Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

And this is why Yang is the most prescient of any of the candidates. He looked at the problem, broke it down into its basic components, extrapolated what was going to happen, and found the most straightforward answer (UBI) from the large search space of possible solutions. You know, like a computer programmer would.

So I fundamentally disagree with the article for the following reasons:

* If I had a budget of a few million dollars and a small team of geeks like me, I could write a (non-general) AI myself in 2-10 years that would pass the Turing test in any specific area, a bit Like IBM's Watson. And I'm nobody. The reason this won't happen is that I don't have the social proof (I haven't won the internet lottery or proceeded through the graduate level accolades or submitted papers so anyone would listen to me) so I'll likely spend the rest of my life making rent instead of making any meaningful contribution to society. And there are a million software developers around the world just like me. And a million architects who will never design a building. And a million biologists who will never cure a disease. This is the great tragedy of the commons of our time, that creates the underemployment that contributes to the wealth inequality that is the one thing holding AI back. You know, the very thing that Yang is trying to solve with UBI.

* I agree that shortsighted trade policies started by Reagan in the 80s with his "I'm from the government and am here to help" deregulation anti-pattern, exacerbated by Clinton with NAFTA, and beaten like a dead horse with George W Bush's offshoring/tax cut for the wealthy blue pill orgy, is the second biggest reason that we may have passed the point of no return on preserving (at least American) jobs. But half the US population won't concede this point or think outside the box for empathetic solutions, so I don't predict that this will be fixed before the singularity. It's a moot point now.

* I predict that the tech industry will go the wrong direction with AI, in roughly this order: industry invests heavily in cybersecurity and profit-driven artificial intelligence research to better exploit users by leveraging their shopping addictions, social/mobile bubble pops as independent developers are undermined further by receiving an ever-smaller slice of the pie, a global recession rivaling the dotcom crash and housing bubble pop hits which halts progress in social causes similarly to what happened during the lost decade of the 2000s, the US doubles down on trying every wrong thing before being forced to do the right thing (further tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization of remaining government services, no UBI because there is no money for that, further regression into service industry feudalism), sometime between 2025 and 2030 the world comes out of recession but now all money passes through an online gatekeeper (whatever follows Amazon) as the world transitions from sovereign nations to having its monetary policy determined by corporations, Stockholm syndrome far exceeding the Trump phenomenom grips the world in luddite-inspired rejection of magic technologies like AI, climate change falls from the forefront of concerns as simple human incursion into every last wild place on Earth creates an instability in civilization due to having so many insurrection cells crossing national boundaries that civic discourse gives way to political infighting and canabalistic government policy, a third world war or dystopian new world order or singularity hit all at about the same time between 2040 and 2050 so that only the rich and powerful have oracle-level AI technology and live in gated communities while the world burns, the masses find that they still need food in VR and then rise up and something happens which unfortunately can't really be predicted past this point.

I really hope that I'm wrong. But the last 20 years have been so bizarre compared to what I thought was going to happen while watching the Matrix in 1999 that I'd argue that we're already living in the early stages of dystopia. So I think we have a year or two left before the next planned recession takes the choice away from us. If even Hacker News is skeptical of the things that Yang is suggesting, then we are well and truly hosed.

The only difference is that we are getting closer to the same asymptote we have been approaching for centuries now, where human labor is less about supplying material property and more about providing human service. Sure, it is possible that within the next few decades all but the most highly skilled and educated workers will be displaced into a continuously growing service industry. A decent chunk of people are not cut out for making a living on human interaction, so this is where a base UBI makes a lot of sense. It does not, however, imply that the labor force as a whole will not have any work to do.

    const capital = () => [capital(), capital()]

Economic power (the ability to extract, move and transform resources to perpetuate the economy) is gradually moving from people to capital. At some point in the future, it will not make sense for the industry to keep on feeding people, and people won’t have any power left to do something about it.

The jobs you mention are peripheral things meant to keep meatware happy while it is still economically relevant.

There are people who are starving today, whose will to live and imagination is as strong as yours. It turns out they are not economically relevant, and thus we let them die. I don’t expect an automated industry to care more about about us than we do about the unfortunate folks I just mentioned.