The next revolution presents some serious societal problems

Many tasks in daily life can be automated with a corresponding reduction in workforce

It's not as if we are trading manual looms for Mills for the next iteration

Much of what has historically been considered valued employment will disappear

Automated diagnostics in medicine. AI read results, more technology driven education such as edx.

It will raise issues such as paying a basic income or potentially driven civil unrest

Yes, we are approaching the point where robots will be able to perform most physical tasks. Professional drivers are going to be wiped out like horsemen in the next decade or two. This will be the first big wave of automation induced unemployment.

The Brookings Institution, which has studied the problem of poverty closely, says that if you do these three things you'll only have a 2 percent chance of falling into poverty and a 74 percent chance of making it into the middle class:

1. Graduate from high school.

2. Wait until you're at least 21 years of age before marrying, and don't have children until you're married.

3. Have a full-time job.

These rules apply to all races and ethnic groups. Unfortunately, breaking these rules is becoming more commonplace for all racial groups. And young adults who violated all three things above had a 76 percent chance of winding up in poverty and only a 7 percent chance of gaining the middle class.

In just looking at government spending on anti-poverty, education and job training programs, it's clear that government already does a lot. A whole lot. From the Brookings website:

“The figures on investing and spending demonstrate that government is already doing a lot. A typical child from a poor family enjoys income and housing support for their family, health care, preschool education, public school education, college loans or scholarships, and employment and training programs, to name a few of the prominent government programs.”


What's even clearer is that your personal decisions about your life are going to greatly affect where you end up in life. So the middle-class values of hard work, perseverance and delaying gratification seem to have come into being for good reason, I'd say.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Guess go into IT security to ensure these robots don't kill all of us.

Will they someday have a robot olympics?

The absence of those same values in poor households prevents the cycle being broken more than it is

I was watching a show where some black college students said growing up they basically had 3 job choices, sports drugs or music I compare that with my neighborhood where were you had everything from doctors to lawyers to bankers to pharmacist to teachers etc. Sports drugs or music was never an option.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

I wonder how much more money we could give to the working poor if we took every aid program (SNAP, welfare, etc) and made it one program, so that if you qualified for assistance you get the whole package in cash. I gotta think that would eliminate a huge amount of bureaucracy and be more useful than all these little band aid programs that probably soak up millions just to administer. We also need to take a hard look at Clinton’s welfare reform law that gave the state’s more leeway in how they spent federal welfare dollars, with several states spending that money on things that aren’t really going to help the needy. I’m generally not a huge fan of doling out cash, but when somebody is busting their ass and working and not getting by, I have no problem with my tax dollars going to help them.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

I wonder how much more money we could give to the working poor if we took every aid program (SNAP, welfare, etc) and made it one program, so that if you qualified for assistance you get the whole package in cash.

Here in my province they were testing a "basic income" program where a basic income would be;

• given to anyone who meets the income eligibility criterion
  
• given to someone who may be working but earning below the basic income level
• generally simpler to administer as it would be a single program

The group was to be given $17,000 per year for a single person ($24,000 for a couple) less 50% of any income they earned outside of the program. People with a disability would receive up to $500 month on top of that amount.

A new Conservative government was elected and they just got rid of the pilot program because they thought it was a handout so now, there are all the same old handouts that existed before. I would have liked to see them test it for 3 years just so see the results but as usual, the politicians got in the way in the hope of getting a few more votes. By cancelling it, they wasted millions as the program was already in place. It made no sense to cancel but that's the way things go.

I don't mind this plan because now there is really no way out. Once you do get a job, your benefits are gone, at least most of them. You don't have an opportunity to save any money to help get you out, or pay for college, etc.

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

The first step is define poverty - I think we keep defining it up. To me, if you have a roof over your head, utilities paid and food then your not poor. Even if you have a low paying job, lets say $10 an hour - you can have all this if you work full-time, in some places it may take you 60 hours of work.

I do a lot of financial counseling, in most cases people simply are not working 40 hours and are not willing to work a bit more. I hear a lot from some folks - I should be able to live by working on 40 hours a week...and then there is the spending side. You dig in and see things like $200 a month for cable, you see no budget. Or my latest favorite, I have a young lady who just graduated with a masters degree, has $60K in debt and took a job starting at $30K per year. You should have seen her face when I told her she needed to get a PT job for a while so she could keep up with her debt. She informed me their was a program that allows her to only pay 10% of her income on the debt...I looked at her and ask her if she was ok paying on this for the next 20 years? She didn't have an answer.

In other words, most of it is ignorance. I get the generational stuff, I grew up dirt poor from a family that mismanaged everything, this is color blind thing.
I do agree that we should fold all the programs into one and give cash to the families in need. It probably will not work any better but will be cheaper to manage. Then rely on churches, other non govt groups to do the education and additional assistance.

I know this is hard to say, but pain can be the best teacher.

Edit to add: I read the article after I posted - it breaks my heart for these families. And yet, if you look at all the decisions, who's fault is it that her father was a crackhead. Why does Vanessa have all these kids and no father around? Why did Vanessa begin to cut class. A job will never solve these things, even a well paying one. How will her kids respond? The answer is thru some means (that known of us know) people stop making harmful decisions.

Interesting. So you want one large federal program and to do away with state involvement. Yet we constantly here that states know what their people need and are more innovative than the wasteful federal government.

Hmmm....not sure I said do away with state involvement. Perhaps the state’s could be useful in administering the program. What I did say was that what used to spent on helping needy people is now given to the states to essentially spend how they please, with many dollars being spent elsewhere. Now, if somebody is taking my money and saying it is going to help the poor, then that’s what they should actually be doing with it.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

It's what was once called the "cycle of poverty." If you're born into poverty, true poverty, you're likely to say in poverty precisely because the personal decisions you make (as well as the decisions forced on you through circumstance) will combine to keep you in poverty. If all you know is "drawing checks" ("drawing government checks") you're going to become skilled at ensuring you continue to be able to draw those checks. That may mean NOT seeking out gainful employment, because the checks will stop coming and the employment you have won't be able to make up the difference, both in actual income as well as benefits (health, etc.).

This is almost a Hobson's Choice as well as a Gordian knot, both at the personal/familial and societal levels.

Hey; who was it that said "the poor will always be with us"? He may have known what he was talking about.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

So the states should have discretion as long as they use the funds the way the feds tell them to?

It's what was once called the "cycle of poverty." If you're born into poverty, true poverty, you're likely to say in poverty precisely because the personal decisions you make (as well as the decisions forced on you through circumstance) will combine to keep you in poverty.


I'm on a reading mission to read all the non-fiction Pulitzer Prize winning novels since inception in 1962. I'm not reading them in order and currently on the 2017 winner "Evicted - Poverty and Profit in the American City."


It focuses on the relationship between landlords and tenants in Milwaukee and while reading it, you can't help but notice the cycle of poverty, where generations of family members often repeat exactly what happened before them. It is often related to drugs which seems to have a strong learned behaviour aspect but the entire way they deal with problems is similar.


One of the biggest problems, which I've seen around the world, is that in too many cases, children of parents who didn't pursue education tend to do the same. It can come down to a simple thing like the parents not knowing that in the evenings, the child should be studying, or reading, or going to bed on time or just having quiet in the home. In many parts of the world I would see children sleeping in front of the television at 3:00 am on a school night because the parents didn't make them go to bed or even turn off the t.v. There is no chance that child would do well at school and the learned behaviour of staying up and not prioritizing school is a big factor. It is similar in a lot of areas of their lives whether it's from a poor diet, how to deal with stress, etc.

Yeah, there was a good NPR piece, based on a book (need to look up the title), that success in life can be strongly predicted by the habits learned up to like age 9. Reading, spoken diction, eating, etc. And, mostly, importantly, personal interactions, e.g. listening, forming effective peer groups, etc.

After that it seems that people are kinda stuck. The main point of the piece was that some "jobs retraining" programs perform very poorly because they attempt to retrain things that are, at best, very, very difficult to retrain. You can retrain blue collar people for other blue collars jobs. But that's about it.

Not to say it's impossible - it just gets a very low conversion rate the older you get.

\

But horesman could learn how to drive a car and basically keep doing the same job. As Autonomous vehicles replace long haul truckers, there is no place for the truck driver to evolve into, its not like he can become a microprocessor.

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Just Triing
Triathlete since 9:56:39 AM EST Aug 20, 2006.
Be kind English is my 2nd language. My primary language is Dave it's a unique evolution of English.

I think you missed the point. Have a full-time job. Graduating High-school does not get you many full time jobs anymore, and in the future they will be hard and harder to get. I doubt working full time at taco bell is enough to put you in the middle class.

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Just Triing
Triathlete since 9:56:39 AM EST Aug 20, 2006.
Be kind English is my 2nd language. My primary language is Dave it's a unique evolution of English.

They had to cancel it, could you imagine if it actually worked?

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Just Triing
Triathlete since 9:56:39 AM EST Aug 20, 2006.
Be kind English is my 2nd language. My primary language is Dave it's a unique evolution of English.

I think it is absolutely clear that pain has taught generation after generation nothing

Some people, obviously yourself, break the cycle but it's clear that for every one of you many do not

A friend of mine is a marine engineer, senior engineer on motor yacht up to 3k ton........

He started an apprenticeship at 16. At 19 he left home moved to ship yards in Holland and Germany and now spends 26 weeks a year working for, in his words, arsehole, but he has made it and he comes from one of the poorest parts of the UK

Most of his peers will not have achieved a fraction of his success but the fact they, their parents and their kids are feeling some pain will not change the outcome

You are counselling individuals and that's fortunate for them but it's a social and cultural problem and these do not get solved by sporadic and random interventions

Vaccinations don't work if you randomly intervene with a sub set of the population and without some sort of policy and Program with respect to bring people out of poverty they are destined to stay thete

I think a basic state wage is certainly one way and eliminates all the BS of different government programs

If the feds are providing funds for cash assistance to poor people, then that's where the money should go. Not sure why this is a difficult concept to grasp. Look, if you have a different opinion, just state it instead of playing 20 questions.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

If anyone missed the point, it would be the Brookings Institution, sir, not me. But I think they didn't. For one, it's pretty clear that the personal decisions one makes while heading toward high school's end will have an effect for the rest of one's life. Through a great deal of study, Brookings identified such personal decisions as a vital input factor into what your life is going to be like if you don't finish high school.

For another, I believe that graduating high school still does get you many full-time jobs these days, mainly because I employ a lot of those high school graduates, and in positions that will prepare them for positions of greater responsibility, as well as pay, in the future. Many of them will move onto supervisory and managerial positions within our company, for example. Or will move on to similar companies with experience and skill sets valued by those employers. At present all five department managers came up from the ranks, so to speak, after starting at the very bottom. Many others here have gone on to jobs elsewhere in supervision or management.

I think part of the problem here is that we're mistaking the "Taco Bell" job as some sort of employment that's supposed to launch you into the middle class. Clearly, that's not the case and it's never been so when it comes to such "McJobs," which are intended to be entry level only and which have been looked at for decades as jobs that teach young people the ins and outs of employment while also helping inculcate a stronger work ethic within them. Something more after a "Taco Bell" job will be required, which goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway:

Graduation from high school isn't all that's required to land the kind of full-time job necessary to enter the middle class, especially in this day and age when one simply can't step from high school into a well-paying blue collar autoworker's job, for instance. Or something else in manufacturing, mining or the like. Those jobs are scarcer than before, for one, and times -- and technology -- have changed.

Vocational-technical training, post-high school, or other forms of job training will of course be needed if one doesn't intend to go onto college. But the first crucial hurdle that needs to be cleared is finishing high school (not just attaining a GED, either). That's where the work and study ethic is instilled. Failing to meet even that metric is often an indicator of deeper issues within the dropout and the numbers don't lie:

Adhere to the three rules and you've got a 74 percent chance of making it into the middle class, for a host of reasons, a few of which I laid out above.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Yes, we are approaching the point where robots will be able to perform most physical tasks. Professional drivers are going to be wiped out like horsemen in the next decade or two. This will be the first big wave of automation induced unemployment.


I'm approaching 50 years old and have been in manufacturing for 30 of those years. I've been hear "X is going to wipe out Y" for at least 30 of those years and if you look back in history you'll see the same statements about pretty much every new technology.

In almost every case it has been true. Cars wiped out buggy manufacturers, CNC wiped out manual mill operators....and on and on and on. However also in every case the new technology resulted in more productivity, less work for individuals with better pay and better conditions.



Yes auto drive vehicles will wipe out professional drivers just like cars wiped out buggy manufacturers. But will the end result of this be? The cost of getting product from A to B drops precipitously and the cost of goods overall drops. Demand goes up and the demand for automated vehicles goes up. The vehicle industry has a large increase in demand as well as vehicle maintenance, programming, monitoring, logistics and on and on. Certainly there will be many instances of drivers that are put out of a job and never find another because that is all they are qualified for. However many will move into other fields.

So know instead of one driver sitting in the cab of his truck 8-10 hours a day moving one load, that one driver is sitting in an office following 10-100 trucks that are being controlled by software. Now instead of sitting in the cab for 8-10 hours a day the guy is sitting in an office watching 10-100 robots manufacturing 10-1000 vehicles a day. Now instead of sitting in a cab for 8 hours a day he's sitting in an office watching robots fix 10-1000 vehicles a day and on and on.


Yes at some point this all focuses down to a point where humans are no longer needed and technology does everything...but isn't that the end game? Isn't that the goal? To have everything you want, cheap, inexpensive or nearly free and 100% of your time to do whatever you want? If everything we want and need is made by "Labor" that costs nothing with materials that cost nothing then we pay nearly nothing for all our goods...who needs a job?



Personally I look forward to that day, don't fear it at all. Sadly it's not going to happen in my life.

~Matt

1. Graduate from high school.

2. Wait until you're at least 21 years of age before marrying, and don't have children until you're married.


3. Have a full-time job.


I've posted this several times over the years and for the most people just don't want to accept it. "The Poor" don't have opportunity. Well no, if you drop out of HS and have two or three kids and the father skates, yep, you're screwed.

I've never worked anywhere where there was not some room for moving up and have never worked anywhere where I did not gain experience that I couldn't leverage to get a better paying job.I started working when I was 16. By the time I graduated from HS I had a good work record, references and people that would vouch for me. I got a better than minimum wage job because of that and in a place where I could learn something other than flipping burgers. I learned everything I could in every Job I got and that got me better jobs and better positions. This mentality that a person is somehow "Stuck" in a minimum wage job is absurd.

Short of a small percentage of people that can't, physically or mentally, move up the ladder, being stuck in in a minimum wage is almost entirely due to personally choice.

No, you are not going to be living high on the hog if you're making minimum wage and in some areas of the country you're going to be crammed into a small apartment with 4-5 of your closest minimum wage making buddies. But you can make it.

~Matt

Yes. Post-scarcity. Star Trek.

If you there is no labour to pay, how do you derive the value of something? Iron is everywhere - what is the value of it if no one has to extract it. It's fascinating to think about. Is basic income the answer? Probably not - why pay money to people when you don't have to pay anything.

I think that in the end game that Matt describes, the value of objects will be in their raw materials, energy used to produce them, and possibly (depending on how IP laws evolve) the intellectual property involved in their design.

I don't know how we ever reach "post-scarcity" on earth. The planet's resources (i.e., energy and raw materials) are finite.

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"100% of the people who confuse correlation and causation end up dying."

I grew up below the poverty line with the "Government cheese" and other benefits, but never really thought about it. Neither did my friends who for the most part were in the same boat until we moved to an area that didn't have many military families.

I always saw the value of school work, and was one of those people who knew that high school was NOT a prison but rather the best life we would have until a long time after graduation. I also saw that the military, while it did not make one rich, DID give me a trade and a career with benefits and the opportunity to grow and succeed.

I followed that path, the only one in my family to do so, and it worked as advertised, I am now looking at a very comfortable retirement at a reasonable age after a pretty successful career. Serving in the military has advantages in the education, opportunities, and in creating a mindset that current difficulties can be overcome with hard work and perseverance.

I have met others, including family members, who never got any of that and are still living below the poverty line. Several have resented my success with snide comments and other put downs as "that guy" who isn't part of the family anymore. Every time I just say "if YOU had done what I have done, then you would have the life that I have!" That answer doesn't seem to satisfy them very much, because they seem to want prosperity without the effort to pursue that outcome.

In a way, we're in a post-scarcity world right now. We can certainly feed, clothe, and shelter everyone. The problem is that half the world's wealth resides in the pockets of something like 100 people.

That said, I think at that point possessions will be valued less since anyone can pretty much have anything, and people will attempt to demonstrate their value in other ways - likely through being socially valued, such as having more "likes" than others or being talked about by more people than others. Basically, we'll all become bored bourgeoisie with only a few of us being industrious enough to pursue art or science.

On another note, AI is going to clobber jobs we once thought untouchable, like people working in finance, bookkeeping, risk analysis, architecture, personal assistants - even art like film and writing. By 2050 it's going to be a very interesting world.

Maybe you have it backwards... these are values and traits that lift you into middle-class.

"What's even clearer is that your personal decisions about your life are going to greatly affect where you end up in life. So the middle-class values of hard work, perseverance and delaying gratification seem to have come into being for good reason, I'd say. "


I don't disagree. But what if you've got issues?

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

You must be new here.

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War is god

Ahhh!

I was thinking in terms of scarcity of natural resources, whereas it looks like you were talking about scarcity of basic necessities.

I think that we're on the same page, especially with regards to AI.

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"100% of the people who confuse correlation and causation end up dying."

I don't know how we ever reach "post-scarcity" on earth. The planet's resources (i.e., energy and raw materials) are finite.


It's an energy issue. At the point we find a very cheap, highly renewable easily repeatable energy source we've pretty much reached that point. Mass is energy and energy is mass. If we can find a way to easily convert one into the other we've passed the post scarcity point.

At that point it becomes nearly 100% about IP rights. When you can live like a 1% for what nearly no cost people pay for the things they want.



I will agree that it's possible we never get there and it's also possible we hit a huge shit storm and or a number of them during the journey.

In any case I just think we are in much of a current danger of people being put out of jobs by new technology. I just spent a day at IMTS in Chicago and earlier in the year I spent two days at the Hannover Fair in Germany. When I go to these place I don't think "Wow these are going to put everyone out of work" I think "Holy crap now I can do that thing I couldn't do 10 years ago" or "Wow that makes this thing less expensive and marketable".

Yep, if you have no skills and no desire to learn one, you're going to be put out of a job. Right now and IMO for the foreseeable future, 20-30 years at least there seems to be more and more opportunity not less. I mean really, I can have an idea for a thing and send it to some place on the internet and have them make it for penny's on the dollar of what it would have cost 20 years ago.

~Matt