So Youtube autoplay played some clips for me over the weekend with Andrew Yang on the Joe Rogan show. Looks like he's one of the clown car Democrat candidates and his platform is focusing on the bleak aspect of automation and it's kinda worrying me a bit. I know I said I loved SCO and I do, but as this affects more and more of our way of life I do wonder how things are gonna change. If we get fully automated robot trucks that will kill several industries along with it. Is UBI inevitable? Does it matter how cheap and convenient something through Amazon is if no one has any money to buy the shit?

Inevitable? Yes.

Anytime soon? Nope. We're generations away.

Feb 20, 2019 0:06:11 GMT KJ said:

Inevitable? Yes.

Anytime soon? Nope. We're generations away.

It's a lot closer than you think. 
Have you seen the Google Ai assistant that can answer the phone and doesn't even sound fake?


Ai and machine learning is here and a huge range of tasks will be rendered useless in the next two years. 
Once a machine can validate its own data therr is little reason to have skilled humans. 
Everything from accounting to detective work to sweeping the floors will lose out to Ai. 

The perverse nature of the question  @ness, asks is that the more you raise the minimum wage the more automation you bring into a business  
In Australia the factories are more automated than most places due to an $18 minimum wage


I support a living wage but it's not really possible. 
Thanks to inflation the higher you lift wages the higher the cost of living. 
If you even out the top and bottom salaries too much you remove the incentive to work hard... We also have this in Australia. 
I don't know if there are any answers

Feb 20, 2019 13:22:04 GMT iNCY said:

Feb 20, 2019 0:06:11 GMT KJ said:

Inevitable? Yes.

Anytime soon? Nope. We're generations away.

It's a lot closer than you think. 
Have you seen the Google Ai assistant that can answer the phone and doesn't even sound fake?


Ai and machine learning is here and a huge range of tasks will be rendered useless in the next two years. 
Once a machine can validate its own data therr is little reason to have skilled humans. 
Everything from accounting to detective work to sweeping the floors will lose out to Ai. 

The perverse nature of the question  @ness, asks is that the more you raise the minimum wage the more automation you bring into a business  
In Australia the factories are more automated than most places due to an $18 minimum wage


I support a living wage but it's not really possible. 
Thanks to inflation the higher you lift wages the higher the cost of living. 
If you even out the top and bottom salaries too much you remove the incentive to work hard... We also have this in Australia. 
I don't know if there are any answers

I don’t want to debate the livable wage piece again, because we’ve gone round and round on that, but you may be right that it’ll push things further.

I’m totally okay with that, mind you. Creative destruction is key to progress. UBI will he needed because we’re headed towards there not being more jobs on the other end for the first time.

I love that people think that jobs are going away. Consider the lovable bank teller. Entry level labor position. In the late 80's to early 90's Automated Teller Machines populated the world and a good percentage of the basic transactions people use bank tellers for were automated and accessible 24/7 at many more locations than just at banks and credit union. Heck, they were at most large retailers and even in a ton of bars. That should have eliminated the bank teller.

Then charge card culture got more secure. And tons of people stopped carrying cash and doing most of their transactions without needing to see a bank teller. Add in online transactions that have lowered the number of cash transactions. Then the obvious elephant in the room, online banking came to computers and people didn't need bank tellers. Now we all have online banking on our phones. In the palm of our hands, 24/7 many of us in the US have the ability to do a ton of the transactions that would have been done with bank tellers. Yet, if you live in any suburban to urban area there are a grip of small credit unions and banks that each have a full staff of bank tellers.

In my opinion, almost every technological step has been taken to eliminate the bank teller. Yet, the bank teller still exists. Since the 80's technology intentionally or not has provided a ton of reasons to see this position be eliminated. But it hasn't.

Yet you think google ai is going to replace people in a short period of time?

Just a stoner thought from the guy who doesn't smoke weed. I had a pretty odd hypothesis once of how bitcoin and blockchain currency was a beta test for UBI at one point. Go smoke a bowl and think about that once. Get a few stoners together and pound that out.

I'm surprised at how long tellers have lasted. Online only banks like Ally and a push towards cashless society. Yet whenever I go to get cash from a teller (don't trust atms due to skimmers) always a line out the door.

A generation from now it'll probably be more of an issue but those clips did make me realize it's probably sooner than we think. And stuff like that I could almost understand mass shootings. Lose your job and a judge takes your kids from you... yeah I get it.

I do wonder how much damage would need to be done to get ubi done. Gonna be a loooong road with entitlement talk to get there for sure.

Feb 20, 2019 14:13:05 GMT KJ said:

Feb 20, 2019 13:22:04 GMT iNCY said:

I don’t want to debate the livable wage piece again, because we’ve gone round and round on that, but you may be right that it’ll push things further.

I’m totally okay with that, mind you. Creative destruction is key to progress. UBI will he needed because we’re headed towards there not being more jobs on the other end for the first time.

Feb 20, 2019 15:18:54 GMT @ness said:

I'm surprised at how long tellers have lasted. Online only banks like Ally and a push towards cashless society. Yet whenever I go to get cash from a teller (don't trust atms due to skimmers) always a line out the door.

A generation from now it'll probably be more of an issue but those clips did make me realize it's probably sooner than we think. And stuff like that I could almost understand mass shootings. Lose your job and a judge takes your kids from you... yeah I get it.

I do wonder how much damage would need to be done to get ubi done. Gonna be a loooong road with entitlement talk to get there for sure.

We have never actually discussed UBI.

It is a principal I completely support as I am a socially minded conservative.

For the record I also support a single payer government healthcare system.



UBI and Automation are in direct opposition to each other though.

As I mentioned, the higher the wage the greater the automation.

Where do unskilled workers go?

Here I can order McDonalds on a terminal, this is the future...





So that one is totally not practical, but it is a concept of what is coming....





This one is real right now.
Do you want to be like France and mandate a 35hr work week?

In my industry people are asking for a "lights out" factory with no people, it is coming.

I think despite the technology only being a few years away, any workers union with any might, will challenge the notion of robots doing our jobs for us.

Even though it may cost less to employ a machine, any true capitalist would understand, the less money being earned, means the less being spent.