The problem with Conservative economics (Al Gore, employment, fast food, global warming)
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A popular saying is "the best welfare program is a job". In much of human history I think I can somewhat agree with that. But right now is not a typical time in human history.
As someone working in High Tech living in a major Tech hub, I have a closer view than many into just how much technology is changing the economy. In my thinking I am actually somewhat conservative and it never ceases to blow my mind just how advanced computers have become. I would be skeptical was I not forced to hang out daily with people who create disruptive technologies.
Nobody, and I do mean nobody, will be driving for a living, be that a cab, a truck or an airplane, by the time we have our 50th President. Nobody will be paid for taking cash from people at checkout. Nobody is going to be hired by call centers. Nobody is going to be looking over paperwork to draw conclusions from it. And those manufacturing jobs that some politicians like so much will not exist either.
So this Protestant idea that if you just work hard you'll make it and if you don't make it you're just lazy, is quickly becoming a cruel fairy tail. Unless you are have specialized professional training, there is no wealth for you to be gained by employment. And even for us professionals, things are not so peachy, at least in the longer term.
I just do not see a future in which we keep a civilized society without a massive welfare state. No amount of cutting taxes and regulations will preserve jobs for the many of us who are only capable of repetitive tasks. Without generous wealth redistribution from corporate elites, over a third of us will be in dire poverty.
American voters are fast asleep, dreaming about mythical past that never really existed, and when they wake up, over a third of them will find themselves completely unneeded in this new world, through no fault of their own. America will never be great again unless it grows out of its outdated founding myth that your survival should be tied to work you do.
I don't doubt there will be changes but the Jupiter II supposedly left the Earth in 1997. As a kid we were told we all would be zipping around in flying cars by now.
We've also had the discussion many times and nothing has really changed from the last 20.
I foresee a future that is not that far off where more automation will give people more time to do what they want and most will become stuck to their couches and others will be out protesting Trump.
Amazon just bought Wholefoods . I wonder if we will soon be seeing drones dropping off groceries ?
Technology is amazing but with more and more people becoming dependent on it, it is going to be a scary day when the power goes off.
"Jobs at risk include a diverse range of service and professional positions. Retail and fast-food jobs will be almost entirely automated. Manual laborers and construction workers will be replaced by robots; long-haul truck drivers by self-driving trucks; accountants, clerks, paralegals, telemarketers and customer-service reps by artificial intelligence; and security guards by robots and drones. Even professionals in the fields of accounting, law, finance, consulting, journalism and medicine are at risk of losing their jobs to smart machines."
I don't doubt there will be changes but the Jupiter II supposedly left the Earth in 1997. As a kid we were told we all would be zipping around in flying cars by now.
We've also had the discussion many times and nothing has really changed from the last 20.
The invention of the Internet and computung is on par with Industrialization as far as its impact on humanity goes. Nothing like this has happened in the lifetimes of anyone reading this.
But if you study history, you will see just how dramatic and painful major economic shifts have been. Sure, in the end Industrialization made the world a better place but in between there were a couple of world wars and a few murderous regime changes in places like Russia and China.
I am worried about this in between period. If you have 40% of the population starving or nearly starving, they are not just going to put on brave faces and salute the flag. Our present economic policy that can best be described as "let the chips fall where they may" is wasting the precious little time that we may have to make the adjustment less painful.
Yeah, a lot of us on C-D are talking about this. The commentators on newspaper articles are talking about this. But are the politicians talking about it? No, all you get is crickets!
In the long term the global population will shrink to fit the number of roles left by automation, just as the global population swelled to fit the number of roles created by industrialization.
In the meantime I agree some form of welfare should be used to tide people over. It will be a cheaper way to reduce the population than the Four Horsemen. Already we are seeing that when cosseted with welfare, many people stop reproducing.
I oppose UBI, and instead favor the piecemeal, means-tested approach. If the goal is to prevent people from dying of penury, then the latter is sufficient. UBI proponents almost always have an ulterior motive, usually not wanting to have to work for a living.
The invention of the Internet and computung is on par with Industrialization as far as its impact on humanity goes. Nothing like this has happened in the lifetimes of anyone reading this.
But if you study history, you will see just how dramatic and painful major economic shifts have been. Sure, in the end Industrialization made the world a better place but in between there were a couple of world wars and a few murderous regime changes in places like Russia and China.
I am worried about this in between period. If you have 40% of the population starving or nearly starving, they are not just going to put on brave faces and salute the flag. Our present economic policy that can best be described as "let the chips fall where they may" is wasting the precious little time that we may have to make the adjustment less painful.
There are a few of us here on C-D who have had this discussion a few times, and what you generally get in response by most posters is, meh, the car replaced the horse and we all adapted. What they fail to realize is that in that analogy, we are the horses. How many working horses are there left in the world?
Like you, I worry about the in between time, because we are wholly unprepared for what is coming at us at breakneck speed. I do a lot of work for one of the largest professional services consulting firms in the world, and they are talking about it. They know it's on the near horizon. But you won't hear any politicians discussing it because the reality is pretty bleak in the near term, and they are completely incapable of being proactive. They tend to deal with things only after they become so obvious they cannot be ignored any longer.
Without any preparation for the massive changes that are on the way it is going to be a scary and dangerous time. And no one is willing to admit this or even talk about possible ways of dealing with it. And that's going to mean a lot of pain for a whole lot of people. Anyone here who thinks they are safe from this massive technological disruption is whistling past the graveyard.
I don't doubt there will be changes but the Jupiter II supposedly left the Earth in 1997. As a kid we were told we all would be zipping around in flying cars by now.
We've also had the discussion many times and nothing has really changed from the last 20.
I see your point of how futurists and alarmists are usually wrong with their time projections, and this is true for everything from flying cars to Al Gores global warming projections.
I remember a few years back being on the phone with a computer and I had to repeat things 5x before the computer recognized what I was saying. But today when I pick up a smart phone or my Cox cable TV remote these new handheld computers accurately recognize 99% of the things I say. And today smart phone technology has the ability to replace human workers that take verbal orders, from fast food restaurant order takers to many kinds of telephone operators.
In 2011 a computer called "Watson" was able to beat all the best human players on the TV game show Jeopardy. And if technology keeps advancing in the near future computers like Watson will be able to take 99% of human jobs that involve talking and communication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)
Clearly robots will one day take most human jobs, the only question is when will it happen. And when the day come that robots take most of our jobs what can we do to insure there are not huge numbers of people without jobs living in poverty?
We could all man up and abolish currency monopolies and open the means of production to all where the fruits of your labor aren't pulled together and redistributed by a centralized involuntary entity.
But the Morgans, Rockefellers and Rothschilds would have you killed if you actively tried to promote it.
Decisions, decisions...
But yeah, focus on "changing technologies". Yeah, that will never be a problem again once we "fix it" this one time.
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