2020 Election

So if I understand this correctly, then people should not try, and improve their lives.
With this kind of logic, why bother to get an education?

 

I don't know, Storm.
What I do know is that automation is not an end all solution.
I am opposed to self driving semis.

 

No, not at all. But expecting longshoremen to just start programming AI? Maybe 5% of them have the aptitude to be able to do that with training.... I guess the rest of them are just supposed to fuck off.

 

Lost my home of 20 years and lost my career and ended up divorced, thanks to the modern ways. I liked the old ways just fine. I don't need an electric tooth brush ... can brush 'em well enough the old way. I don't need electric windows … can roll them up the old way. I don't need a motorized snow thrower … can shovel arm strong way real well too.

 

As far as longshore work goes, the stevedores and longshoremen are supposed to bolt down the container on the chassis, before they bring it out to me in the marshalling area where I hook my semi truck to it. It's their job to make sure the container has all the bolts, on all the corners. It has to be done according to the DOT regulations. It's their job, not mine. And I doubt the damn computer can bolt down a container.

 

What exactly happens to the self-driving articulated lorries when the next Carrington Event happens when the Sun belches out several huge CMEs in rapid succession, turns the sky blood red all the way down the Equator and fries all of the electronics? Or, for that matter, Saudi Arabia finally comes out of the closet with their nuclear ambitions by exploding a nuke 700 km up over whichever large fraction of humanity is less than perfect according to the head-chopping infibulating terrorists that day of the week?

Seeing what even rain showers and dust storms do to satellite television and how easy it is to make things go pear-shaped with anything computerised, if I were a person inclined to wager, I would say that vehicles flying off of overpasses and driving the wrong way down the road at 70 per cent above the local speed limit would be just the beginning . . .. Ever see what an E-Bow, an early near-equivalent of the Wah-Wah Pedal, can do to a computer when one puts it near the hard drive and moves it all around like doing the Hokey Pokey? It will take one's breath away . . . A committed nihilist will get a hard-on or start tingling down south and/or their butt will start to itch . . .

 

Also, couldn't a programmer tell a machine how to do what twenty of his or her &c co-workers could do in a lot of cases? So what do the other 19 do is the first thing to iron out. The default is wandering around and eventually having to shoplift and/or conk people on the head to pull together some scratch as soon as they start to get dizzy from hunger . . . as even/especially the right wingers realised in the 1930s -- if people don't get theirs, they are eventually going to come and take yours, so to speak.

As much as American conservatives and libertarians like to kvetch about such conclusions, Ned :Ludd, candidate Yang, or both are right, it turns out . . .

 

The problem with getting a programmer to emulate other people's functions is that the programmer is not an expert at each of their jobs. Even if they are duplicated positions for handling workloads that a computer would laugh off, the programmer can only program what they know. So it will require another kind of expert to analyze the jobs and determine what each represents in terms of a formula.

The thing to do then is get the employees to log the details of their daily tasks. If it's a union shop, good luck with that. And be ready for incomplete and even conflicting information. One way to accomplish this is to make the operation ISO9001 compliant. This means that not only do the employees log their entire job down to every time they open a drawer, that information is then used to create autonomous work orders, that the employee has to follow to the letter. If something was missed, the employee has to make a report. Bypassing the process to accomplish a task, is against the rules and such a discovery can cost the business it's ISO compliance certification, limiting who will do business with them. The employee who caused it is usually terminated with great haste and their manager has to eat crow on bended knee, or be terminated and perp-walked out by security, with the employee.

Another way to do this is to engage the employee as being upwardly mobile so they gladly hand over the keys to what they do, for a promotion. Six-Sigma is how larger corporations do it (there's also a "lean" 6-Sigma for cheapskate organizations). It has the benefit of getting everyone talking the same kind of language. Which is also the down side since innovation suffers considerably at the hand of greed. As the employee completes a 6-Sigma "project", basically an analyses of a specific task in an effort to improve it and eliminate potential errors. The company requires these in order for the employee to become certified. The first certification, Green Belt, usually leads to a better position or more money, rarely both.

The next and final certification is Black Belt and they make you jump through flaming hoops while being chased by dogs while wearing a steak suit. The black belt's overall job becomes thinning the herd and looking for green belts who might be worth saving. They are intelligent people, but cruel and heartless after getting nearly a PhD in statistics beaten into their head. And STILL with all of this research and process improvement going on, you can't find a programmer to make it all work on a computer. There are still too many human variables that can't be logically coded.

Also, AI is a pipe dream and will be for a long time. At most the best "AI" programming can effectively mimic beings with limited programming, like insects. Even then you're dealing with a mindless automaton that has no contemplation nor realization of self. Automated insects would only be useful for artificial pollination or to deliver chemical weapons maybe. But who knows? Maybe thousands of Artificial Insects could paint a house in an hour, with no drips.

 

O ye of little faith. With the computers in charge, what could possibly go wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong....?

 

I am not saying that AI is good, but it seems to be the future, in the long term.

 

What do you think of the concept of taxing corporations that automate their workforce in order to provide a UBI?

Just curious

 

What you say is true, Flagme. I'm just saying in my own way that we need to get a societal grip on this, because the businessmen will likely screw us in a hundred ways with their new found technology. Unionized workers have been getting pushed aside for years. Nixon and Reagan did some serious damage to us. Remember, these are the guys who think truckers are not entitled to overtime pay and waitresses are not entitled to minimum wage. The Republicans are ANTI American workers, Anti working family men! They don't want us to have enough pay to live on, don't want us to have enough to make a house payment, don't want us to have enough to pay for health insurance and medical care, don't want us to have dental care, don't want us to have enough to pay for school, don't want us to have worker compensation insurance, and they don't want us to live next door to them in their gated community. So, when the Republican businessman gets his hands on this new AI technology, it will be to screw American workers and create more poverty. The bad might out-perform the good … again.

 

I am not opposed to taxing any corporation.

 

But in terms of providing a universal basic income?

 

and then they call us lazy.

 

The way I look at it is that corporations are wealthy enough to absorb any tax(es), and still provide a basic income for their workers.
If corporations are suffering, cut the damn CEO's salary.

 

Well a universal basic income wouldnt be for workers, it would be a general income (Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has proposed $1000 a month) generated to all americans to help mitigate the economic ramifications of automation

 

Yeah, I know about Yang. I believe his proposal would only encompass people over the age of eighteen. Corporations would fight this tooth and nail: and, he would not get this passed in congress.

 

Yeah. Automation will be dealt with reactively rather than proactively, unfortunately.

Anyways I know Yang doesnt stand a chance, but I do like how he's injecting this idea into the conversation. Most people wont take it seriously until we start seeing significant job shortages though

 

i think it's a great idea and want to see it rolled out worldwide. but as you say.. reactive not proactive. that sums up humanity as a collective really.