Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Lord Liaden]

Let me put it this way. At the outset of the use of fossil fuels for manufacturing and electricity generation and powering automobiles, had we known at the time all the adverse effects of pollution from burning fossil fuels, at least some people would have invested time and thought and resources into mitigating the adverse side-effects and looking for less-problematic alternatives. Replacing up to 50% of existing jobs with automation in the next 40 years will be MASSIVELY DISRUPTIVE. We should plan ahead for that, shouldn't we?

 

Sadly, I fear not enough people would have invested time and thought into mitigating those effects. Because that also would have meant investing energy and money. Look at where we are on the global warming front today -- the warning has been in effect for decades, the science has been overwhelmingly in support of it for years. Yet we're still debating whether keeping our coastal cities from flooding is worth the negative impact on our economy. And that's with the dissemination of knowledge at an all-time high.

 

The normal state of the majority of humanity is complacency. As long as we're warm and our bellies are full, we don't want to deal with inconvenient truths. We're also too fixated on finding a technological fix for the problems we create with every new technology. As a people we need to change the way we live our lives, our relationship to our world. I'm not very optimistic we'll find the motivation to do that before things get so much worse that we'll have no choice, which may be too late. Then again, I grew up half expecting the world to end in a nuclear holocaust, or under a choking cloud of industrial pollution. We managed to find the wisdom to avert those man-made crises; maybe we'll avert this latest one in time.

[Lord Liaden]

Can I just say that this thread has become much more interesting and enlightening as it's moved away from Donald Trump and into deeper territory. Thank you all for the stimulating discussion.

[TheDarkness]

One of the things that gets me riled up is, yes, information is often right there, right there, just grab it(unless it's behind a subscription or something, journals, I'm looking at you), but unfortunately, all the bad information is ten times as prevalant because it's easier and can easily be turned into short-term gain if only enough people click on it, and it's always free to click on it.

 

On the flip side, my experiences here in China have taught me that the more that propaganda is used for, the less that the people who believed it before believe it now. It may still work, but it does not work based on belief in it.

 

Fortunately, our machine overlords will not need our votes.

[megaplayboy]

Well, "news" as we know it has explanatory value (what's happening and why), predictive value (what's going to happen next), and confirmatory value (what's happening to you is happening to other people). Propaganda, over the long term, fails to sustain these values--the explanations don't make sense or are contradictory, the predictions often are wrong, and the "official story" is contrary to lived experience.

[Old Man]

Replacing up to 50% of existing jobs with automation in the next 40 years

This claim seems preposterous and hysterical; I find myself wondering where it came from.

 

But we'll use that as the basis of a thought experiment.  In 40 years Automation has replaced 99% of all jobs except for the technopriests who fix what little needs fixing and the oligarchs who tell them what to do.  Every other function is being handled by our robot masters--food production, healthcare, construction, transportation, entertainment, and so on.  Virtually no one has a job, and no income, so the robot masters refuse to serve them, which... creates jobs for the humans.  Or the robots are so efficient that the cost of production of almost anything falls to almost zero, in which case it doesn't even matter that no one has a job because everything is free, and money becomes nothing more than the metric the oligarchs use to compare their space megayachts.

 

Admittedly this thought experiment is nearly as ridiculous as the original claim,  but I just don't see the screaming crisis posed by Automation in anything like a realistic time horizon.  No doubt there will be problems as occupations fall to the robots here and there, but to me there's nothing that can't be solved by judicious application of economic and educational policies.

[Pattern Ghost]

I just want the machines to advance enough to provide us with immortality but not far enough that they realize what a colossally bad idea it is.

[Kaspar Hauser]

Here's a link to a CBC article about a report that indicates that up to 42% of Canadian jobs are at risk of automation within the next 20 years:

 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/automation-job-brookfield-1.3636253

[TheDarkness]

Actually, the larger risk is that the point at which unemployment becomes a fairly consistent measure for extreme regime changing civil unrest is much lower in percentage than the numbers we're talking.

 

But, if you grew up on post apocalypse movies, if it does come to pass, just about any fashion choice will soon be in.

 

I actually don't imagine that economics in the future will resemble what it is now. Unless we don't automate all that much more, but that just serves as incentive for another country to automate and outperform. And then, we'll be serving foreign robots, and that's madness! We want our own robot overlords! Remember, cylons eventually had all kinds of models, handsome, pretty, or deadly looking. If we let the brits get the lead, it'll be daleks everywhere, and there's really no hot daleks, though they do have a respectable probe.

 

And that was the moment when it occured to me that there are probably dalek fanfics that I do not ever need to see.

[Kaspar Hauser]

IN-SEMINATE! IN-SEMINATE!

[megaplayboy]

The only jobs that would be hard to replace with automation are those at the extreme end of cognitive skills (less than 1% of jobs), perhaps creative jobs (performing arts), and those involving extensive social interaction. But maybe 40-90% of existing work could be broken down algorithmically and emulated by software and hardware, within our lifetimes.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Can I just say that this thread has become much more interesting and enlightening as it's moved away from Donald Trump and into deeper territory. Thank you all for the stimulating discussion.

Since I'm going to be contrarian here, Blah blah Donald Trump blah!

 

That aside, the "40% of jobs vulnerable to automation" is based on two ideas: First, that "routine" jobs can be automated, and that certain jobs are particularly routine. Second, various claims are made about what jobs might be automated based on the roll-out, or projected roll-out, of certain technologies.

 

Taking these in order: First, the idea that routine jobs can be automated is a corollary of the claim that routine actions can be automated. This is an obvious solecism: tasks which non-human actors can do, can be automated. Tasks that can't, can't. It doesn't matter whether they're routine or not. Machines have real problems with bipedal locomotion and high dexterity tasks in three dimensions, such as, for example, manipulating a wad of chiclet gum in an airway without closing it off. Literally, walking and chewing gum at the same time. Other tasks are ludicrously easy to automate. How many porters does a single Land Rover replace? Heck, how many porters does a raft replace? Rafts have been around for a long, long time. 

 

Second, "Certain jobs are routine." In the future, I recommend that people who are inclined to say that give it the same thought before hand as they might the inclination to helpfully suggest to their good friend that they're fat. You're being offensively oblivious. It's like the idea that fast food counter attendants are going away because customers might can push the icons on the keyboard instead of the attendants. Saying that just shows that you don't pay a lot of attention to what your friendly "fast food counter attendant" is doing. 

 

To take an example even closer to my heart, yes, "retail sales clerks" do some highly repetitive actions, for sure. They also solve a lot of problems standing at their tills. Or, at least, they're supposed to, Joanna and Assad. A surprising number of people (and not just dumb ones, either) struggle with the work. You will see, at your grocery store, a mix of self-checkout tills (with an attendant cashier) and manual cashiers. First (I know, I know, I'm introducing a sub-list here; have your computer sue me), there's a reason people still need to use manual checkouts. Second, there is a reason that self-serve banks have attendants. Third, self-serve checkouts were introduced almost twenty years ago. As with my raft example, the future of automation is long past us. 

 

Now, "projected roll-out." Sub-list again! First, take the intercity train some time, especially if you live in a city at the leading edge of railroad construction when the tide went into ebb. You will see abandone retail/wholesale areas along the train tracks, long rows of buildings, each with its own back entrance facing a siding off the railway. Long ago, when the First World War was a raw memory of just yesterday, the ancestors of Costco were built along this stretch, with the idea that they would each have their own boxcar, which would be broken off a goods train, shunted onto the siding, and unloaded into the back of the facility. Then, people realised that this was dumb, and gave up on it in favour of truck distribution, even though trucks needed drivers, and rail cars didn't. The future of automation is long behind us again. 

 

Having begun with trucks, I'll continue. It is the case, in the first instance, that people who talk about the roll-out of self-driving vehicles have been doing so for a very long time. There are projects going back to the 1920s, for the very good reason that almost the entire job can be automated. People got stuck with the last x% in 1928, and the progress since has been . . . incremental. Consider: Google began work on the driverless car in 2009, aiming at a commercial, driverless car by 2020. That, in itself, is a longer timeframe than the Apollo Programme, but this is a bit misleading, since 2009 is actually the year it lured Sebastian Thrun away from Stanford, where he had been working on driverless cars since 2005. The main driverless car research group's timeline is already considerably longer than Sputnik-Tranquility Base. It should be noted that they now have three years and ten months to make their 2020 target. It's getting pretty tight, Mr. Page. 

 

Here's the thing, though. Thrun has long since left Google, after burning through considerable goodwill with Google Glass, which literally could not do the one thing everyone expected it to do. (Virtual reality overlays.) I guess that it was anticlimactic when it was admitted that driverless cars wouldn't be able to use the incredibly expensive Google Streetview, because it lacked sufficient detail. That announcement was the source of a wave of stories about the Google self-driving car being dead, two years ago, and  the creeping purge of top management of the project over the last two years would seem to suggest that Google, er, "Alphabet" agrees with me.

 

On the other hand, the visionaries remain visionary. Co-founder Andrew Levandowski is working on a self-driving truck start-up, they say.

 

And I say, WTF? Does Mr. Levandowski have any idea what truck drivers actually do? Because I can enlighten him, and let's be romantic for a second, so I won't have to talk about cleaning up a toppled skid in the loading bay at 11:30 at night, which is the usual kind of routine-task, low-intelligence emergency that I see truck drives dealing with.

 

Let's instead, propose that it's the middle of the night, way out on I-666, halfway between Shelbyville and Springfield, and, oops, Adlai Stevenson Bridge over the Big Muddy is washed out. Traffic is being diverted onto a railway bridge that the National Guard has laid temporary deck on. >Runtime Interrupt Error: Caution Lights: Run Stop.exe: Run: Open Driver's Side Window: Run: Hello Officer, What is the Problem: Run: Tell Robo-hooker to keep her head down and Hide the Cyber-blow.exe; Run Initiate Detour Through half-washed out single-lane Rain-soaked bottomland County Road.exe: Run Carefully Drive Up on Ramp Without Causing Cargo to Shift.exe: Run Call Head Office And Tell Them I'll Be Late: Run Forget To Call Destination, Causing Huge Overtime.exe.  

 

Seriously: a self-driving truck only makes sense if you have a completely autonomous driving function; it only makes sense in intermodal routes where there's no swamping; it opens a huge can of worms with respect to everything from gassing up to hazards of the road; and it is only economically justifiable if the depreciation cost of the software and hardware is lower than the labour costs of the driver. 

 

Notice: driver>swamper. I could also bring up my earlier example of the lowly doc reviewer who's asked to do, you know, a little more. When you turn in the docs, could you maybe write a little, I don't know, appreciation of the documents you've been reviewing? Just something to help us put together the brief. I'm not saying that there'll be work for you next week if you don, and, if not. . . . See, this part is speculation on my part, because I'm not a law-talking guy. But I sure as heck know that when it comes to the day when an autonomous truck with a minimum wage swamper in the passenger's seat has a break down in its autonomously-driving function, the swamper will be expected to slide over into the place absented by the $25/hour driver and drive the truck. 

[Simon]

[Old Man]

But maybe 40-90% of existing work could be broken down algorithmically and emulated by software and hardware, within our lifetimes.

No, it can't.

[Starlord]

 

A lot of job loss is attributed to automation.  In fact, today I fired my writers because for the next four years, jokes will write themselves - Conan O'Brien

[Burrito Boy]

[TheDarkness]

In agreement with Lawnmower Boy, there seems to be this idea that the 'upper end' of skills is where the problems will lie for automation. I tend to disagree.

 

The entirety of all modern legal systems in the world are much easier to put in a computer than to emulate a more competent Lucy pulling chocolates from a production line. Ad hoc solutions abound in the manufacturing world, if this line is not working properly, that does not mean the best production choice is to stop that line, there may be no choice but to keep running it and having people separating things by hand and moving them by pallete jack to the area they need to go, and then, once the distribution goals of the day are reached, the line can be repaired.

 

In that process, probably the easiest part to automate would be defining the distribution goals. Probably the hardest would be the robot that has to now take things off of the line that are actually meant for other lines, find somewhere to put it, send it off and put an empty pallete in its place, stack a series of boxes whose shape and size cannot be predicted ahead of time so that they won't fall off the skid, etc.

 

That's what happens when one scanner goes out, or the system behind that scanner. If the scanner is toast, stopping the line may not be an option, and another scanner may take time to arrive by robotic car, dealing with traffic situations caused by weather.

 

In point of truth, I'm not sure we wouldn't be far better off with robotic lawyers whose cases are presented by actors, and I suspect this would be far simpler than manual labor robots.

 

Don't even get me started on contracting. If the robots have any programming that requires things to be up to code, EVERYONE, EVERYONE would find their house torn down the first time they tried to remodel anything. Which is probably part of the robot overlords' plans. Then, of course, it's to the HEMA camps with all of us.

 

Mining is another area where I could see it being problematic. Really, any manual labor tends to involve an imperfect walking environment, no matter the initial design of said environment, and, let's be clear, computers effectively mastered chess long before they could walk like a toddler on perfectly flat ground, much less tight quarters. The EASIEST tasks for a computer are not those involving physical motion at all. I think we project our own views on what is 'highly skilled jobs' in a way that would make no sense to a theoretical sentient computer.

[Iuz the Evil]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/02/22/politics/doj-withdraws-federal-protections-on-transgender-bathrooms-in-schools/index.html?client=ms-android-verizon

 

So, Title IX now is subject to state interpretation related to transgender youth using restrooms.

 

Huh. States get to interpret Federal regulation now? Looking forward to California interpreting Federal immigration statutes.

[DasBroot]

I've given up asking 'why' for the most part.

 

Sheesh, did he realise that he didn't make the front page of the US and Canada section of bbc.com/news yesterday or something?

[csyphrett]

Don't know if its true but word is going around that ICE pulled a woman with a brain tumor out of the hospital to send home.

CES

[TheDarkness]

Don't know if its true but word is going around that ICE pulled a woman with a brain tumor out of the hospital to send home.

CES

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/undocumented-woman-brain-tumor-removed-hospital-lawyer-article-1.2979956

 

Apparently a bit worse than that, even...

[Kaspar Hauser]

Is this what it looks like when civilization suffers a stroke?

[Joe Walsh]

What's the big deal? She's just the first lucky person to experience the new GOP version of Obamacare.

[aylwin13]

Yeah, it probably never happened. I'm sure that's just fake news.  

[Joe Walsh]

Has The Failing New York Times weighed in on it yet?  (And have they updated their masthead with their new name?)
 

[Kaspar Hauser]

Les Leopoldo: "Republicans now control 32 state legislatures and 33 governorships. They have majorities in both state legislative chambers as well as the governorships in 25 states. The Democrats have total control in only six states and legislative control in two more.

 

"If Republicans achieve veto-proof control in 38 states, they can do something that has never been done before—hold a constitutional convention, and then ratify new amendments that are put forth. To date, all amendments have been initiated from Congress where two-thirds of both houses are required. In either case, 38 states would be needed to ratify the amendments. The Republicans are well on their way."

 

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/why-we-could-be-on-the-verge-of-a-constitutional-apocalypse/

 

Meanwhile, the Arizona Senate has just passed a bill that would allow the police to seize your assets if you are part of a protest that turns violent. So, if you show up at a town hall meeting and an agent provocateur throws a brick, you could lose the car you drove there in. If you helped organize the protest you could lose your house. Expect similar legislation to sweep through Republican-held legislatures across the country. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-arizona-legislation-idUSKBN1622LB