Google self-driving car pioneer wants to teach people how to face the future

I also think there are a lot of merits to online-education and Udacity seems to have the right general idea. On-line education needs to be more engaging and entertaining than simply videos and online collaboration.

However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. In our current economic model, this seems like increased pain for most of us.

IMHO it would be much better if we could stop this denial. We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. I think a much better strategy would be for us to start focusing our best and brightest on full automation of our needs and basic wants so that we can provide most essential services to people with minimal human and resource cost.

Perhaps I'm just jaded or cynical, but fuck people.

We, as a species, are the greatest threat to ourselves, and we are our greatest asset. An individual may be brilliant, and and large groups congregating together into governments that empower hundreds of millions of individuals may be the greatest feat our species has accomplished, but there is just so much instability across a wide spectrum of life.

We, as a species, are approaching the limit of what 7B people on this planet are capable of. Globalization is piquing and revolutionary growth will pique with it, and maintaining the rate at which we grow will be accomplished by broad-sweeping reforms with the end-goal being tearing down inefficiencies -- starting with economic.

We, as a species, absolutely can bring a first-world quality of life to everybody, so why shouldn't we?

We, as a species, absolutely can cooperate and govern on a global scale, where such cooperation is codified into law, so why shouldn't we?

The answer is that we don't want to because we can't handle giving up control to those other people because they don't have our best interests in mind.

How do we face the future? By letting go of our ill-conceived notion that we are fit to govern ourselves in the current manner, and accept that operational control of various aspects of humanity (eg: supply chain management, namely natural resource allocation and food distribution) will be automated, and as such outside of the purview of human judgement.

So putting a floor on what people get each year seems like a pretty good idea. How about a ceiling as well? What's an equitable spread? 10x? 100x? Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get?