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Automation is coming on strong in the economy and will take millions of jobs in the next few years because as soon as a machine becomes cheaper for an individual task than a human, the worker will be gone. In addition, business owners like how robots work 24/7 and don’t require lunch, sleep or paychecks. Just an occasional squirt of oil will suffice to keep the machines performing.
More recently, the Wuhan pandemic has speeded up the process of businesses adopting smart machines, since robots also don’t get sick — so convenient rather than undependable humans with their annoying germs.
There’s not a lot that can be done to deal with the job-killing Age of Automation we face, but it would make sense to end immigration, because most of the jobs that immigrants do can be done more cheaply by smart machines. In short,
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
Here’s a transcript of the discussion I cleaned up for easy reference:
NARRATOR: Automation is coming for your job — at least that’s the fear among many workers — from burger-flipping bots to car-building robots, not to mention high-powered software taking on more and more administrative tasks. It seems like hundreds of skills are rapidly becoming obsolete in the US economy. A McKinsey study found that AI and deep learning could add as much as $3.5 trillion to $5.8 trillion in annual value to companies.
ANDREW YANG: Eighty percent or more of the jobs that make $20 an hour or less are at least potentially subject to automation.
NARRATOR: The economic shock of the pandemic hasn’t helped; human workers are vulnerable to diseases that robots aren’t, making it much easier and now cheaper to have a robot on staff that doesn’t require healthcare.
MARCUS CASEY: Businesses are kind of looking and seeing that humans can get sick from covid, but machines can’t.
MICHAEL HICKS: If you can eliminate the healthcare costs, the labor and wage tag that comes along with those folks and particularly in services — that’s a big competitive advantage.
NARRATOR: To put the increase in robotics in perspective: the U.S. had .49 robots per thousand workers in 1995 which rose to 1.79 robots per thousand workers in 2017, but automation isn’t just a robotics revolution. The rise in information technology and artificial intelligence or AI has also become an enabler of automation. AI can help navigate difficult challenges that previously only a human operator could handle. Of course, if you’ve encountered automated phone systems, it’s likely you personally experienced that automation still has a long way to go. Continue reading this article
Yang is a tech guy who tried to bring attention to the coming problem of extensive automation which he mentioned during his remarks about ending the campaign:
ANDREW YANG: We highlighted the real problems in our communities as our economy is being transformed before our very eyes by technology and automation. Americans know now that when you go to a factory in Michigan, you do not find wall-to-wall immigrants doing work. You find wall-to-wall robot arms and machines doing the work that people used to do. We stood on the debate stage and shifted our national conversation to include the fourth industrial revolution, a topic no one wanted to touch until we made it happen here with this campaign.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Yang emphasized his free money cure for automation-caused job loss rather than alerting the public to the coming employment downturn. He calls it the “Freedom Dividend” aka Universal Basic Income on his website Yang2020.
One of Yang’s worst enemies in his political campaign was America’s excellent economy, so any warnings about robots taking jobs from humans must have seemed a distant threat to many voters.
But at least he brought the issue to a wider public. President Trump should hire him as the Under Secretary of Commerce in charge of American preparations for the automated future.
Trump can also severely decrease foreign entrants to this country, because
One of the reactions to the dire predictions of mass unemployment in the automated future is to claim that it won’t be a problem at all. Just institute universal basic income (UBI), the pollyannas say, and everyone will be happy with their free money, and the machines will be doing all the work — utopia!
But organizing UBI is hardly a small thing. The pricetag will be very high and the emperors of automation might not cotton to being taxed to support the millions of workers that they have disemployed. And wouldn’t free money being handed out be an even bigger magnet to illegal aliens than American jobs?
Of course, when millions of simple jobs are taken over from humans by robots, most immigration will become obsolete and should be ended as an economic adjustment to the automation economy.
Human workers are impossible to find on some factory floors.
Plus, even if all parties were agreeable to UBI (doubtful), the set-up time might be lengthy because lawyers and politicians will want to be involved. Surely such a major transition away from the economic system of millennia will be difficult.
Following is an article from the optimistic school of thought:
Experts estimate about a quarter of American jobs could soon be automated. Looking further down the line, we may see a majority of jobs being done by robots. If 60 percent of jobs were to be eliminated, for example, a tremendous amount of people would be out of work, and we’d very likely have to adopt a program like Universal Basic Income (UBI). We don’t yet know how these changes will impact society, but a lot of people are trying to figure out just that.
“I think a very large number of jobs are going to be impacted — automated or deskilled. Eventually, it might be a majority,” Ford says.
Ford says just 20 percent of jobs disappearing would have a “staggering impact” on society and the economy. He says the jobs that will be safest, in terms of automation, will be the ones that require some level of creativity.
“The other areas are those things that require unique human qualities like empathy or building sophisticated human relationships with other people,” Fox says. That might include a job where you have relationships with clients, like in sales, or a job where you’re caring for others, he says.
Richard Baldwin, a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, tells Inverse that jobs that aren’t completely automated will still be affected by automation.
“Almost all occupations will still require some people to do the tasks that can’t be automated or offshored,” Baldwin says. He believes jobs that require human skills like empathy, motivating people, dealing with unexpected situations, curiosity, innovation, ethics will not be automated.
There are also simply jobs that won’t be automated for a long time because it will take so long for the technology to develop, Ford says. He thinks it would take a robot “like C-3PO” to replace an electrician, for example.
Once there are fewer jobs, and some kind of program like UBI that is keeping people financially stable, many believe we’ll simply have more time to do the things we want to do that don’t necessarily earn us much or any money. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang says on his campaign website that UBI will “enable all Americans to pay their bills, educate themselves, start businesses, be more creative, stay healthy, relocate for work, spend time with their children, take care of loved ones, and have a real stake in the future.” (Continues)
The book got my attention in particular about how insane it is to continue immigrating millions of low-skilled foreigners when many of the jobs they take will be obsolete for human workers in just a few years.
The word is gradually getting out that the technology of robots, automation and AI needs attention for the threat it poses, although today’s booming economy makes that future easy to ignore.
Disruption of the job market and the economy from automation and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the primary ideas animating Andrew Yang’s surprising campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Alone among the candidates, Yang is directly engaging with one of the central forces that will shape our futures.
Over the past ten years, I have written two books on the subject of artificial intelligence and its impact on the job market and the economy. I’ve spoken at dozens of events in more than 30 countries. The majority of my presentations were given to what you might call elite audiences — executives, technologists, Wall Street financiers, economists, government technocrats and so forth. I’ve found that, virtually without exception, these people take the specter of technological disruption seriously.
To be sure, not everyone buys into the possibility of widespread unemployment resulting from automation. But even the most skeptical generally recognize that the speed at which AI is advancing could create a stark divide, with a large and growing fraction of our workforce left struggling to maintain a foothold in the economy.
A recent report from the consulting firm Deloitte found that, among more than a thousand surveyed American executives, 63 percent agreed with the statement that “to cut costs, my company wants to automate as many jobs as possible using AI,” and 36 percent already believe that job losses from AI-enabled automation should be viewed as an ethical issue. In other words, while media pundits dismiss worries about automation, executives at America’s largest companies are actively planning for it. Continue reading this article
I couldn’t face watching three hours of Democrats jabbering at each other on Tuesday’s debate, but it was interesting that automation came up as a question from news person Erin Burnet (Transcript):
BURNETT: I want to turn now to jobs. According to a recent study, about a quarter of American jobs could be lost to automation in just the next 10 years. Ohio is one of the states likely to be hardest hit.
Senator Sanders, you say your federal jobs guarantee is part of the answer to the threat from automation, but tens of millions of Americans could end up losing their jobs. Are you promising that you will have a job for every single one of those Americans?
SANDERS: Damn right we will. And I’ll tell you why. If you look at what goes on in America today, we have an infrastructure which is collapsing. We could put 15 million people to work rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our water systems, our wastewater plants, airports, et cetera.
“Rebuilding” is not a clear career choice for young people, and anyway, construction is becoming at least as automated as other general fields. Most of the candidates who responded on the topic showed limited knowledge on the automation threat to employment.
Below, in certain types of manufacturing, human workers have largely disappeared from the floor as they are replaced by robots.
Senator Warren has been rising in the polls and may well be the Dems’ candidate, but she stuck to her anti-business position rather than recognizing the new and unique problem of smart machines:
BURNETT: Senator Warren, you wrote that blaming job loss on automation is, quote, “a good story, except it’s not really true.” So should workers here in Ohio not be worried about losing their jobs to automation?
WARREN: So the data show that we have had a lot of problems with losing jobs, but the principal reason has been bad trade policy. The principal reason has been a bunch of corporations, giant multinational corporations who’ve been calling the shots on trade, giant multinational corporations that have no loyalty to America.
Fortunately, automation-aware candidate Andrew Yang was able to make his point:
YANG: Senator Warren, I’ve been talking to Americans around the country about automation. And they’re smart. They see what’s happening around them. Their Main Street stores are closing. They see a self-serve kiosk in every McDonalds, every grocery store, every CVS. Driving a truck is the most common job in 29 states, including this one; 3.5 million truck drivers in this country. And my friends in California are piloting self-driving trucks.
What is that going to mean for the 3.5 million truckers or the 7 million Americans who work in truck stops, motels, and diners that rely upon the truckers getting out and having a meal? Saying this is a rules problem is ignoring the reality that Americans see around us every single day.
This topic appearing in a debate is real progress. No such discussions occurred in the 2016 campaign.
Now if the Democrats would admit that automation makes low-skilled immigration obsolete. . .
It’s encouraging to see a smart young candidate for president talking about automation as a threat to the US economy and American jobs. The 2016 election was lacking any such discussion: the tech community was aware, but Washington lagged behind, as usual.
The formula is simple: when a machine become less expensive than a worker, then the human will go. And unlike the Great Depression, the jobs won’t come back.
Among the first jobs to go are the low-skilled sort, the employment that illegal border crossers count on getting in America. It’s likely that automation-caused unemployment would be higher without President Trump’s economic leadership.
Andrew Yang was interviewed yesterday on CBS Sunday Morning (the show made famous by Charles Kuralt and his nostalgic patriotism seen on the nation’s backroads).
Candidate Yang mentioned in his CBS interview about how automation has already had an electoral effect: “We automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, all the swing states that Donald Trump needed to win, and did win.”
That job loss is an important point and a reminder that we are already on the big automation highway with no off-ramp.
In a park in Los Angeles last month, thousands gathered to hear the Democrat perhaps least likely to be running for president. “I am the ideal candidate for that job, because the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math,” said Andrew Yang.
In Yang’s world, MATH stands for “Make America Think Harder,” and Yang is mostly thinking about dire economic times ahead.
[. . .]
Andrew Yang, in fact, calls himself an entrepreneur. His parents immigrated from Taiwan: His father, a physicist, and his mother, with a master’s in math and statistics. Yang grew up in Schenectady, New York. His first big success was running a college test-prep company, and then he founded Venture for America, a non-profit that helps train entrepreneurs in struggling cities.
He thinks jobs – or rather, the loss of them – are why Donald Trump won the presidency.
“The numbers tell a very clear story,” he said. “We automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, all the swing states that Donald Trump needed to win, and did win.”
And Yang believes robots and artificial intelligence will accelerate the loss of all kinds of jobs. “Now, what we did to those jobs, we’re doing to the retail jobs, the call center jobs, the fast food jobs, the truck driving jobs, and on and on through the economy,” he said.
Thompson met Yang along the campaign trail, as he took a break for some tea (“Duke of Earl Gray”), and then discovered a foosball table, where he naturally talked about economic theory, and another of his big ideas: reforming how we calculate Gross Domestic Product, or GDP.
“If you want to see how out-of-whack GDP is, all you have to do is look at my family,” Yang said. “My wife is at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic. And what is her work every day, included at in GDP? Zero. And we know that her work is among the most important work being done for our society.” (Continues)
More than a year ago I asked about Kamala Harris, “How pathetic have Democrat politics become when a freshman senator with no accomplishments thinks she can make a credible run for president?”
It’s still a good question, and the answer requires delving into D-party psychology.
Democrat strategists see the California senator as a winner because she conforms so well to current leftish values. At the top of the list is the great god Diversity — and Kamala is a three-fer: she is a (1) female, (2) daughter of an immigrant from India and (3) half-black since her father, the Stanford economics professor, was born in Jamaica.
In 2009, PBS newsreader Gwen Ifill remarked, “There’s a great district attorney in San Francisco whose name is Kamala Harris . . . they call her the female Barack Obama.” So you know that comment got attention among lefty campaign experts to whom the unassailable Obama is the ideal candidate.
Elizabeth Warren is currently the fan favorite on the Democrat campaign trail, but if a white man becomes the nominee, he will want a diverse vice-president. And Warren seems to have given up on her native American claims of non-whiteness which means Harris is not dead yet.
Kamala is well plugged in to California politics. It didn’t hurt that she was the girlfriend of the powerful Willie Brown for a time who appointed her to a couple of boards. One, the Medical Assistance Commission, met monthly yet paid $72,000 — once again showing that it’s good to have friends in high places.
Tucker Carlson recently discussed the Harris history:
TUCKER CARLSON: Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. As the Brett Kavanaugh saga has just reminded us, the left feels no compunction about rooting around in the past of people they don’t like and using what they find to destroy them. The question is, do they apply the same standard to themselves?
Well, today we have breaking news about the past of a well-known progressive, and once again confirms that no, the standards are not the same. We’ll bring that to you in just a minute.
But first tonight, here’s a quick quiz. What exactly do you know about Kamala Harris? Can you name three things she believes? Can you name a single thing she has accomplished? If you’re like most Americans, you cannot. You have no real idea who Kamala Harris is.
The one thing you know about Harris is that she could very easily become the President of the United States, and you know this because you’ve been told it confidently again and again, by geniuses on television:
MSNBC HOST JOY REID: The name I’m hearing now — there was a sheet of people sort of survey of prominent women in politics. Number one name of some — of people — of the person that’s on people’s minds, Kamala Harris.
MSNBC HOST LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: And the politician she reminded me of most then was Barack Obama. Kamala Harris, is now running for President. And she is one of the top tier candidates.
MSNBC HOST CHRIS MATTHEWS,: There’s a new challenger to Trump and she is drawing huge crowds, Senator Kamala Harris of California kicked off her campaign this week and surrounded by — look at that crowd. Trump must be envious as hell.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kamala Harris is probably somebody that on paper has the highest ceiling. You can envision a path for Kamala Harris that quite resembles Barack Obama’s.
CARLSON: Every word a cliche, these people are so stupid. It’s remarkable they can breathe unaided, much less have paying jobs. But whatever. The story they’re telling you, Kamala Harris, she is a star, destined for big things. She is like Obama 2.0, even more woke, with even more diversity points. Out there in America, they love Kamala Harris. She’s a folk hero. She’s like Pete Seeger. Continue reading this article
On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to discuss his presidential campaign along with the issue of automation, specifically how it threatens the jobs of millions of Americans in the near future.
An article written by de Blasio appeared in Wired the same day, titled Why American Workers Need to Be Protected From Automation which is a topic more leaders should be addressing. The article is decent, but if anything, it underestimates the effect that the permanent removal of perhaps the majority of workers from the economy will mean. The adjustments to society will take decades.
The good news about the de Blasio interview was Tucker’s question to the mayor: “If you really believe that automation is a threat to low-skilled jobs, why are you for mass immigration?”
Which de Blasio dodged.
The bad news is how Tucker became distracted from the important discussion about America’s future under smart machines to badger de Blasio about his terrible management of New York City: one topic is of a transitory nature; the other is world changing.
At least there were several good minutes before the important topic of automation was mostly lost:
TUCKER CARLSON: So in the three or so years the show has been on the air, we’ve taken a bunch of different positions on a bunch of different topics, but one thing we’ve always been consistent about from the first day until today is making fun of Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York — on every topic. If you watch this show, you’ll know.
Then the other day, it came to our attention that de Blasio has raised an issue that too few in either party are talking about. It’s the question of automation. He has got a piece in “WIRED” magazine on it.
De Blasio, as you as you know is also running for President. Something else we’ve made fun of. But his position on automation really struck us is pretty interesting, so yesterday, we arranged a phone call and we talked about a very friendly conversation, invited Mayor de Blasio to come on the show to talk about that and other things and he was gracious enough to respond.
And so we’re happy to have Mayor Bill de Blasio join us tonight live. Mr. Mayor, thanks a lot for coming on.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D-NY): Thank you, Tucker and I appreciate that you care deeply about this issue of automation because it’s bearing down on all of us.
CARLSON: It is, it is and my praise of you on this question is totally sincere. Very few people are taking this seriously. Andrew Yang is one of them, you’re another. I can’t think of many others who are, and so God bless you.
So you’re basically saying that companies ought to have to — and I’m not sure how much of this I agree with, but I think I’m phrasing this correctly. You say companies ought to have to bear some of the cost of helping workers transition to something else when they lay them off in favor of robots.
DE BLASIO: That’s right. Tucker, right now, let’s just get the magnitude clear for all your viewers.
Middle-class Americans, working-class Americans whose jobs are not going to be there if we don’t do something different. Because right now, the recent estimate I saw, 36 million jobs that could be made obsolete. We’re talking as early as 2030 — 12 years ahead. Eleven to twelve years from now.
So here’s the reality. Right now, in fact the Federal Tax Code rewards companies that invest in the kind of technology that actually sheds jobs, destroys jobs.
Our tax dollars are helping companies — incentivizing companies to get rid of more and more American workers. So my plan is simple, it says, end that. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that we could use to actually address our bigger issues in this country and employ a lot of people.
CARLSON: I am completely with you on that one right there. I’m sure there’s a lot of details we disagree on, but I agree with you on that, for sure.
DE BLASIO: And by the way, South Korea is doing that right now. They recognize that if they don’t stop incentivizing companies, a lot of times these companies are making the decision simply because it’s better for their tax reality rather than what’s better for working people or even productivity.
The second point of my plan is, let’s institute something — Bill Gates actually was the first one I think to call for — which is a quote unquote “robot tax.” It says simply, you know a worker pays income tax. You take away millions and millions of workers, that’s a lot less revenue to take care of all the things we need in our society and it means of course, millions and millions of people who don’t have a livelihood.
I believe in work. I think you do, too. I believe we need a future that’s based on work. So if a company is going to put thousands of people out of work, they should bear responsibility for making sure that those folks get a new job, either in the same company or elsewhere.
But that tax is both an incentive to keep people on the job in a good way, in a productive way, it also provides money to help foster from the Federal level the kinds of things we need a lot more of. We need a lot more investment in renewable energy and recycling and environmental restitution. There’s all sorts of this.
CARLSON: Well, let me ask you this question though, okay, so I’m not sure I think of the second, but I don’t think it’s totally crazy. You know, I am happy to read and think about it more. So we’re together up until this point, but if you really believe that automation is a threat to low-skilled jobs, why are you for mass immigration?
What are all of these people going to do, we’re importing with your help?
DE BLASIO: Look, Tucker, I’m not finished on the point about what we’re trying to achieve here and I certainly want to answer that question, it’s an important one. Let’s just be clear about the central point here.
Right now, there is no American strategy, no Federal government strategy to address automation and it could be the single most disruptive force in our society that we’ve ever experienced.
If you talk about tens of millions of working-class and middle-class Americans who no longer have work or the prospect of work, that’s unacceptable.
So the Federal government has to step up. There is no strategy now. There’s no candidate in my opinion who is offering a coherent strategy. I respect Andrew Yang for raising the issue.
CARLSON: So I agree. I would say that immigration — immigration is a close second as a force to transforming the country and the two are at cross-purposes. So immigrants come here overwhelmingly to work in low-skilled jobs, a lot of those jobs no matter how hard we try are going away. This is crazy, why are we doing this?
DE BLASIO: Well let’s face it, there’s a huge number of jobs right now and let’s take agriculture as an obvious example. We’re in the worst of all worlds. We don’t have enough workers to do the work among the people already in this country and we don’t have a coherent immigration system including something as obvious as a guest worker program, a legal guest worker program.
CARLSON: Okay, but Ag is a small sector.
DE BLASIO: That could actually take this some place.
CARLSON: Okay, Ag is — and that’s a separate debate. I disagree but that’s not — I mean, the much bigger picture is jobs in the service sector are going away that immigrants fill. We continue to import immigrants at over a million a year, why are we doing that? Continue reading this article
Andrew Yang discussed his presidential campaign on Fox News Sunday.
But rather than explain what tech authorities forecast will happen, Yang went for the attention-getter of free money, aka Universal Basic Income. The details are important because it’s difficult for average people to envision a level of permanent job loss worse than the Great Depression. In fact, polling has shown a strange sort of denial among the public:
AI is a problem for jobs, say the majority of Americans, but it’s someone else’s problem.
Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of US adults believe artificial intelligence will “eliminate more jobs than it creates,” according to a Gallup survey. But, the same survey found that less than a quarter (23 percent) of people were “worried” or “very worried” automation would affect them personally. (Continues).
The jobs economy is booming now, but that could change quickly: when smart machines become cheaper than humans in performing jobs, then the replacement will begin, as it already has in industries like automotive manufacturing:
Furthermore, it’s crazy to continue admitting huge numbers of low-skilled foreigners as immigrants when their jobs will be among the first to be automated.
Candidate Andrew Yang appeared on Fox News Sunday to discuss how automation will affect American workers and the economy:
CHRIS WALLACE: His supporters call themselves the Yang Gang. They chant PowerPoint at his rallies and wear ball caps with “M-A-T-H” on the front for “Make America Think Harder.”
Joining us now for an exclusive “Fox News Sunday” sit down, Democratic presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who will be on the debate stage this week.
Mr. Yang, welcome to “Fox News Sunday.”
YANG: Thanks for having me, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here.
WALLACE: Let’s start with the latest Fox News poll that came out this week. It shows you tied for sixth place with Amy Klobuchar at 3 percent, 30 points behind Joe Biden, but running ahead of Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke and Julian Castro.
So I have kind of a good news/bad news question, which is, why do you think you’re doing better than a lot of better-known politicians? And then the other hand, how do you ever make the big jump that you still have to make to get into the top tier of candidates?
YANG: Well, on the positive side, America, unfortunately, has lost a lot of confidence in its politicians. It’s one reason why I’m doing so well, I’m beating many sitting senators and governors.
The American people realize that our government is way behind the curve in solving the real problems. And we need to catch up and speed up. And they see someone like me as someone who can help make that possible.
In terms of making the big jump to catch up to Joe Biden and the other leaders, most Americans are just tuning in to who’s running in 2020. I’m still introducing myself to the American people. It’s going to be a very, very fluid race over the weeks and months to come. I’m very confident I’m just going to keep on climbing the polls and start catching up to the leaders very soon.
WALLACE: You say people are just tuning in, but if they tuned in to the first Democratic debate, they didn’t see much of Andrew Yang. You ended up getting — I had to get check this out — two minutes and 50 seconds total in a two hour debate, by far the least amount of time of any of the Democrats in the two debates.
What’s your plan to get more airtime this week?
YANG: Well, I got asked two questions in two hours, which certainly was not enough, but we’re very confident that this Wednesday I’m going to have much, much more of an opportunity to make my case to the American people that the real central issue is that we’re automating away millions of first manufacturing jobs and now retail jobs, call center jobs, and on and on through the economy.
And because of the polling support we have, I’m not going to have just next week in Detroit. I’m going to have also September in Houston and on and on. My campaign is going to be here the entire way.
WALLACE: I want to talk about your policy proposal and automation in a moment, but just to get back to the debate, one way that is tried and true to get more attention and airtime is to go after the front runners. You’re going to be on the stage on Wednesday night with two of the front runners, Vice President Biden and Senator Harris.
Any thoughts about going after them, one, because you have differences on issues, and, two, because it will get you more attention?
YANG: Well, my focus is on solving the problems of the American people. And to the extent that I can drive the conversation towards those issues, I’m very, very excited about it.
I don’t think that we benefit if I’m throwing rocks at other candidates when, frankly, I agree with them on many, many issues. And I think right now my focus really is on still introducing myself to the American people.
WALLACE: One of your main messages, which you referred to a moment ago, is that you say that this country is going through a dramatic, economic transformation, in large part because of automation. And you say that you will keep the promises to working-class Americans that President Trump has failed to keep to them. Here you are in the first debate:
YANG: I can build a much broader coalition to beat Donald Trump. It is not left, it is not right, it is forward. And that is where I’ll take the country in 2020.
WALLACE: You propose what you call the American Mall Act, like shopping mall act, with a $6 billion fund.
How would that work?
YANG: We’re in the process of automating away the most common jobs in the U.S. economy, which includes retail worker, call-center worker, truck driver, food service. These are the jobs that are disappearing around the country. And, unfortunately, they’re also the most common jobs.
So Amazon is closing 30 percent of our malls and stores and paying zero in taxes while doing it. And these malls become sinkholes. They cause blight, become havens for crime and bad actions. So we need to help communities transition these malls to become community centers or schools or even residential. But in the absence of that kind of move, these ghost malls become the last place anyone wants to be and they destroy property value for miles around. Continue reading this article
It’s a rare thing to hear anyone in politics discuss the threat of automation to the economy — certainly no candidates did in the 2016 presidential campaign, and I watched closely. You would think that a genuine leader would have a plan to lessen the shock of massive job loss when it becomes cheaper to use a robot than hire a human over a wide swath of the jobs economy.
Some tech experts estimate that time is only a few years off, as indicated by the chart below from a PwC report concerning How will automation impact jobs?
So it’s a relief to see a technology-cautious candidate appear for 2020, and I have written several times about Andrew Yang because he says things like:
“We automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, and those communities have never recovered. Where if you look at the numbers, half of the workers left the workforce and never worked again, and then half of that group filed for disability.
Now what happened to the manufacturing workers is now going to happen to the truck drivers, retail workers, call centers and fast-food workers and on and on through the economy as we evolve and technology marginalizes the labor of more and more Americans.”
On Friday, Carlson commented about a few 2020 candidates on Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream. The first one of them discussed was Andrew Yang:
SHANNON BREAM: You have talked with a lot of these 2020 contenders: I want to play a little back and forth with Andrew Yang and then we will discuss:
ANDREW YANG (in March 1 interview): My friends in Silicon Valley are working on trucks that can drive themselves because that’s where the money is, where we can save tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars by trying to automate that job. But I was just with truck drivers in Iowa last week. . . it will be a disaster for many American communities.
TUCKER CARLSON: You are one of the only people I have met who is honest about the effects of de-industrialization.
BREAM: I’m not assuming you’re going to vote for him, but you agree with him on this point.
CARLSON: I definitely would vote for a candidate like that, but I don’t agree with everything he says. I don’t know all of his views, but I can’t think of many more people on either side who are thinking more deeply about what the actual problems are.
Automation by every estimate will eliminate a huge percentage of jobs in the United States at exactly the moment when we’re importing millions of new people every year to fill jobs that probably won’t exist three years from now or ten years from now — it’s lunatic.
Indeed. Automation makes immigration obsolete — and certainly of low-skilled Hondurans et al trooping here over America’s open border at the rate of 100,000 per month. What will happen when millions of non-tech Third-Worlders find themselves priced out of the coming robot jobs market in a few years? There will likely be increased crime and possibly civil unrest.
The transition to whatever economic system is next won’t be easy even without millions of low-skilled illegal aliens — but Washington is worsening an already bad future problem with its crazy sovereignty failure.
CARLSON: And nobody is saying anything about it other than Andrew Yang. I’m not sure why it’s falling to him, but I don’t care. I want somebody to tell the truth about it.
BREAM: You are worried about the jobs, not this whole AI worry that people have that robots are going to come eat us and kill us.
CARLSON: Of course, anybody running a business wants to eliminate labor costs or reduce them to the extent possible. That’s the imperative of the market. There is no sin in that, but it’s real and we can’t pretend otherwise.
And so we often hear ‘We need more workers for agriculture’ — we don’t know anything about agricultural really; very few parts of the ag economy aren’t automated now. It’s a completely real thing.
Lawyers, physicians — huge sectors of white collar America are about to be overturned by AI, and nobody is talking about it because RUSSIA!
Andrew Yang is a technology expert who is running for president in 2020 on what might be called a Tech-Caution platform. Unlike the clueless characters currently running our national government, Yang understands the danger of automation and artificial intelligence — that when smart machines take over major employment categories in America, the economy will fail from massive, permanent job loss. Curiously, the brilliant captains of industry are big on developing the cheapest possible manufacturing, but have forgotten that shoppers with healthy incomes are a big part of the economy equation.
For more details on the issues, see the candidate’s website Yang2020.
Why isn’t Washington paying attention to tech experts’ warnings? There’s not a whole lot to be done in the face of such fundamental social change, but certainly America won’t need more immigrant workers, as President Trump has recently suggested in a major reversal of a top campaign promise. That flip-flop is doubly bad because:
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
Audio version:
TUCKER CARLSON: Big tech knows a lot about you, in some cases more than you know about yourself. They certainly know where you go and what you eat. May even know what you think. The only thing it can’t control is what your thoughts are, but they are working on that, too.
In a 2018 phone recording obtained exclusively by this show, Adam Kovacevich — he is Google’s head of U.S. Public Policy — explains to Google employees why the company was a sponsor for CPAC that year. Google sponsored CPAC, he says, because it wouldn’t let them push the party toward a more open borders agenda. Listen:
GOOGLE EXECUTIVE ADAM KOVACEVICH: The Republican Party and the conservatives in general, is also going through a lot of internal debates about what should be the sort of position of the Party and I think that’s one that we should be involved in because we, I think, want probably, the majority of Googlers wants to steer conservatives and Republicans more towards a message of liberty and freedom and away from the more sort of nationalistic incendiary nativist comments and things like that.
CARLSON: Now, as noted, Google has more power than any company has ever had. It has the power of its massive data reserves technology, of course, it has financial power. It has one highest market capped companies in history. It also increasingly has political power though they don’t typically admit it in public.
Kovacevich did admit it. He said that companies like Google are playing quote, “a leadership role” in American politics. He bragged that the company got a support of mass immigration on to a CPAC panel and that person argued in support of Google’s agenda. It shows a lot about big tech’s attitude toward the country. They are in control — elections, parties, democracy, just a hindrance to their control.
So we told you a lot on this show about the potential dangers of big tech. Some of those dangers are imminent, and they are technological, and the main one is robotics and artificial intelligence.
Remarkably, the person, the political figure who is making the most sense on this subject, who has thought about it most deeply is a Democrat who is running for President. He is Andrew Yang. He is an entrepreneur and as we said, he is a Democratic presidential candidate. He says that artificial intelligence and expanded automation could potentially cause violence in this country and that we need to do something about it right now. Andrew Yang joins us tonight.
Andrew, thanks very much for coming on, and I meant that with sincerity. I haven’t heard anybody in our political conversation describe the threat as clearly and compellingly as you have. Why should would he be worried about automation?
CANDIDATE ANDREW YANG: Well, if you look at the backdrop, we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, and those communities have never recovered. Where if you look at the numbers, half of the workers left the workforce and never worked again, and then half of that group filed for disability.
Now what happened to the manufacturing workers is now going to happen to the truck drivers, retail workers, call centers and fast-food workers and on and on through the economy as we evolve and technology marginalizes the labor of more and more Americans.
CARLSON: What will be the effects of that? That’s a massive displacement of people. What will happen once that happens?
YANG: Well, as you said, I think it’s going to be disastrous, where if you look at truck drivers alone, being a trucker is the most common job in 29 states. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in this country, and my friends in Silicon Valley are working on trucks that can drive themselves because that’s where the money is, where we can save tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars by trying to automate that job.
But I was just with truck drivers in Iowa last week and imagining that community recovering from their income going from let’s call it $50,000 a year to much, much less than that catastrophically, it’s going to be a disaster for many, many American communities. Continue reading this article
That approach may have been too gloomy at a time when the jobs economy had been booming, so he is back with an offer of free money — a sure-fire attention getter.
When Fox News host Pete Hegseth asked his guest on Sunday what was up with the cash giveaway, Yang answered, “In my mind, the reason why Donald Trump is our president today is that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, and now we’re about to do the same thing to millions of jobs in retail, call centers, truck drivers, fast food and on and on through the economy. And this message is resounding loud and clear when I talk to Americans in early states around the country.”
Certainly, it is insane for America to continue admitting low-skilled foreigners from peasant economies when machines will be replacing them in a few years. It was disappointing to hear President Trump remark recently that he wanted “more people coming into our country” — a policy which won’t help citizen wages rise and does not recognize the technological train wreck coming our way.
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