People who get anxious about robots and AI taking jobs are usually worrying about the wrong thing.
The thing to worry about is how to structure our society to best distribute the vast amounts of leisure time and resources freed by automation, not how to STOP THE ROBOTS.
Of course, in the USA, I don't expect the Republican party to fully grasp and understand the huge opportunity here until way too late. I'm only slightly more confident in the Democratic party.
(as an aside: a few years ago I posted a quote in image form from…someone at world bank maybe? addressing this very issue, but Google, who should be excellent at this, makes searching your own posts extremely difficult)
You made multiple points: your score break down 😉
+1 quit worrying about the robots, start worrying about how to occupy your leisure time
-1 focussing on the Republican party. They are no less likely to get in the way than any other group using "the political means"
+1 weird that google screwed up searching features
+Jeff Cave​ I mention the Republican part because the most obvious and largely recommended by economists way of dealing with this issue is wealth redistribution… and since that's a dirty word to the Republican party I fear they'll be too slow to come around to the realization that wealth redistribution because we've built a robotic utopia where people don't have to work as much is a different beast than the wealth redistribution they're usually on about.
If we continue without changing course in the current direction – ie. doing nothing to update our social structures while technology increasingly and rapidly eats jobs, we will have a world with a permanent destitute underclass consisting of a majority of the population, with a few very rich people trying to figure out why, inexplicably, no one is buying all the lovely products their robots make. Then probably shrugging and targeting the luxury market.
+Dustin Wyatt I recently read a (Canadian) government plan to implement a UBI. The explanation of the mechanics made it impossible to gain access to the resource unless you had access to a lawyer. This effectively bars individuals that need it, from gaining access to it.Â
I only mention it because, it was proposed by Canada's equivalent to the Democrats.
My comment is based on a general suspicion of the kind of person who wants to be a politician (regardless of party). Never underestimate a politician's ability to turn a good idea into something that lines their pockets.
Yeah, +Jeff Cave​, I'm in complete agreement. In case you understood my post to mean I thought Democrats would be our savior, what I was trying to indicate was that the Republicans were really really really unlikely to solve the issue and the Democrats were just really really unlikely to solve it. The only reason the Democrats are slightly more likely to have a solution is that because many of the possible solutions are more in line with Democrats already existing platforms.
I still don't have much confidence that any political party will recognize and solve the problem.
+Dustin Wyatt There's one party in Denmark who has it in their program. I think they have ~5% of the parliament seats…
It's probably worth mentioning that Silicon Valley types are very interested in universal basic income (not surprising since they're the ones developing the technology that makes these sorts of policies relevant!). In fact, Y Combinator, a large and influential VC firm in San Francisco, is attempting to fund a UBI experiment. http://goo.gl/h6xQF5