(10-22-2019, 03:25 PM)David Horn Wrote:(10-22-2019, 10:50 AM)Marypoza Wrote: -- that's why l like Yang's idea of a basic monthly income. to help supplement crappy low rent jobs. what's Yang's score anyhow?
Yang is advocating for policies at least a decade in the future, because the universal income meme has no play right now … except among people like us. If, as I suspect, job destruction outpaces job creation over a long enough period to prove, to the average member of the not-well-informed, that is something drastic or starvation, then it will get pushed to the front and fast. Killing all the truck-driving jobs may be enough, but a huge infrastructure build-out may paper over that loss for a while. We'll have to see how it plays. We do need the infrastructure badly.
Can we reject technologies that do more harm than good? I'm not saying that we need go the route of the Old Order Amish in rejecting technologies because those do harm to old values...
I suppose that if we cannot ban the AK-47 and the AR-15 we cannot ban self-driving vehicles. On the other hand we are going to need truck drivers just to ensure that loads are not diverted because someone hacks the instructions to pick stuff up or drop it off at the right place. Maybe the truck driver might become a sort of security guard, the sort of person smart enough (as I assume most truck drivers are) to figure that a load headed from Philadelphia to Chicago should not be going into Kentucky...
Reduction of time spent on the job may be a certainty with the greater efficiency of assembly lines and computers. Meetings and office politics seem to be more common in office work, and I suspect that they are largely wastes of time. I'd rather telecommute (OK, maybe it would be wise for me as a way for concealing unpleasant characteristics of my personality) and not waste time on inefficient behaviors. (It would be great to live simply in an inexpensive place in which to live rather than New York City... or perhaps choose to live in northern Michigan in the summer and Arizona in the winter.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.