
Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality - MilnerRoute
https://slate.com/business/2019/10/andrew-yang-automation-unemployment-freedom-dividend.html
======
PakG1
_In a 2018 paper, UC–Berkeley sociologist Steve Viscelli suggested that in the
most likely scenario, long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages,
will be replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous
vehicles through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle
less well than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs
changing._

I'm not sure if the author is claiming that the job displacement will be 1:1.
Does anyone honestly think it would be 1:1? I don't think so. And if more jobs
are disappearing than are being created, there is a net job loss; also the
author agrees that the new jobs would be lower pay. Whether jobs will be
created in entirely and unpredictably new industries is besides the point.
Yang's point is that everyday people are inadequately prepared to make _that
transition_ to new jobs. He frequently cites data that the US federal
government sucks at job retraining.

IF various tech companies are successful in their endeavors (and yes, that's a
big if), it will be true that a lot of people will need to transition to
something new. And given recent demos by various tech companies for voice AI
tech (yeah, Google's really was impressive when it came out, and it will
probably get better until it's commercialized one day), self-driving tech (I'm
a skeptic for the short-term, but it will probably happen in the long-term),
and etc, I think the subject is ignored at the working population's peril.
Never mind self-checkout, which is already a reality and steadily gaining
ground.

~~~
alexandercrohde
Yeah, honestly I don't really understand the article's point.

Is it that say McDonalds switching to electronic kiosks to order your burger
is going to create as MANY tech jobs as it took away? Because that doesn't
pass the smell test.

~~~
nyhc99
There were a slew of anti-yang articles that came out from the leftmost media
sources immediately after the debate, owing to the fact that Yang made
Elizabeth Warren look unprepared in her answer about job loss.

Andrew Yang, snake oil salesman:
[https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/andrew-yang-tech-
entr...](https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/andrew-yang-tech-entrepreneur-
fears-automation-self-driving-cars/)

Is Yang doing more harm than good to the case for universal income?:
[https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/16/andrew-
ya...](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/16/andrew-yang-
universal-basic-income-229847)

Andrew Yang is Full of it: [https://slate.com/business/2019/10/andrew-yang-
automation-un...](https://slate.com/business/2019/10/andrew-yang-automation-
unemployment-freedom-dividend.html)

There was one more I can't find. It's good to be generating hit pieces; it
means someone views you as a threat.

~~~
jonnycomputer
National Review a leftmost media source?

~~~
curuinor
Or Politico, or Slate. When I hear "leftmost" I'm thinking like, Jacobin or
Chapo

------
brycehamrick
I'm not a Yang supporter but this article is total garbage. Slate has been
very disappointing lately.

The key takeaway seems to be while Yang says automation has displaced jobs
there's a lack of academic consensus on the weight placed between trade policy
and technology improvements; but everyone agrees both have had a significant
effect.

Ok... so we shouldn't be coming up with a plan for how to address economic
changes due to technology based on "it's historic effect has possibly been
outweighed by other factors" even though we all agree it will continue to have
an effect in the future?

Also just want to point out that anyone using the reported federal
unemployment rate as a measure of overall employment health has already lost
all credibility to write on the topic.

~~~
fullshark
Agreed, there are some good points in the piece, but the headline and
concluding paragraph are not supported by the body.

~~~
mikeg8
Curious as to what you identified as a good point? I didn’t really see any to
be honest

~~~
fullshark
I think Yang has been overstating automation’s impact, in part because that’s
necessary for political messaging. Sounds like the Ball State study has some
issues.

------
kadoban
"[...] Long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages, will be
replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous vehicles
through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle less well
than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs changing."

Uhm, that's halfway decent careers turning into far fewer and shittier jobs.
That's jobs disappearing. And it ignores that eventually someone will automate
even that part away, it'll just take a bit longer.

The article just seems to just be a series of quibbles that don't show Yang to
be wrong in any meaningful sense.

~~~
darkmoney007
That's BS about being capable of navigating Interstate highways autonomously.

Whoever does the research needs go actually go along an Over The Road truck
driver and actually see what challenges technology face.

Different highways with crumpling road markers. Severe weather. Unpredictable
human drivers. Fueling. Construction sites and their differences between
displaying markers.

I do not see autonomous technology taking over long haul truckers anytime
soon, especially if the state and federal government doesn't maintain the
highways and keeps cutting budget.

The few scenarios where the present technology can handle is a local route
that has greatly maintained roads and stable weather. Even in this case, it's
foolish to think human drivers will not be as careless as before. In fact, I
predict they will think its so safe that they will cut the truck off ever
closer, thus creating more disasters.

Source: I'm a trucker and know the challenges computer vision and its sensors
could possibly face.

~~~
manicdee
There are many routes which are possible to automate today. Those will become
human-free first, leaving the humans to compete for the remaining 95%.

Then another 5% of routes will become computer navigable, and the remaining
truckers will compete for the remaining jobs.

Then between automation and improved maintenance due to the higher regulatory
fees afforded by automation, more roads will become auto-navigable by dint of
maintenance and standardised marking.

There will be a pincer movement, roads coming up to standard, standards
converging on what automated trucks need, and automation becoming better at
navigating any road.

By 2030 there will be far fewer humans driving anything.

~~~
foogazi
What? 10 years?

------
losvedir
Since I like Yang and have Googled him before, Google thinks I should know
about every article written about him and keeps prompting me about them as
they come up.

This one, like so many lately, all have been hammering me with this idea that
Yang is predicting a dystopian horrible future.

On the contrary, I think Yang is fundamentally _optimistic_ about the future
and technology. He predicts that we will lose a lot of our current jobs and
that we need to put in place a government safety net in the form of UBI, but I
don't think _he_ considers it a dystopia.

I'm frustrated by all the editorializing in the headlines that I'm seeing. If
all you saw were all these headlines of late, you'd think Yang were some kind
of "sky is falling" candidate. But actually I like him because I feel like he
has a quite hopeful vision of the country and our future.

~~~
dao-
Agreed. If we're honest about it, labor sucks for most people. You have to get
up early, spend the day doing something you don't really care about, and get
home too burnt out to enjoy even the rest of your day. It's absurd to think
that liberating people from that labor regime through technology and a new
social contract must be dystopian.

------
outlace
I read the whole thing. It’s not so much that Yang is wrong but that the
automation-is-taking-all-the-jobs mantra is incomplete and that outsourcing to
places like China is a substantial part of it. From what I can tell from Yang-
like arguments outsourcing could be seen as a form of automation. The general
idea is that companies are incentivized to reduce labor costs so whether it’s
outsourcing or automation the end result is the same. Presumably if we
restrict outsourcing then just more investment into automation will take
place. It’s inevitable.

~~~
awinder
The most charitable way of looking at this is that yang wasn’t wrong, but he
wasn’t right either. He made explicit claims like “this isn’t a rules problem”
in response to trade policy; actually, there’s a lot of evidence that there
_is_ a trade policy problem.

------
munherty
I stopped reading after the author mentioned that Yang thinks that Ubi will
solve issues. Have you actually read into some of the things he said, Ying
explicitly says he does not think it will solve everything. Rather it gives
people a bit of leeway in the short-term to focus on other things. With the
hope that it will lead to more entrepreneurial things, but knows more likely
it will go towards random things in each individual's life

~~~
aodin
I think the best summary of Yang's view of UBI comes from his own FAQ [1]:

> We are experiencing the greatest economic and technological shift in human
> history, and our institutions can’t keep up. Without the Freedom Dividend,
> we will see opportunities shrink as more and more work gets performed by
> software, AI, and robots. Markets don’t work well when people don’t have any
> money to spend. The Freedom Dividend is a vital step to helping society
> transform through the greatest automation wave in human history.

[1] [https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-
faq/](https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/)

------
aodin
> over the very long term, automation probably has played a role in limiting
> manufacturing’s share of employment in the U.S. Factories really have become
> more advanced and efficient since, say, the 1970s.

Can anyone at Slate read a chart? US employment in manufacturing as a
percentage of non-farm labor dropped from 32% post-WW2 to less than 10% today
[1]. This change didn't start "sometime in the 1970s", but has been a
consistent downward trend post-WW2. The low hanging fruit of automation (from
mechanical feedback mechanisms to programmable logic controllers) are all
pre-1970s inventions.

And so what if different jobs are created for those that are lost? The article
itself admits those jobs will either be lower paying or require more advanced
education. Job re-training is mostly a myth [2]. No matter what, an entire
generation of unemployed will suffer. I grew up in Detroit. I know what
happens when the jobs base shifts.

[1] [https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/04/the-decline-of-
manuf...](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/04/the-decline-of-
manufacturing/)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/retraining-
jobs-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/retraining-jobs-
unemployment.html)

~~~
dao-
> And so what if different jobs are created for those that are lost? The
> article itself admits those jobs will either be lower paying or require more
> advanced education

And even this will only last so long. With ever more advanced robotics and AI,
there will be fewer and fewer possible lower paying jobs as well as advanced
jobs that average Joe could even be educated for. Humans have finite muscle
power and brain capacity. Is it not obvious that as technology becomes more
potent, we'll reach a point where it just doesn't make sense anymore to make
the masses spend their days working bullshit jobs?

------
theferalrobot
> Following the debate, a “fact check” by the AP claimed that Yang was
> right... “Economists mostly blame [manufacturing] job losses on automation
> and robots, not trade deals,” it stated. But this was incorrect. No such
> consensus exists

So they claim AP and Yang are incorrect but also state there is no consensus.
This piece seems more like it is trying to justify the warren gaffe in the
last debate by muddying the waters. The truth is be it automation or
outsourcing our economy is changing and we need to be prepared for it.

~~~
defen
I would like to know which mainstream economists blame trade deals. Ideally
stuff that was published more than 5 years ago.

------
aey
Yang is totally wrong about automation. The main cause of the shift of
manufacturing from US to China is trade policy and China’s monetary policy.

If automation was the problem, then US would be price competitive on goods
with China. Somehow US automation is only good enough to eliminate jobs in the
US, but not good enough to compete with cheap labor in China.

~~~
ivalm
Whatever automation you can do in the US you can also do in China but with
lower regulation. Whatever labor costs left over are also cheaper. What I mean
is that automation is not an inherent advantage of the US.

~~~
jbay808
Absolutely. In fact industrial automation components (robots, servos, linear
bearings, etc) have been in huge demand from China. Suppliers often sell the
same components there for half the price as they charge in the US for the same
quality and quantities. Domestic Chinese companies are becoming major
suppliers of a lot of factory automation equipment like presses, laser
welders, coil winders, etc.

There's no reason to think the US has an advantage in automation. In fact,
it's much easier as an automation engineer to design automation processes for
the factory that's around the corner than to do so for a factory in another
time zone that 90% of your team has never seen in person.

------
aeturnum
I generally favor UBI because it's basically wealth transfer from the wealthy
to the less wealthy and I support those policies.

UBI seems like a poor response to the shifting nature of work. Yang himself
implies that automation will "come for" some groups before others. I.e.
subsequent subsets of the population will lose 100% of their income.
Increasing the income of everyone seems like a poor response. If we want to
support workers who worked or trained for a job that has been automated away
why don't we...do that?

If we want to overhaul our society into a place that no longer forces people
to work to live I'm also in favor of that! It's just different.

~~~
mrob
Because UBI is the only welfare system that can't be gamed. How do you
identify "workers who worked or trained for a job that has been automated
away"? Non-universal welfare wastes a lot of resources on conflict between
potential welfare recipients and the state, and it inevitably mis-categorizes
people, which causes suffering either directly when the "deserving" are denied
it, or via resentment when the "undeserving" are granted it.

~~~
aeturnum
>Non-universal welfare wastes a lot of resources

It seems like you're saying that UBI is more efficient we don't need spend
resources on targeting it. I 100% agree for the _general case_ of wealth
transfer. I think it's very weak for addressing specific job losses.

So, let's say we have 100 people and 10 of them lost their jobs to automation
but we don't know which. One option is the "Yang plan" of $12 a year ($1 a
month), so we have a budget of $1200[0]. That spends $1200 giving $120 of
assistance to the people we want to help. This plan is 10% efficient _if the
point is to help those who have lost their jobs_. In fact, with a budget of
$1200, we can spend up to $108 per person identifying if they lost their job
due to automation and have the same efficiency (10%). That is a really high
ceiling on the cost of conflict.

I'm very skeptical that in any real world situation the cost of identifying
worthy recipients is greater than the "loss" of giving everyone else money.
Again, only if the goal is _helping workers who lost their jobs._ Hell, even
if you're wrong 50% of the time and give 15 people $12, you would need your
method of identification to cost $60 (5x the benefit) for it to be 10%
efficient!

Again, I favor UBI and I favor transforming society to function differently,
but that's not helping workers who lost jobs.

[0] These are ofc not the real numbers Yang is suggesting

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I always assumed part or perhaps most of the funding would come from
flattening the tax system.

------
crazy5sheep
China or not, most of the jobs won't come back, they were eliminated by
automation. The bottom line of the so called UBI is the redistribution of
wealth. It's not only for individuals, but regions too. I somewhat image that
the money you give to individuals is able to encourage them to move to regions
where there are less jobs, but lower living cost. meanwhile, the newly moved
in individuals are able to revive the region, creating new local business and
jobs...etc.

~~~
HSO
Notably, jobs in China are and will be automated away just the same as in the
US and everywhere else. Technology and science are universal, you can't just
put a border in and think you're insulated. Apart from why one would even
_try_ to obstruct progress?

------
leerob
I don't think Yang is claiming the _only_ thing causing job loss is
automation. It's just one major factor, which will continue to rise into the
future.

I also don't think he believes it will put everyone in those industries out of
a job. I can see how the sound bites from the debate sound that way, but
unfortunately he probably has to use the worse-case scenario type examples.

------
gjmacd
Use your eyes. Have you walked into a Supermarket? Or better, when's the last
time you saw MORE retail store hiring MORE help and not actually cutting
(because Amazon's choking them off). Better, ATM machines are now charging
$5.00 per transaction fees because cash is no longer needed. Automation is a
bad word for all this -- it should be called simply "job replacement" \-- and
it comes in all forms of technology than can help us in many ways, but also
has ramifications like job loss. People need to use their eyes. He's not
wrong. He's not full of it.

------
ZeroGravitas
That's a strangely angry article and seems to miss the bigger point.

America changed its trade situation with China, which either made the US
better off or worse off. (I'm guessing the economic consensus for is better
off).

Basically the same applies to automation.

No individual factory worker or doctor or police officer made that happen, so
the benefits and/or costs should be spread around equally. UBI is one tool for
doing that. People who lose their job and need to retrain automatically get
cushioned, which lets your society be more ruthless about creative
destruction.

~~~
HSO
> _either made the US better off or worse off._

It's very hard (meaning impossible) to make such an assessment for the US as a
whole. Some groups net benefited from globalization and trade liberalization,
others net lost, for many it was a wash.

Remarkably, this is one of the predictions of mainstream economists (MSEs)
that is empirically true. What they should have stressed more, therefore, is
the distributional aspect of trade liberalization: that the gains from trade
must be distributed to compensate the losers. The gains are so large that this
could have been done and still leave something over for the natural
beneficiaries of free trade.

What Yang is saying, and I TOTALLY agree on this point, is that automation or
progress in AI is like that only ten times worse. We all know that tech is
full of natural monopolies, while the economic gains are HUGE because they are
aggregated over so many people/transactions/etc. and marginal costs are low.

Therefore we should think about reorienting our economies (talking globally
here, not just US) to ensure that we don't see the same that happened with
trade now with automation and AI. Namely huge segments of the population left
behind "because market" and all the gains accruing to a handful of data
oligarchs.

------
richpimp
I develop key performance indicator software for my company's manufacturing
plants. It's basically a real time analytics dashboard that also trends data
over time. One of the results of this software has been a better understanding
of the efficiencies (or really the lack thereof) and bottlenecks in our
processes. Identifying and understanding these KPIs has allowed our pilot
plant to cut significant labor costs without losing any productivity (no one
was fired, the positions in question weren't refilled due to attrition, which
is always high in a manufacturing job).

My point being, it isn't just robots and automation that reduce the labor
workforce. Better data and analytics are also having an effect, a trend I
don't see slowing down. As the market continues to shrink for the blue collar
workforce, something will definitely need to happen so as to not
disenfranchise large groups of people. Whether a freedom dividend is the
answer or not is up for debate. I think it will help more than it will harm.
There's always going to be someone who finds a way to game the system (the
perceived welfare queens). For many, though, an extra $1000 a month would
literally be life-changing.

------
wcunning
At the risk of continuing the non-conversation here, I feel like it's
important to consider countervailing long-term trends. I was listening to a
fascinating episode of the Macro Musings podcast with Alex Tabarrok of George
Mason and he brought up a very thought provoking point: the largest single
group of workers was the Baby Boom generation, the next largest is (broadly
speaking) their children, the Millenials. The number of Americans in the
workforce is currently at its peak for about the next hundred years simply by
number of people in their prime working years. This means that unless
automation vastly outstrips the decline in the number of prime age workers,
this problem won't directly be nearly as bad as people are saying. This is
further reinforced by the demographic trends among the changing generations of
workers -- Millenials aren't going into trucking or welding or other not-
currently-automated jobs at nearly the rate their parents did.

The obvious followup to that whole point is "what are the comparative effect
sizes of all of these various causal phenomena?" I don't happen to have the
answer to that, but I feel like it's worth pointing to at least some
mitigating factors.

------
MilnerRoute
The article's most compelling point for me is the graph it links to showing
all U.S. manufacturing jobs from 1939 to 2009.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP)

There's a big, sudden drop in 2000.

It also cites a paper that says that the number of _factories_ in the U.S. has
been dropping (between 2000 and 2014)...

~~~
trhway
>There's a big, sudden drop in 2000.

actually it is in 2001. Also in 2008. The years of big busts.

~~~
MilnerRoute
Yeah, but the jobs never come back after those drops. (It's almost entirely a
one-way trend over the last 19 years...)

There's a big three-year drop that starts in 2001. Then it goes from that
steep drop to a slowly-declining drop -- before that next massive "2008" drop
(which lasts through December of 2009).

So it seems plausible that the loss of jobs was caused by specific events.
(Whereas if it were the creep of automation, it seems like it'd be happening
more gradually, factory by factory....)

I guess you can argue that the economic hardship of a bust forced companies
into sudden and widespread cost-cutting measures like replacing humans with
robots. But another study cited in the article argues against that theory.
(The article acknowledges that automation has taken some jobs, but that it's a
much smaller fraction, and that latching onto that as the single explanation
makes us miss the other factors -- as well as possible solutions.)

------
Merrill
The real threat to jobs is business process automation. The ideal is to change
business processes to be like self serve gas stations where in the usual case
the customer does all the labor required and the individual transaction never
requires an employee's attention. Better sensors and actuators, embedded
technology, and artificial intelligence to handle all the corner cases of the
business process will allow 100% flow through for many other business
processes. This will result in a significant decrease in administrative, back-
office, and low level managerial jobs.

Trucking is just a nice example that is easy to explain to people. But the
overall trend is much broader and more complex involving 100s of thousands of
IT workers incrementally removing costs.

------
peisistratos
> Meanwhile, the overall job market is fine...

In constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, according to the US government's
Bureau of Labor statistics, current earnings for production, nonsupervisory
employees on private non farm payrolls is $23.65, in constant inflation-
adjusted 1983 dollars for September 2019.

In February 1973 that was $23.33 an hour. Almost a half century of economic
growth, in a good economy, and workers are making only 32 cents more an hour
than they did 46 years ago.

If pundits were describing wages in the Soviet Union, this would be called 46
years of stagnation and so forth. Whereas we have someone from the Bill Gates
funded corporation Slate telling us "the overall job market is fine" and other
niceties.

~~~
foogazi
Wondering aloud if there are any studies that figure out how much these
workers should be earning proportional to the productivity increases in the
last 40 years?

What is the “cut” workers can expect from their output charted through the
last century - this number must exist

------
stingrae
Even in China labor is getting more and more expensive. So sure there was some
loss of manufacturing jobs to China in the 2000s but now even China is losing
it to automation and outsourcing as labor rates go up.

------
mikedilger
This complaint about robots and AI taking all our jobs is hundreds of years
old. Still hasn't happened. US is at record levels of employment. Humans are
terrible at predicting the future. Let's just wait and see and react when it
actually happens. My guess... there will be plenty of jobs for humans for
thousands of years to come.

Ever since the industrial revolution jobs have gone by the wayside. We no
longer have wagon wheel makers, or people cutting pins from long spools of
wire. If you just look at the jobs going away, you're missing the other side
of the picture, the jobs being created.

Jobs are essentially just things that humans do to improve our lives. If you
imagine that you were infinitely rich, what kinds of things might you want
someone to do that isn't getting done? I've got tons of housework and
yardwork, construction work, programming ideas, hell my brain is overflowing
with stuff that will never get done. Too many jobs. All those things are jobs.
Most of them cannot be automated anytime soon.

~~~
PakG1
_If you just look at the jobs going away, you 're missing the other side of
the picture, the jobs being created._

I don't think Yang is missing the other side of the picture. He's saying that
society sucks at getting displaced people to the other side in a humane
manner.

~~~
mikedilger
I don't disagree with that.

------
turtlecloud
Just more of a smear against Yang. The establishment is afraid.

Also the tint of anti Asian American racism - similar to SV when the hiring
team or management group tries to talk themselves into finding reasons to not
like a qualified candidate that does not fit the mold of the obediant Asian
worker drone. Usually done insidiously to cast doubt on a person's character
etc.

------
remote_phone
The other part of the equation is that retraining are a complete failure. The
idea you can teach a truck driver or a coal miner to code is a fallacy.

Retaining programs have a 0-15% success rate. It’s basically useless. What
happens is that middle aged people get their jobs automated away and they are
left with nothing. Look at what happened after manufacturing jobs left the
Midwest. This is the bigger problem is that large swathes of the population
will have no viable jobs after automation.

------
S_A_P
I’ve done some consulting at quite a few bigcorps in the Houston area. The
amount of outsourcing of IT generalist work that I’ve seen is downright scary.
Regardless of political affiliation, this should be front and center for both
parties. It is the go to move for executives that want to spin stagnant growth
into profitability. I generally disagree with tariffs. However outsourced work
should be subject to a 100% tariff so that it’s disincentivized.

------
darepublic
Don't know how quickly it is coming but I think ubi is the right direction for
civilization. People are fighting tooth and nail for meaningless bullshit jobs
that low key function as a form of government assistance but waste your entire
adult life in the process.

------
AzzieElbab
I could understand if they questioned universal basic income or whether Yang's
1k/m will do any good, but plainly denying what is happening before your very
eyes indicates a hack or a hit job. Also, focusing on manufacturing jobs alone
is simply misleading.

------
Mountain_Skies
If the need for low to moderate skilled labor is going away, why are we still
importing so many workers in those skill ranges?

------
braindeath
So the article is probably correct that trade has been a bigger issue than
automation. Well let’s assume that’s true, to be charitable to the mentally
challenged Slate authors.

So what happens after you put the screws to trade? That certainly isn’t going
to decrease automation as an alternative. What happened from 2000-2010 doesn’t
really matter, they should save their breath.

------
baby
So I guess this means that Stephen Hawking was wrong as well?

------
pythonwutang
Andrew Yang is the Trump of tech. And his brand of politics is more a
dangerous threat to democracy than Trump’s is. His messaging and policies are
just like Trump’s in that they’re dumbed down, optimized for social media
likes and subtly enforce a world view where extreme income inequality is
inevitable so let’s make the best of it. AI/tech isn’t going to kill the
middle class by itself. This destruction will be assisted by technocracy
propagandists like Yang.

------
manicdee
Obligatory CGP Grey “Humans Need Not Apply” spruiking:
[https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU](https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU)

Deals with the issue of why current types of automation are different to
industrial automation an why we won’t be creating new “machine fixer” jobs
when the new machines take our old jobs.

------
oblib
“You're creating a slippery slide transfer straight into socialism”

This seems to beg the question: "Would Amazon be less successful if it paid a
living wage to those who labor in its warehouses and those who work to
manufacture the products it sells?"

~~~
foogazi
1\. Does Amazon get away with paying warehouse workers less than others?

2\. Are you presuming no one else will pay them a living wage either so they
MUST work at Amazon?

3\. Are Amazon warehouse workers prevented from getting living wage jobs
elsewhere?

~~~
oblib
Those are stupid excuses posing as questions, but I'll play along and answer
them...

1\. Yes 2\. No & Yes 3\. Yes

------
zackmorris
_And therein lies the real problem with Yang’s outlook. It’s not just
unrealistic. It’s lazy._

And this is why Yang is the most prescient of any of the candidates. He looked
at the problem, broke it down into its basic components, extrapolated what was
going to happen, and found the most straightforward answer (UBI) from the
large search space of possible solutions. You know, like a computer programmer
would.

So I fundamentally disagree with the article for the following reasons:

* If I had a budget of a few million dollars and a small team of geeks like me, I could write a (non-general) AI myself in 2-10 years that would pass the Turing test in any specific area, a bit Like IBM's Watson. And I'm nobody. The reason this won't happen is that I don't have the social proof (I haven't won the internet lottery or proceeded through the graduate level accolades or submitted papers so anyone would listen to me) so I'll likely spend the rest of my life making rent instead of making any meaningful contribution to society. And there are a million software developers around the world just like me. And a million architects who will never design a building. And a million biologists who will never cure a disease. This is the great tragedy of the commons of our time, that creates the underemployment that contributes to the wealth inequality that is the one thing holding AI back. You know, the very thing that Yang is trying to solve with UBI.

* I agree that shortsighted trade policies started by Reagan in the 80s with his "I'm from the government and am here to help" deregulation anti-pattern, exacerbated by Clinton with NAFTA, and beaten like a dead horse with George W Bush's offshoring/tax cut for the wealthy blue pill orgy, is the second biggest reason that we may have passed the point of no return on preserving (at least American) jobs. But half the US population won't concede this point or think outside the box for empathetic solutions, so I don't predict that this will be fixed before the singularity. It's a moot point now.

* I predict that the tech industry will go the wrong direction with AI, in roughly this order: industry invests heavily in cybersecurity and profit-driven artificial intelligence research to better exploit users by leveraging their shopping addictions, social/mobile bubble pops as independent developers are undermined further by receiving an ever-smaller slice of the pie, a global recession rivaling the dotcom crash and housing bubble pop hits which halts progress in social causes similarly to what happened during the lost decade of the 2000s, the US doubles down on trying every wrong thing before being forced to do the right thing (further tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization of remaining government services, no UBI because there is no money for that, further regression into service industry feudalism), sometime between 2025 and 2030 the world comes out of recession but now all money passes through an online gatekeeper (whatever follows Amazon) as the world transitions from sovereign nations to having its monetary policy determined by corporations, Stockholm syndrome far exceeding the Trump phenomenom grips the world in luddite-inspired rejection of magic technologies like AI, climate change falls from the forefront of concerns as simple human incursion into every last wild place on Earth creates an instability in civilization due to having so many insurrection cells crossing national boundaries that civic discourse gives way to political infighting and canabalistic government policy, a third world war or dystopian new world order or singularity hit all at about the same time between 2040 and 2050 so that only the rich and powerful have oracle-level AI technology and live in gated communities while the world burns, the masses find that they still need food in VR and then rise up and something happens which unfortunately can't really be predicted past this point.

I really hope that I'm wrong. But the last 20 years have been so bizarre
compared to what I thought was going to happen while watching the Matrix in
1999 that I'd argue that we're already living in the early stages of dystopia.
So I think we have a year or two left before the next planned recession takes
the choice away from us. If even Hacker News is skeptical of the things that
Yang is suggesting, then we are well and truly hosed.

~~~
foogazi
> If I had a budget of a few million dollars

But 1k a month would make this happen?

If 1k UBI is causing this tragedy of the commons then you owe it to yourself
to fix this, earn more, move to LCOL area and start curing diseases

~~~
nitePhyyre
$1000 a month 12 months a year 10 people team 10 years.

That's 1.2 million.

------
human_error
Sounds like this is a paid article for an agenda. Yang sees where automation
is going and as far as I know he's the only candidate talks about automation
and coming up with solutions.

