The Most Important Question Asked from the GOP Debate on November 10th

Click: Debate transcript for reference

(TL;DR at the very end)

In many ways, the debates are worthless. They don't encourage critical thinking, and just give the candidates a platform to spout poorly informed half truths, outright lies, or just weird beliefs. They're more about talking points and saying good-sounding things versus giving us a feel for what the candidates are actually like. I digress though, because this post isn't about that. There was 1 actually interesting question posed by the moderators, that touches on perhaps the most important issue of our times:

The question:

BAKER: Senator Rubio, Senator Rubio, let me -- let me take you to a question that I think gets to the root of a lot of the anxiety that people have in this country. The economy is undergoing a transformation through information technology. Americans are anxious that the new economy isn't producing higher-paying jobs. Many are concerned that the new wealth seems to be going mainly to innovators and investors.

Meanwhile, with factories run by robots and shopping done increasingly on smartphones, many traditional jobs are just going away. How do you reassure American workers that their jobs are not being steadily replaced by machines?

Rubio's response:

Marco Rubio during Debate

RUBIO: ... And it isn't just a different economy. It's changing faster than ever. You know, it took the telephone 75 years to reach 100 million users. It took Candy Crush one year to reach some 100 million users.

(LAUGHTER)

So the world is changing faster than ever, and it is disruptive. Number one, we are in a global competition now, and several of the candidates have said that. There are now dozens of developed economies on this planet that we have to compete with. And we lose that competition because we have the highest business tax rate in the industrialized world, because we have regulations that continue to grow by the billions every single week, because we have a crazy health care law that discourages companies from hiring people, but because we're not fully utilizing our energy resources, that if we did, it would bring back all kinds of growth, especially in manufacturing, and because we have an outdated higher education system.

Our higher education system is completely outdated. It is too expensive, too hard to access, and it doesn't teach 21st century skills. If we do what needs to be done -- tax reform, regulatory reform, fully utilize our energy resources, repeal and replace Obamacare, and modernize higher education, then we can grasp the potential and the promise of this new economy. And we won't just save the American dream. We will expand it to reach more people and change more lives than ever before. And then truly this new century can be a new American century.

Rubio started out giving a good answer-- he talked about massive transformation, made an apt comparison between the telephone and Candy Crush, he brought up that this is an issue with significant global factors, and I thought for a second that he might actually have a grasp of the significance of this issue, then he just crawls back into his cave. He surmises the answer is in our traditional education system, bolstering supply side economics (aka trickle down) that have been throughly discredited from failed policies over the past 3 decades, and pretending fossil fuels have a place in our energy future. And i'm not trying to pick on Rubio either, I don't see any other presidential candidate answering this any better, except perhaps Sanders.

So why is this so important?

TL;DR from above, Rubio completely screwed up his answer to this, and no one else on the stage would have done better.

It's notable though that this question of robots taking jobs was even asked. Within 5 years, this will be an obvious issue to everyone, and within 10 years, starting in what will likely be the 2nd term of our next president,we'll be in crisis mode trying to understand what's happening. For this reason, the next president NEEDs to be on the right side of this issue TODAY. If you've read about the singularity (computers with super-human intelligence, not nanomachines uploading our bodies into the Internet), I believe it started about 2 years ago, and we are currently in the beginning stages (!!).

Tesla already has cars capable of driving themselves, that have been learning every day how to drive better, based on driver inputs. There are numerous startups building robots specifically for standard retail usage. Panera Bread just announced an initiative to have touch screen order being the primary ordering system in ALL of their stores by the end of next year, their CEO isn't ashamed to note this will take jobs. McDonald's, losing money for the first time, will continue to automate their food creation processes (like their espresso machines and drink machines are robots now) and ordering process. Best Buy is testing out robotic assistants that will surely start getting deployed to stores in the next year or 2, to give shoppers better, more accurate, corporate approved answers better than any of the part-time workers. I could make a very long list of how robots are already suppressing wages, taking jobs, or raising the barrier of entry for professions. Research and development of these technologies are in advanced stages, and will soon be everywhere. Once they become smarter and more capable, there will be little hope of many humans keeping up.

So in 2020, when Uber hopes to have self-driving taxis replacing traditional taxis as well as delivery services, the next president will have to deal with this. When vehicles from Google or Apple or Tesla hit the market, threatening sales from formerly "too big to fail" automotive companies, the next president will have to deal with this. When IBM Watson starts diagnosing diseases better than human doctors, and the Da Vinci surgical robots helps fix those diseases better than a human surgeon, some doctors will lose their job, other doctors will have to spend more time to retrain to more niche specialities, settle for lower paying positions in remote or underserved areas, or simply change professions to something less lucrative, the next president will have to deal with this. Udacity, the revolutionary online university founded by one of the creators of Google just got a billion dollar valuation and will eat into college degree programs, reducing many, many workers needed to run a traditional college campus, and Rubio's concept of "making higher ed more accessible" means something very different. What do you teach the average person, when a robot can do a better job than the average lawyer, doctor, accountant, or factory worker? What do you tell the average student who might be unable to reach a level of mastery to out-compete a computer?
TL;DR starts here
We need our politicians to more seriously address these issues. Bernie Sanders has entertained the concept of a UBI (unconditional basic income) that is growing in popularity, but there must be other answers too (one of them explored in a previous blog post here). We don't need a president who wants to give more money and power to existing capital owners-- the same people who will be buying the robots and reaping the benefits, at the expense of the rest of us. We need leaders who believe in the "exceptionalism" of the individual human spirit and wants to support our natural desire to be happy with our friends and family and communities. We need leaders willing to see where the future of the great American society lies, when robots can do many or most of our jobs for us, and wants to empower people to pursue hobbies that make them happy, whether this hobby is making art or just playing video games. We need leaders that will not moralize about the differences of people along the natural spectrum of human tendencies and ambition levels. The human that has the insatiable appetite of climbing the tallest mountains isn't innately better than the person whose bliss is quietly reading a book outside on a beautiful day.

Robotics and automation are going to hit our society like a ton of bricks, and we as voters need to demand our leaders be serious about addressing these present and future issues. We need to ask economics researchers to do their best to devise stable, scalable solutions that fit our cultural values.

Thanks for reading!

TL;DR: Just read the last 2 paragraphs ;-)










This blog post was made after weeks of thought, but was written off the cuff. Feedback is welcome!

PS. Sign my petition to change the debate formats: debates are worthless!

Alternative to UBI (Universal/Unconditional Basic Income)

NOTE: I don't necessarily support this idea, just offering it as a possibly workable alternative

(TL;DR at end)

UBI has been thrown around a lot recently, and it’s currently the forerunner among futurists as the solution to a highly automated, robotic future.

Unfortunately, this plan has a lots of issues. Most significant among them the political barriers. Most Americans, and most politicians, would not support the direct transfer of money to people, for “no good reason”. These plans would be attacked as socialism, or wasteful government spending, or overreach. And they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong in these accusations (but still a lot of wrong).

So what could be an alternative? Already, many jobs have been lost to computers and robots. Already, companies, the capital owners, are trading human workers, for the massive returns on capital costs that robots/automation provides. But this can be exploited for the benefit of the common worker.

Historically, the capital owners and workers have been in a constant struggle with workers. This is the reason labor unions were first created. Our government spends a lot of time trying to balance and negotiate this relationship. Our modern capitalist society is built on the relationship, and our existing systems are intricately dependent on this relationship, which is why it’s of utmost importance to address the disruptions robots will cause for this relationship. The best solution might be to work within the worker-owner paradigm, rather than trying to disrupt this paradigm as a UBI intends to do.

How you ask? Let workers own the robots. A vehicle assembly line for example contains dozens of robots that produce millions of dollars worth of vehicles, while merely costing a few hundred thousands of dollars in maintenance and lifecycle costs. What if, rather than the factory owner owning the robots, and reaping the benefits of the robots at the expense of humans, they were required (or encouraged) to lease the robots from workers? Workers would get together and “purchase” the robots from robotics companies, “lease” them to the factories for fees that could more that support the income needs of the workers, and be responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the robots?

The system that would evolve would be “employers” being the worker-coops that manage and maintain the robots. These worker coops would necessarily have to hire people to maintain the robots and keep them functioning, they would hire people to acquire the best robots, and hire people to negotiate usage of the robots with the factories. The factories would seek out coops with the best negotiators, or best workers, which ensures they pay competitive leasing fees. This way, the market economic system incentives creation of the best robots, people still have productive work to do in maintaining the coops, businesses still have meaningful pressures to seek better efficiency, and a basis for setting prices, and our economy keeps ticking along.

Compared to a UBI, this allows workers to control their destiny. Workers can figure out new ways to run coops (that i can’t even begin to capture here) that increase their incomes. Some workers might be okay with a coop that seeks a meager income, while others will work hard to make the best robot coop ever. Under a UBI, masses of people will have no job, no real opportunities, and a true underclass would form. The UBI might only let people buy the cheapest of goods, and stay in low quality housing. It would result in massive growth in ghettos as people try to survive on their meager basic income.

Under worker-owned robot cooperatives, anyone has the opportunity to buy into these robot coops. And to be clear, these coops don’t have to by physical robots, it could be intelligent software. It may be possible for each individual to own an intelligent software agent, rather than having to buy into a more expensive robot coop. There are many ways this system could evolve.

Fundamentally though, it would require laws that force employers to “hire” human employees who then send a robot (software or physical) in to work for them. This would see massive opposition to implement (since factory owners aren’t going to want to give up their lucrative robots), but should result in a superior system in a post-automation society than a UBI.

TL;DR: Forcing companies/factories to lease/buy robots from humans is better than a Universal Basic Income

(originally posted here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/reality-bytes-musings )