What To Do About The Long-Term Implications of Automation

Obviously you are not a businessman.

 

Its a reasonalble doubt to have

The swamp rats in washington do not want the wall

And they have many tricks to stall until trump leaves office

 

Meta,I'm going to add some comments to your quoted four-phased approach here. First, I do think it is thought out and intended to be fair and balanced. To some degree this is a "devils advocate" response, pointing out a few things about the basic premise.

I agree that if people are in need of shelter, health care, etc. then its the government's responsibility, not private industry's.
And the government ought to do something to help. I'm not suggesting that government force private industry to do anything at all beyond paying their designated share of taxes, and like you said, follow appropriate regulations.

Everybody is in need of shelter, food, health care, etc- and there is a line of responsibility. The first person is that line is the person in need, and if each one of us took care of that one person- nobody would be left.out. The only proper time that responsibility belongs elsewhere is in childhood, and parents care for us. As we reach maturity, that responsibility transfers to us. IF we do not keep that in mind, and allow that need to become government's responsibility in the minds of a large percentage of people, we open a door to abuse.

Adults who simply will not accept responsibility for themselves, and those who simply cannot understand otherwise and believe society has the obligation to parent everyone are the abusers. This is to the detriment of those who are genuinely in need who would help themselves if they could and deserve our full support. I'm saying that government tends to label anybody who says "I can't" as a person in need- and that becomes a magnet for vast numbers who are really saying "I won't" and have no problem becoming what ever qualifies for free support. This is a substantial part of the welfare world population, and the reason for it's image. Problem is that those who really deserve our help are stigmatized by the image; they loathe the idea of being labeled that way. Some of them are proud enough they would rather do without than ask for help that would label them as taking welfare- which winds up taking their self-respect. I think it's shameful we can't do better, and all that takes is to find a way to recognize the difference in those needing a hand-up or needing support that cannot do for themselves- and the people looking for a hand-out so they don't have to do for themselves.

IF we were able to differentiate this, the whole system would become far more respectable, and a lot of people (and businesses) that now see welfare services as a way to redistribute wealth or steal money legally- would be stepping forward and happy to help. I don't know how that can be done- I'm just trying to shed some light on the reasons for the problems, and a way that would bring people to voluntarily support it. A great many of us are happy to help those really in need- be they neighbors or strangers.
Helping those in need is a natural human quality, but feeling offended when you find yourself being milked to feed those too lazy to do for themselves is also natural- and it makes us believe that trying to help is subsidizing the parasites of society.

There is a great deal of abuse in the system, and little real effort to clean it up. It's politically incorrect to call it out as well, even when the problems are obvious and blatant. If one looks at what industry does now on a voluntary basis, you find they have founded and funded hundreds of charitable organizations for a wide variety of purposes. There is a reason why that method is so widely supported (as opposed to giving it to government for welfare funding). That is because they want that money to actually go where it will achieve help for those in need, rather than support those too lazy to do for themselves. Business already IS volunteering on it's own- they just don't want their money being used to feed the problem.

It is bureaucracy that can't see the differences here. Business does, and I think most people do too. It's one problem, not dozens. If that problem could be resolved or greatly improved, I think your objectives would be met.

 

There is no American Free Market when the government uses it's influence to control that marketplace. Check out the word 'free' and I don't think you'll find words like 'force'...

 

I 100% disagree; Americans live better than most people on Earth. Any American today can obtain an unskilled job, work hard at that job, increase their job functions, increase their pay, change jobs for greater opportunities, and even start their own businesses. Any American who cannot achieve this has built in personal limitations or they're just too lazy. Are many of these things difficult to achieve...hell yes...and they take time...but who says achieving everything one wants should be a cake-walk? I'm sick and tired of all the BS whining from Americans who fail! If they're not working 10 hour days to achieve the best in life then they must accept less based on their lack of personal investment. It's not the job of business to pay everyone living wages and benefits? Employers pay whatever the labor demands...it's this simple. Having government 'force' higher pay/benefits will never solve a single problem.

I think each American should look in their mirror and take personal responsibility for their choices in life...

 

How can private for-profit business and social not-for-profit government be partners? For-profit businesses must satisfy the demands of consumers. Not-for-profit government needs to satisfy 'some' demands from citizens. Keep them separated as far as possible!

 

I don't have personal failure to worry about. I'm talking about social failure! The ability of the collective we to have open-mined dialogue and find consensus on anything today...it does not exist! And you cannot force it to exist. It's also possible for humans to live 300 years...but we don't yet know how to achieve this...

 

Not so fast! Automatons have their uses. One of them is serving the White House as press secretary, and she gives the press robot briefings almost daily. Sean Spicer, who appears to have been a human, was unable to spout nonsense in such a mechanized monotone and was fired as a result.

 

Meta, consider a larger problem- and that is the deception of perceptions, meaning people see any large issue from one position and usually can't grasp the entire picture. A science professor gave me an analogy once regarding the flat earth- that to a tiny animal living on the surface of a large ball. it was not only logical that the earth was flat, is was beyond question. He was unable to get the perspective view to prove anything else.

In society we have many positions and each sees thing differently, coming to honestly believe in their conclusions. Most of them are wrong, at least to some degree- and most of them will apply a rational or logic which allow them to interpret what they see is the way that provides the most support for what they would like to believe. They can arrive at that point and still be honest with themselves.... but usually, it gets taken further; they start disregarding some facts to maintain a desired conclusion- then they start stretching others to invent facts that never existed. Lots of mental gymnastics involved. Some men can accept things as they are, but many are compelled to re-arrange reality to construct an ideological picture. It's natural for people to want to find answers to problems that make their own role innocent, to hold others responsible and become victims. It takes very strong character to do otherwise, and that is a commodity in serious shortage today.

If a person has the experience of being in many positions, their understanding adjusts and becomes more accurately based. For example, the conflict many see between business and labor. Almost every employer started out as an entry level employee of some kind, because he lacked the experience for something better. He has been in the position of working by the hour, of doing basic labor, of climbing the ladder of experience to gain- and quite likely of losing a job and having to search for a job. He has that perspective- it is part of his overall view of life. On the other hand, very few employees have ever been employers. They have never been in the position of having to make payroll, having to keep both customers and employees and government happy while having no guarantee of any income at all, and getting none of the benefits they provide for their employees- unemployment insurance, workmans comp, etc. A very common belief among employees is that they do all the work, and the boss makes all the money. Total lack of perspective allows them to assume such things- but of course with a little license of logic to ignore a number of facts that are obviously true.

Under our system, nobody is forced to work at anything. While some say that the fact they need an income is some kind of slavery, they do indeed have exactly the same opportunity as the person who decides to risk everything and start a business. The person who starts a business must be in compliance with a multitude of laws designed to protect labor from business- but will find there are none at all to protect business from labor.... And there is most certainly a lot of actions where they will suffer as a consequence. The "working man" doesn't see that because of his perspective and the willingness to compromise the facts to support a desired conclusion.

Every person who has a job is in business for themselves- and don't understand it. Their "business" has many benefits the employer will never have. They are selling a product- personal services, for an agreed on price, just as the employer is, but that's were the similarity ends and the balance swings heavily in the favor of employees. Employees that don't do their work can be fired, but the employer still must pay for the hours they wasted. The employee has no liability- but everything he does can create liability for the employer. If he is injured on the job- regardless if it was due to his own carelessness or not- the employer pays. If the employee commits some offense with another employee or with customers, or does something to incur product liability- almost anything that happens because of them- becomes the liability of the employer, and the worst that can happen for the employee is to lose the job... lose his customer. The worst that can happen to his employer is total loss of the business. I've never talked to an employee who understands this, with the exception of one who previously owned his own business.

Unions have even more advantage. They have the ability to do things that would be illegal for any other entity- to literally force a company to agree to terms it does not want by having the power to put them out of business if they don't. The common term for that is extortion. The unions are the closest thing to legal organized crime that we have. I say that not from observation, but from personal experience. The threats to me personally included severe physical harm- as in, "would two broken legs change your mind?" They threaten workers who are too productive, insist they do less because they make the poor ones look bad. And of course, they have always had a substantial element of organized crime within the union power structure in large markets. Unions operate in a moral void- But despite this being common knowledge, many employees praise the unions. It's the ability to overlook all the criminal and unethical aspects involved because they might benefit from them... and that is the willing adjustment of perspective, the distortion of rationality and dismissal of one's moral compass for personal gain.

We make ourselves who we are- and some, with a combination of high motivation, skills and vision do far better than average. Even among entry level workers, there will be people who are 3-4 times more productive than others and produce higher quality at the same time- and those are the ones who will rise. The ones left behind will not, and yet resent those who do as the reason they have not.

A business is like a team, just like sports. You are competing with other teams- and the only way to win is to have good players who work together. So you look for the ones that are more productive, that support the team goals, and just like sports teams, the best rise to the top and get the most compensation. If you fail to pay them what they are worth- some other team will take them away from you. A business would be foolish to make employees the enemy... and usually don't. But employees are also fools when they make their employer their enemy- and they commonly do. They create their own perspective, react to what they have led themselves to believe, and ignore all the opportunity in favor of blaming the quality of their life on someone else. This is the self-fulfilling prophecy- selling yourself into a state of believing yourself to be a victim. This is "comfortable", as it absolves us of the responsibility for ourselves. It is so wide-spread as to be a politically popular belief among societies all over the world- and everywhere it thrives, people suffer for it.

Opportunity is everywhere- for everybody. It's not "easy", you don't just choose to be a winner; it takes a lot of self-discipline and hard work as well as judgment. The worst choice a person can make is to blame others for the state of their life, because in doing so they surrender their own power over their own destiny.... yet, we see that very perspective being promoted and endorsed everyday. There is an old saying- "We have met the enemy, and he is us". It is the lack of balanced perspective that has us believing otherwise.

 

If the swamp rats can delay till trump leaves office the wall will never get built

 

What about a UN Treaty BAN on further automation or better wind it back a decade, nations not signing would face a ban on imports from nations not signing this will protect jobs at the high end or low end so it should be popular enough for most nations to opt into and other nations who might resist couldn't afford to.

 

Why have automation, when you can have slave labor? Trump and the cons want to destroy the minimum wage and workers rights, so businesses can go back to paying fifty cents an hour and an 80 hour work week, with no weekends, no healthcare. and no workers comp.

So how will the cons stop this year's election? Oh i know, Twerp declares Marshall Law when he starts his war with Syria and Russia.

 

They should do the same thing that buggy whip makers did. Find another way to contribute to society.

 

Exactly!

Things have been changing since time began. Technology has made it come faster, but also opened up vast opportunities. People have always had to adapt to change; it is the norm- not the exception.

 

Did you bother to read the study?

To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier.

Their "novel methodology" is highly flawed and suspect.

To make matters worse, the Guassian process classifier is the wrong statistical model to use with their "novel methodology."

Their conclusions are couched in weasel words like "are likely" which is not the same as "will be."

Since you have no idea what jobs might be created by automation, or what jobs will be in demand otherwise, there is no point in wasting money, time and other valuable resources.

It's better to let the Free Market operate, instead of attempting to pick Winners & Losers.

In any event, as people see there are no jobs available, they will not be seeking employment, so the unemployment level will not rise drastically (since the unemployment figures are derived from people seeking work and not people who aren't working), nor will it remain high for any sustained length of time.

 

Yes, that is exactly how it works.

Truck drivers made very near what college graduates received, until Reagan allowed federal Guaranteed Student Loans and VA Benefits pay for truck driving schools. The market was flooded with truck drivers and their wages decreased dramatically due to the increased competition among truck drivers.

Same thing happened with key punch operators, who used to earn as much as $10/hour in the late 1960s and early 1970s, until high schools started offering courses in key punch operations, which flooded the market and drove the wages down to just above minimum wage.

Yes, and there are reams of data to support that conclusion.

Elementary and secondary school teachers have their wages set by unions, but in the absence of unions, and with an over-supply of teachers, their wages would drop to $12/hour to $15/hour. We saw something similar with pre-school/day-care teachers who were not unionized, but paid in the range of $12/hour to $15/hour until the market became flooded, driving down wages in some areas to just over the minimum wage.

Everyone's needs vary greatly. In the US, some people earning $11/hour have mortgages, while others earning $11/hour can't even pay for a month's rent, and would never qualify for a mortgage.

The Cost-of-Living in the US varies so greatly that some people qualify for HUD Section 8 housing earning $23.60/hour ($49,150 annually) while other single people don't qualify for HUD Section 8 housing because at $7.70/hour ($16,001 annually) they earn too much money.

It all depends upon in which one of the more than 1,500 separately functioning economies in the US a person lives.

The wages a person is willing to accept is dependent upon many factors.

The companies that complain about the lack of qualified candidates generally demand very specific unique requirements that cannot be met through education alone, rather it is a combination of education and the exact unique experience the employer "wants" that is causing the lack of candidates.

And not all of the jobs available require education, but they do require training, which is generally not available at the university level.

No, because high schools grotesquely inflate grades in order to meet certain State or federal requirements for funding, and to look good, and because there is intense pressure from parents who think their child is intelligent, in spite of the fact that their child is of rather unremarkable ordinary garden-variety intelligence.

You often see students with a 4.0 GPA in high school have only a 22 ACT score or 1500 SAT score, which tells you their high school grades were grotesquely over-inflated.

The vast majority of people are of rather ordinary intelligence, and not worthy of university education Sending them to a university will not improve their intelligence, but it will waste lots of money, time and resources.

The maximum ACT score is 30, so students with exceptional or above average intelligence should score at least 24.

The maximum SAT score is 2400, so students with exceptional or above average intelligence should score at least 1950.