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White House: US Needs a Stronger Social Safety Net To Help Workers Displaced by Robots (recode.net) 635

The White House has released a new report warning of a not-too-distant future where artificial intelligence and robotics will take the place of human labor. Recode highlights in its report the three key areas the White House says the U.S. government needs to prepare for the next wave of job displacement caused by robotic automation: -- Fund more research in robotics and artificial intelligence in order for the U.S. to maintain its leadership in the global technology industry. The report calls on the government to steer that research to support a diverse workforce and to focus on combating algorithmic bias in AI.
-- Invest in and increase STEM education for youth and job retraining for adults in technology-related fields. That means offering computer science education for all K-12 students, as well as expanding national workforce retraining by investing six times the current amount spent to keep American workers competitive in a global economy.
-- Modernize and strengthen the federal social safety net, including public health care, unemployment insurance, welfare and food stamps. The report also calls for increasing the minimum wage, paying workers overtime and and strengthening unions and worker bargaining power.

The report says the government, meaning the the incoming Trump administration, will have to forge ahead with new policies and grapple with the complexities of existing social services to protect the millions of Americans who face displacement by advances in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. The report also calls on the government to keep a close eye on fostering competition in the AI industry, since the companies with the most data will be able to create the most advanced products, effectively preventing new startups from having a chance to even compete.

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White House: US Needs a Stronger Social Safety Net To Help Workers Displaced by Robots

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  • Frostipsot (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 )

    Why not just have a bigger army? It'll be needed sooner or late.

    • by rlp ( 11898 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:18AM (#53528933)

      "Why not just have a bigger army?"

      But what is someone comes along and creates an even bigger army of robots (or clones) and puts them out of work?

      • by Big Hairy Ian ( 1155547 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:57AM (#53529121)

        "Why not just have a bigger army?"

        But what is someone comes along and creates an even bigger army of robots (or clones) and puts them out of work?

        I find your lack of faith disturbing

    • Why not just have a bigger army? It'll be needed sooner or late.

      Because we'll all get jerbs workin in the coal mines. King Coal shall rise again!

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Nice plan Demoncrats:
    1. outsource jobs (NAFTA, etc)
    2. bring whole 3rd world into country
    3. blame AI (scapegoating)
    4. insist workers must pay for whole 3rd world

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:08AM (#53528897)
    It's called education, and self motivation. Unfortunately, we seem to be lacking in those qualities as a nation these days and the more nimble and aggressive third world countries are hammering it home. This is a problem that the free market could easily solve, given an opportunity to do so.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:17AM (#53528931)

      That's fine for the intelligent among us, but what will those in the bottom half of the bell curve do?

      • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:15AM (#53529217)

        Education != intelligence
        I think the real issue isn't formal education but vocational towards jobs that are needed and offer a formal retraining when such jobs go out of date.

        The fact is you can't do the same job every day for the rest of your life. Even us software developers workers over the past 40 years (full career) needed to move from COBOL to C to Perl to what ever is new now Python/.Net/Java/Node.JS.

        To survive today you need to be well trained. Formal education is valuable because such people know how to teach themselves. However for many we need continued training on new ways to do things to keep our skills up.

      • by sinij ( 911942 )
        Bottom half? You are an optimist. Try bottom 90%.
    • The best motivation is fear, fear of homelessness, starvation - everybody is afraid of that. Keep the workers' feet to the fire, without a social safety net they'll have to get out there and retrain themselves - we don't need education programs, the workers worth having will figure it out without teachers or classrooms. Think of the cost savings, think of the PROFIT!

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That's fine as a motivation to work, but it leads to very poor efficiencies because the workers will hate their job and do the bare minimal. The way to get more out of your workers and maximise profit is to get them to love their job so they go out of their way to do more for your business. Whether that be more work in hours, recommending your company to friends, or putting in overtime.

        • by JoeMerchant ( 803320 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:01AM (#53529133)

          You know what worked really well for like 50 years? The Iron Curtain. We can do that, we can build a wall, keep the stinking filth in the sewer where it belongs. Anybody who doesn't like to work for the company, deport 'em. The beatings will continue until morale improves. MAGA!

      • by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:03AM (#53529141) Homepage

        Or they rise up and kill the rich.

        Holding the poor's feet to the fire worked really good in France. Oh and it worked so well in the USA when it created the work unions.

    • by dywolf ( 2673597 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:28AM (#53529303)

      few things:

      - trumps education secretary wants to eliminate public education, turn everything into for profit private schools. ie: the poor kids get to go to work while the rich kids get an education.

      - the free market has never actually solved this problem, despite many opportunities to do so. in fact its what creates it in the first. this idea that the free market can eliminate the need for social programs if given a chance only shows a vast ignorance of history. all of history.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Kierthos ( 225954 )

        And his Secretary of Energy pick got a D in a class called Meat Science.

        And his pick to run the OMB questions whether we need publicly funded scientific research.

        Frankly, Trump's cabinet is worse than he is. Trump at least can be distracted by an SNL skit.

    • by ranton ( 36917 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:35AM (#53529343)

      It's called education, and self motivation. Unfortunately, we seem to be lacking in those qualities as a nation these days and the more nimble and aggressive third world countries are hammering it home. This is a problem that the free market could easily solve, given an opportunity to do so.

      I'm curious if you have any examples of the free market creating nationwide scale positive changes to education in modern history. You mention aggressive third world countries hammering it home, but that is with massive government spending on education and research. The US catapulted ahead in education because of massive government spending after World War II. Various European countries with great school systems also relied on strong government investment. South Korea is one example where there is massive private spending on education, but this is merely an example of how the free market can pervert a government's earlier successes in education.

      While I overall agree that education is the key to America's future economic success, it seems naive to think there would be a free market solution when every single historical success story was built on massive government spending.

  • by Matt.Battey ( 1741550 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:12AM (#53528911)

    Citizens beware of the pending doom brought on by mad-scientists creating an army of robots that will take away your jobs, raise your children, sex your wife, and transport themselves in flying cars.

    You must be prepared to be coddled by your government in order to survive. It is only by further relinquishing your free will and self motivation that you will flourish.

    This is all, carry on.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      My wife already has that robot.
    • by EmeraldBot ( 3513925 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:28AM (#53528985)

      Citizens beware of the pending doom brought on by mad-scientists creating an army of robots that will take away your jobs, raise your children, sex your wife, and transport themselves in flying cars.

      You must be prepared to be coddled by your government in order to survive. It is only by further relinquishing your free will and self motivation that you will flourish.

      This is all, carry on.

      How the hell is being payed overtime and strengthening unions "relinquishing your free will" or "being coddled by the government"? If anything, you're gaining free will by having better grounds for negotiating with your employer, giving you access to better pay, better job safety, and stronger job security.

      I think some people are more obsessed with soundbites than learning any US history, because we've already had this exact scenario before, this. exact. scenario. before. Do you want the Progressive era, or the Gilded age?

      Unless my sarcasm filter is broken tonight.

      • by dywolf ( 2673597 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:31AM (#53529315)

        A Day in the Life of a True Freedumb Loving Conservative:

        Joe Conservative wakes up in the morning and goes to the bathroom. He flushes his toilet and brushes his teeth, mindful that each flush & brush costs him about 43 cents to his privatized water provider. His wacky, liberal neighbor keeps badgering the company to disclose how clean and safe their water is, but no one ever finds out. Just to be safe, Joe Conservative boils his drinking water.

        Joe steps outside and coughs–the pollution is especially bad today, but the smokiest cars are the cheapest ones, so everyone buys ‘em. Joe Conservative checks to make sure he has enough toll money for the 3 different private roads he must drive to work. There is no public transportation, so traffic is backed up and his 10 mile commute takes an hour.

        On the way, he drops his 12 year old daughter off at the clothing factory she works at. Paying for kids to go to private school until they’re 18 is a luxury, and Joe needs the extra income coming in. Times are hard and there’re no social safety nets.

        He gets to work 5 minutes late and misses the call for Christian prayer, and is immediately docked by his employer. He is not feeling well today, but has no health insurance, since neither his employer nor his government provide it, and paying for it himself is really expensive, since he has a precondition. He just hopes for the best.

        Joe’s workday is 12 hours long, because there is no regulation over working hours, and Joe will lose his job if he complains or unionizes. Today is an especially bad day. Joe’s manager demands that he work until midnight, a 16 hour day. Joe does, knowing that he’ll lose his job if he does not.

        Finally, after midnight, Joe gets to pick up his daughter and go home. His daughter shows him the deep cut she got on the industrial sewing machine today. Joe is outraged and asks why she doesn’t have metal mesh gloves or other protection. She says the company will not provide it and she’ll have to pay for it out of her own pocket. Joe looks at the wound and decides they’ll use an over the counter disinfectant and bandages until it heals. She’ll have a scar, but getting stitches at the emergency room is expensive.

        His daughter also complains that the manager made suggestive overtures towards her. Joe counsels her to be a “good girl” and not rock the boat, or she’ll get fired and they’ll be out the income.

        His daughter says she can’t wait until she’s 18 so she can vote for change or go to the Iraq War.

        They get home and there’s a message from his elderly father who can’t afford to pay his medical or heating bills. Joe can hear him coughing and shivering.

        Joe turns on the radio and the top story is a proposal in Congress to raise the voting age to 25. A rare liberal opinionator states that it’s an attempt to keep power out of the hands of working class Americans. The conservative host immediately quashes him, calling him “a utopian idealist,” and agreeing that people aren’t mature enough to make good choices until they’re at least 25.

        Joe chuckles at the wine-swilling, cheese eating liberal egghead and thinks, “Thank God I live in America where I have freedom!”

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by vvaduva ( 859950 )

      Yes...be afraid, you will need government even more. Because this thing called electricity will put whale hunters and whale lamp makers out of business. Who will take care of them?

    • The robots already have flying cars, the meat bags are just too fat to ride in them. (See: The White Rabbit project "Where's my hoverboard" - the 145lb host couldn't get off the ground until he invested $20K in motors - a robot can fly itself for well under $200.)

  • by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:20AM (#53528939)
    Obama will issue all sorts of feel-good proclamations and what-have-you between now and 1/20/17, just because it will look good as part of his legacy, which he is busily imagining and crafting. It's a waste of time to afford these any real discussion. He's not serious about any of this stuff at this point, why should we be?
    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:39AM (#53529041)

      What legacy? I will admit that he was handed a crappy deck when he got into office, and that the reinvestment act did help. However, what he needed to do is stop the giant sucking sound and stop businesses from moving manufacturing to China and knowledge work to India, leaving nothing but McJobs behind in most of the country. Instead, Obama presided over more gun control laws passed in three years that ever were passed in the history of the nation (which has caused crime to rise.), a healthcare plan that insurance companies used to their advantage (I know people who are single paying $500 more a month than in 2010), a Chamberlain-esque foreign policy which caused a power vacuum and gave us Daesh (with enemy attacks on US soil every month or two in their name), and allies, for the first time since WWII, have been left to their own devices to fend for themselves, with broken promises of protection or help.

      Of course, the Dems point at Wall Street and cheer. Those numbers mean jack shit for the average person because that wealth flies overseas never to be seen in the US again. In reality, unemployment is still high. Even the tech sector jobs are tenous at best. You have to completely reinvent yourself every 6-12 months or you are on your ass. Don't know what kubernates, terraform, or the platform of the hour is? Better learn now before you have to learn while unemployed.

      As it stands now, there is arguments on who gets the share of the pie, but Obama's policies have caused the pie to shrink for everyone involved with the biggest disparity between rich and poor in the nation's history. You can't run a country on service jobs and expect it to survive. You also can't contract out a military's items to foreign companies and expect it to work (like US planes to India.)

      • Numbers don't lie (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Bush legacy: 2008 USA GDP: $14.7186 trillion, EU GDP $19.02 trillion (EU dwarfs US economy)
        Obama legacy: 2016 USA GDP of $18.56 trillion, EU GDP $16.97 trillion (USA dwarfs EU economy)

        "Chamberlain-esque foreign policy which caused a power vacuum and gave us Daesh...." blah blah blah... lots of words, and fuck all reality. An enemy so weak it's reduced to cutting people's heads off one by one because he has no major weapons. More people choke on burgers.

        Trump future legacy: Strip away the lies about his busi

  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:21AM (#53528943)

    We need to end college for all and replace it with an more trades like system where you don't need 2-4+ years of class room to get a job with an 20-60K+ loan.
    and / or change college accreditation so that tech / trade schools get more respect and make it so that colleges can update there Curriculum faster with less bs like.

    Accreditation prioritizes the wrong things. Historically, accreditation has focused on things like how many professors have PhDs, whether a college has a mission statement, and whether degree programs require a broad, general education as well as a specific major. Critics, including Margaret Spellings, the education secretary under President George W. Bush, have argued this misses an important point: whether students are learning. Most accreditors now require colleges to define the outcomes they want for their students and measure whether they're meeting them, but it gives colleges a lot of leeway on what those outcomes are.

    Also make the loans be discharged in Bankruptcy so that the school and banks have skin in the game.

     

    • Those are all good objectives and policies, but it doesn't seem to address the issue at hand: not all people can do jobs that require "advanced" training. Roughly 10% of the US workforce is effectively unemployable today: what happens when that jumps to 15% or higher?

      You effectively have two options that I see to support this ever increasing population: subsistence living (barter, hunt, scavenge), or wealth transfer. Rural people seem to prefer the former, while urban folks prefer the latter. Not sure i
    • Great plan Einstein. Meet the challenge of manual labor being replaced by automation by putting more people into manual labor. What could possibly go wrong.

  • by CrankyOldEngineer ( 3853953 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:27AM (#53528973)
    but no one trained to do them. So instead of improving our educational system, POTUS wants to pay people to do nothing. Yikes! And by improving our educational system, I do not mean throwing Federal dollars at it. We already have the most expensive system in the world with pitiful results. CrankyOldEngineer believes that any child can and should learn math and science, if we hire teachers that are qualified to tech these subjects. By jobs that need doing, I do not mean current openings on the want-ads. The human race needs doctors, engineers, and all kinds of skilled people, but we've created incentives for the wrong professions.
    • by dywolf ( 2673597 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:39AM (#53529365)

      the problem is people like you only see education as a means to an end, that end being a job.
      but education is its own end in its own right.
      the ability to get a job from it should be seen as a bonus, not the goal.

      we've taken the reality that certain jobs require an education and turn it into "the only reason education is important is employability".
      that is a perversion and it will be our downfall.

  • Er (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:27AM (#53528975)

    The report also calls for increasing the minimum wage, paying workers overtime and and strengthening unions and worker bargaining power.

    Lifting the cost of humans isn't going to help them compete against machines.

  • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:28AM (#53528981) Homepage

    Let's not have more people on the dole, please. We need a better answer than that.

    I remember, years ago, some African ambassador was touring government housing in the UK. I suppose he was supposed to be impressed that unemployed people got houses for free from the oh-so-generous government. His comment at the end of the tour was something like "How soul deadening, these people have no purpose in life. I'd rather be poor.". Coming from an African who knew what poverty was, it was a powerful indictment of social safety nets.

    People need a purpose in life. If we are going to be displaced from our jobs, then we need a different purpose. Being freed from repetitive, menial labor should allow us to do something more meaningful. Just putting ever more listless people into a lifelong holding pattern is not the right answer.

    • [Citation Needed]

    • by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:45AM (#53529063)
      How could the government give them purpose? The proposal is basically that we keep them from dying. To give them purpose in a dystopian automation future would require makework projects if there's nothing left for some ever increasing percentage of the population to train towards. You could pay them to grow a community garden, for example, but then you need money for the plot of land, and if a fiscal hawk comes around they're going to notice that it is cheaper to hand out bread.
      • In the UK there is an awful lot of free training you can get to get you back into employment, and you can go from unskilled to skilled in various areas without paying a penny for the training.

      • by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:08AM (#53529167) Homepage Journal
        The US government did this during the 1930-40s using the WPA project. It employed millions and you probably use the stuff they built every day without knowing it.
      • Litter cleanup, child-care (for parents with full-time jobs), elder-care, landscaping and gardening of public buildings and land, jury duty, local organic community farm, neighborhood security patrol (monitor only), QA gov't documents, monitoring legislators...

        There are plenty of tasks that could be done, but it's difficult to justify the expenditures for such under the current economy setups we use.

        Perhaps we need more "work-fare". You get a check from the gov't, but you have to spend 3 days a week on one

    • You cant get a free house in the UK just because you are unemployed. I am a white male over the age of majority, I won't ever get housed by the government unless I get seriously ill or get very old. If I were made unemployed tomorrow and lost my home, the council will tell me to go away - my only recourse for a bed would be a charity.

      To get housed you have to have a vulnerability factor - in most cases, females without kids won't get council housing either. A child under 18 would get you emergency accomm

    • Being freed from repetitive, menial labor should allow us to do something more meaningful.

      Yes, it would be nice if all those poor unemployed people could do meaningful things like start a business, or write that novel they've always dreamed about. But who's going to pay them for that? And how are they going to feed their families in the meantime?

      People have enough trouble finding work when there are all these repetitive menial jobs. They'd be doing something more meaningful if they could, but the option isn't there. When those menial jobs go away, it's not clear what they can move on to.

    • by dywolf ( 2673597 )

      and that ambassador prolly never actually felt the pangs of poverty, so who gives a flying F about his opinion?

    • by SlashDread ( 38969 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @10:05AM (#53529579)

      Purpose, probably useful, sure, I however do not understand why purpose seems to equal payed labour to you (and lots of other people). Are you suggesting voluntary work, or just being social to your neighbor has no purpose? I use these examples, because it is not certain that people even have the capability to always find "more meaningful" work if the "repetitive menial" labour has been automated. And why stop there? I suggest we are entirely capable of automating even "more meaningful" work. And then what?

      Figuring our what purpose people have, if they do not need to work for basic Income, is one of the goals of experimenting with it.

    • Some of us aren't so empty that we can't find better things to do than work all day. A factory job or digging ditches or cleaning house for the well to do is just as soul deadening of you ask me. I could be writing games or music or my little toy apps or reading or cycling any I of a dozen cool things besides making somebody else rich.
  • It's catching people who write these (and other) stupid prediction stories.
  • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:32AM (#53529003)

    "Invest in and increase STEM education for youth and job retraining for adults in technology-related fields. That means offering computer science education for all K-12 students, as well as expanding national workforce retraining..."

    There's a valid reason we don't have a massive surplus of neurosurgeons or nuclear fission experts. The field of STEM takes brainpower.

    A lot of jobs that will be replaced first by automation are not exactly jobs that are mentally challenging, so they are rather fitting for a certain portion of the general populous. That's not meant to be a derogatory statement, it's simply stating fact. You can't expect to shove the entire field of displaced laymen into a STEM curriculum and expect everyone to actually succeed, and yet that appears to be the grand plan here. Toss advanced mathematics against little Johnnys brain all you want, but if he doesn't get it then he's likely never gonna get it. Mental capacity varies from human to human. Always has, always will.

    I'd also love to hear what the master plan is for human employment once AI comes along and starts doing STEM better than any human could ever dream.

    In the end this political pandering really won't matter. The disease of Greed will ultimately win. Those in control wouldn't have it any other way.

    • by hyades1 ( 1149581 ) <hyades1@hotmail.com> on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:06AM (#53529157)

      There's a whole list of valid reasons why we're not inundated with neurosurgeons. Yours is well down that lis. The main reason is that many, many children with the intellectual capacity to become neurosurgeons never get the chance, because they can't afford the schooling.

      If you've ever sat on a committee charged with the responsibility of awarding a scholarship (I have), you realize very quickly there are thousands of worthy candidates who won't get the money, and that most of them will wind up without access to post-secondary education, or access only to low-end courses that won't lead to any kind of doctorate or medical degree.

    • A lot of jobs that will be replaced first by automation are not exactly jobs that are mentally challenging,

      Not that true. A lot of jobs that will be first replaced by automation are the one where it's most effective and easiest.

      New surgical robots will memorize your patterns and only call you to intervene when something new shows up. Radiology is going to go rather fast since image processing neural nets can look at images 24/7. You could have an X-ray or MRI machine read your diagnostic before you were re-dressed.

      In the future putting in an IV is probably going to be a robotic job. It's not something doctors do

  • But the reality is that we are no closer to "AI" than we were in 1960. And the robots that might displace workers are incredibly lame. Robots are good for some tasks, like assembly line welding, but useless for other tasks like assembling Ikea furniture.
  • It will one day be said, "It started with McDonald's." The question is, will we be there to hear it, or will it be a robot's contemplation of their evolutionary predecessor.
  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @09:38AM (#53529359)

    It's funny how these things go from a few "wackos" talking about robots taking over manufacturing, to the US government actually acknowledging there may be a problem with the system sooner than we think. I do think people are trying to lay the groundwork now, to minimize the negative effects. I could imagine some pretty bad methods of "population control" to use a euphemistic term if we tried to carry over the current system with majority unemployment being the norm.

    Of course, this is a parting shot from the outgoing administration -- given Trump's cabinet picks, I foresee some pretty nasty congressional fights and an eventual dismantling of most social programs. The Social Security system may be handed over to hedge funds and banks for safe keeping, Meidicare may become a voucher system that just enriches the insurance companies, and what little welfare there is left may be taken away. I'm happy the current administration is getting it on the record that we've been warned...it could be an interesting historical footnote or maybe a wake-up call.

    The fact is that even though "AI" isn't nearly as thrilling as the pundits claim, it is good enough at this point to displace a huge number of very vulnerable people. People aren't working assembly line or fast food jobs because they love the work...they're doing it because it's the only thing they're capable of. That's the first problem -- a lot of people are poorly educated, and a great number of those won't benefit from additional education resources getting thrown at them. Median IQ is 100 -- there's a lot of people at or below that. Unless you want to start engineering society to model "Brave New World," you either need to find something for these people to do, or allow them to do nothing and stop complaining.

    The next iteration is what I'm worried about -- professionals could easily have their roles reduced. Doctors and lawyers are a good example -- most of medical and law school is designed to select for people with photographic memories and dump volumes of information into their brains. When that knowledge doesn't need to be kept in someone's brain anymore, the status of the professional holding it is reduced. Same thing goes for IT -- I'm in systems architecture so I'm designing stuff and coming up with procedures, and it's obvious where things are headed. Hands-on IT work is almost at the point where we just need to tell someone to plug in cables, remove hard drives, etc. Development is moving offshore and increasingly done as a series of pre-formed code components and microservices. Note that this also goes for almost every office job out there too. Working in corporate IT, I see so many generic C-strudent business majors from Big State University performing an updated version of a 40 year old process. It sounds like a good idea to increase productivity by automating and replacing them, but I haven't lost sight of the fact that these people are having kids, buying products and living in communities. Take them out, and no one's around to buy the things your company is making in their fully automated factories.

    Lots of people are saying this will never happen and that anyone who suggests it will is a Luddite. Maybe so, but I don't see anywhere for most workers to go -- there's no retraining for jobs that don't exist in the modern AI world. It's going to require a radical rethinking of how we define work, wealth, etc. And if it isn't done very carefully, it will lead to a very bad end. Imagine the uproar when you tell everyone that the retirement savings they worked for all their lives won't need to be saved up by future generations, or that we have to enact more social safety programs for the 80% and rising unemployed people out there. If this is done badly, it will lead to the owners of businesses hoarding everything for themselves or calls to control the population in certain ways.

  • by modmans2ndcoming ( 929661 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @11:00AM (#53530033)

    As soon as Lawyers and Doctors can't get jobs the government will realize it's an issue. Until then it is just a lazy person issue.

  • by gestalt_n_pepper ( 991155 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @12:18PM (#53530905)

    -- Fund more research in robotics and artificial intelligence in order for the U.S. to maintain its leadership in the global technology industry.

    This is crap. The first country that gets human-like scalable AI wins. Period. It wins the wars. It wins the economic race. It wins everything.

    The domain of solvable problems may be limited, but humans will never be able to address it as well as effective AI.

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