they outlive their usefullness.
With all the shit we ingest that's legal to put into our food supply?
No fucking way in hell would I eat that.
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The bigger question is: Retrain them for what? They lose their job to an AI today so they retrain for a new job.. and by next year that job is being replaced as well. If the path of technology continues as it has historically, AI replacement will likely follow an exponential growth pattern and once it finally starts taking things over, it will quickly start taking other things over until there's nothing left to take and the vast majority of humans are left unemployed.
The upside is that production and tra
Solving the wrong problem (Score:2)
Ng said he's visited call centers and spoken to workers, knowing that his teams of software engineers will then write software that will automate aspects of their work.
This is a Good Thing. The need to staff a call center is a clear indication of a poorly functioning product or service. It means that some process or product has room to be made better. Call centers are necessary sometimes but really are a waste of human capital. I severely doubt that any near term AI is likely to do away with call centers any more than phone trees have. The better way to do that is to design a product or service that doesn't need the call center in the first place. Using AI to improv
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Call centers should be a last resort.
When people won't even read the manual to learn how the product works, call centers are inevitable.
If someone's only skill is driving a vehicle then perhaps that person should consider educating themselves further.
There will always be some people whose greatest skills are still within reach of automation. Education is a stopgap measure because there are limits to how highly we can educate most people---individual potential is not limitless. This will only become more common as time goes on.
What do we do with them? Let them starve?
Plus, we may need a million more nurses or engineers, but we don't need 10,000,000 or 100,0
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Factory workers, service clerks, and drivers that don't think and don't sleep and don't talk back and don't try to unionize? Sounds like the current technology level of pseudo-AI has lots of real work applications.
The whole "AI" moniker is misleading, but hierarchical learning and machine learning is very real and currently available technology. Making a machine that allows one person to replace the jobs of 10 is nothing new to our society, and that is what we face today with the new so-called "AI". We'll b
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a robo kitchen at a fast food may need say 1-2 people on site to cleaning / CS / basic unjamming / basic repair work. With say a roaming techs doing the bigger repair / maintenance work.
Do you really want your robo mc'd to shut down in the middle of rush due to jam with an not taking orders at this time error?
Metrics (Score:2)
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Basically, people look at the wooden shipping pallet and say, "OH NOES! 95% OF JOBS REPLACED FOREVER!" They fail to understand that the constant replacement of jobs by technology is occurring all around them, and has been, for their entire lives--and for thousands of years.
What folks don't realize is that plumbing and electrician work won't be free--no cost along the whole supply chain--because a mix of unskilled and skilled labor will be used, in smaller proportion than today. That implies we can hire
Productivity is over 200x what it was 120 years ag (Score:1)
We should be able to provide everyone the ability to live as well as an 1890s farmer plus some kind of smart phone without them needing to work.
Basic housing, decent food, and entertainment.
But a lot of people are going to get wierd and destructive in that kind of environment as long as "rich" people exist and the things they do are displayed as entertainment.
Already, a lot of entertainment used by rich people is no longer shown or reported on. Areas become private domains for wealthy people and you never
Nice thought and all, but... (Score:2)
pays people displaced by technology to study, offering an incentive to learn new skills and reenter the workforce
While I admire his faith in humanity, this seems like a pipe dream. The job market is flooded with so many educated people right now that there's an implicit ranking:
If you're not in the first category, you're fighting for scraps right now without post-AI scarcity. Do you really think
The New New Deal is part of a broader push (Score:2)
It's what used to be called a 'Party Platform' before money took over politics. There's a group calling themselves the "Justice Democrats" trying to push it through by primarying a bunch of the right wing Dems that got in on Clinton (Bill)'s coat tails. They're hoping they managge to knock Diane "Supports gun control but carries a gun" Feinstein ou
AI will save us (Score:1)
We’ve been mired in a long term slow growth economy, and a huge part of the reason why is that productivity grown has slowed. AI is one of the key technologies to get productivity growing again.
Other productivity tailwinds: Trump's fight against regulation, Uber, Amazon, and eventually self-driving cars. We need these things to overcome demographic headwinds.
Productivity increases are the key to sustainable economic growth that outpaces population growth. More GPD per capita means people will lead
just have student loans bankruptcy and then (Score:2)
just have student loans bankruptcy and then the costs will go down.
Won't fly here (Score:3, Insightful)
The "red" part of USA would rather have their left nut cut off than allow such "socialism". They'll blame such unemployment on factors such as "too much" regulation or taxes, foreigners, a foreign country, Hollywood elites, Canadian cows or bees, Soros banking conspiracies, Hillary's emails, etc. etc. before they will submit to New Deal 2.
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You deny the ruskies ran an operation to influence the election?
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The DNC literally rigged a national primary election to get the result they wanted. Hillary Clinton took millions of dollars in foreign donations for her campaign. Hillary's campaign colluded with multiple media outlets, telling which stories to run, when, and getting editorial control. Obama administration was literally wiretapping Trump's campaign manager DURING the election. But we go batshit crazy over $100k of facebook ads? Really?
So all it took was 3,000 Facebook ads to swing the elections, who woul
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Two wrongs don't make a right, even if that were all true. (Dailycaller is highly biased. Skippit.)
Sounds like a good plan (Score:2)
It'll never get off the ground because "OMG socialism" but I think we're going to need something like this. If we're truly ready to say there are no more manual labor assembly line type jobs, the majority of people in the US are suddenly unable to sell their labor. This includes white-collar assembly line jobs as well...think about all the paperwork processing type jobs you may support in IT and wonder why they still exist.
Not everyone is capable of training for a higher-level job. Consider the assembly lin
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During the New Deal, the CCC built a lot of things that are still in use today. People went out and did real work and learned useful skills. The reason the government paid for it was that nobody else would fund those or similar projects, not that the projects weren't worth doing. Currently, such employme
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...Currently, such employment would be mostly make-work, since we can't efficiently use large numbers of low-skill people, and the skills they learned wouldn't get them a decent living.
This is one reason why mass illegal immigration should be resisted, not given amnesty. They are by definition low skill people whose limited skills won't get them a decent living. Moreover they make life even harder for the low skill people that we already have here. Many downsides just so that the upper middle class and the rich get low cost gardeners and housekeepers.
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I agree with that, but giving illegal immigrants amnesty does improve the situation. What illegal immigration mostly does is create a pool of abusable labor that can be paid peanuts and treated illegally without the laborer having recourse.
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I agree with that, but giving illegal immigrants amnesty does improve the situation. What illegal immigration mostly does is create a pool of abusable labor that can be paid peanuts and treated illegally without the laborer having recourse.
Removing the illegals would also get rid of the pool of people vulnerable to abuse. It would also help deter future illegals. Amnesty creates a moral hazard - ie you broke the law and were rewarded. Expect more illegals, not less, if you give amnesty. Thus defeating the goal of removing the pool of people vulnerable to abuse.
AI is a red herring (Score:2)
I don't see any reason to complicate the issue by bringing AI into it. Jobs get created and destroyed all time time for lots of reasons. For example, lots of companies are eliminating cashier and checker jobs in favor of self-service kiosks/self-checkout/mobile apps. Is that because technology and AI became good enough and cheaper? Because the minimum wage went up? Because customers prefer self-checkout? Because it improves throughput? Who knows? I certainly don't.
If we want to help re-train people who lose
Take my job.... please! (Score:1)
Spend a bit to save a bit (Score:1)
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How is being a human required for any of those? All those jobs could be done by automatons of varying degrees of realism. A medium-sized shellscript would be an improvement over the current US President.