Here is the podcast: Robert Stark talks to Anatoly Karlin about Andrew Yang and The War on Normal People
Robert Stark is a Yang supporter. You can check out his article “Andrew Yang and the Post-Nationalist Future” at Taki’s Mag. Brandon Adamson (website) also participated, but unfortunately he was cut off due to technical problems early in the podcast.
Topics:
Anatoly’s articles Yang Hasn’t Gone Anywhere, 7 Reasons Why #YangGang Is More Than Just A Meme and What Does Everyone Think About Andrew Yang?
The young educated demographic of support, THE GREY TRIBE, and faction from the dissident right
Yang’s chances of winning
Yang over Trump but Trump over Harris or Biden
Tucker Carlson agreeing with leftist on Venezuela Intervention
Why Yang’s UBI and VAT proposal are relatively Centrist
Iran’s UBI experiment
Peter Turchin and theory of elite over production leading to social instability
Asian American Identity and positive mentions of China
Charles Murray’s COMING APART and Bubble Quiz
The potential impact of the UBI and automation on immigration and demographic trends
How America’s failure to adjust to new realities is leading to social tension
I didn’t have much new to add to what I already wrote in my book review, with one exception. I wanted to address one common argument that UBI skeptics tend to bring up. This argument boils down to automation alarmists having been consistently wrong over the decades. Motorization didn’t remove people from the factories, to the contrary it created many new jobs. Attempts to completely automate car factories from as early as General Motors in the 1980s have floundered time and time again. Robots will create many new jobs and things will continue ticking along just fine.
My response is that the critical difference between then and now is that the new generation of robots is run on much more powerful AI. By and large, they don’t need inputs of human brainpower – the previous limiting factor – as they do the thinking themselves. Now yes, there are some jobs that are hard to automate, even with AI – typically, these are jobs that require fine motor skills – but ultimately, how many air conditioner repairmen and cleaning ladies does society need?
So what will actually happen is that the oligarchs who own the robots will come to control massive slave armies of labor that do most jobs much more effectively and much more cheaply than any human. There’s only so many personal assistants, cleaning ladies, and court jesters that these oligarchs will need. There will be some makework in the government bureaucracy, and I suppose companies will retain human HR departments (because we have established that AI is racist), but that’s about it. There will be as little economic need for humans as there were for horses after the arrival of cars and tractors, whose numbers in the US fell from 20 million c.1920 to 2 million by the 1970s.
The irony is that smart people are the ones being made redundant, when the narrative until recently has been that smart people are gaining economically and its physical skills that are bring phased out (learn to code).
I’m sure there is some sort of world-historical irony in there somewhere.
http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/automation-and-unemployment.jpg
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-jobs-lost-automation/
Great, more teaching jobs.
Norm MacDonald said all there is to say about teachers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAg9M-O9wGo
All you “yay technology” people can shove it, man. Long live back-breaking agriculture. Long live the Luddites.
The key thing about UBI and automation is the intelligence and skill required for these imagined new jobs.
When humanity moved from hunter-gatherer society to agrarian society, learning how to farm and build was well within the intellectual capacity of nearly all humans.
When we moved from farming to manufacturing, operating a machine was still well within the cognitive ability of the vast majority of (western & eastern) humans.
When we moved from manufacturing to services was when problems started occurring. Not everyone was intelligent or dynamic enough to enter this new generation of ever more complex work. A considerable percentage of the population hit their cognitive ceiling, so to speak.
As we now move into an era of connectivity and AI-driven automation, certainly many new jobs will be created, but they will require a higher cognitive ability than the jobs they replace. Meaning that a much larger percentage of the population will hit their cognitive ceiling and be unable to enter this new job market.
Even if tens of millions of new jobs were created by this technological revolution, we would not have enough people to do those jobs because they would be too complex for an increasing percentage of the population to do.
If we want to continue having societies where most people are in full employment, the only way forward is IQ augmentation.
TL;DR the new jobs will be for the clever, until we have many more smart people, UBI is an absolute necessity.
what if we don’t buy the oligarchs’ products?
How will the racist AI problem be solved? Just removing racial data from inputs so they can’t spot patterns? Or building in some sort of function to automatically equalise results (e.g. insurance premiums)?
No, on average, it is the less g-loaded jobs tha are more vulnerable, even if plenty of exceptions exist.
Not clear the choice will be ours to make.
It doesn’t remove disparate impact. So you need to add racial data and then simply teach the AI to achieve equality of outcomes for the averages of the races. Basically adding affirmative action to the AI logic.
That is true, but what I have seen them complaining about most recently with AI is not disparate impact (which would happen with any process) but algorithms working out that black people are (for example) riskier even accounting for other factors
Are you really sure about this? Whilst routine, unskilled work is certainly easier to automate, it’s also cheaper which gives less incentive without external factors (The EU’s working time directive has done this for vegetable picking). An anecdotal example: in the 80s and 90s in the UK, car washes were either automatic or coin operated pressure washers, now, thanks to the expansion of the EU, hand car washes are everywhere, staffed by Romanians and automatic ones are rare. Digital Taylorism: previously skilled jobs becoming low, skill, low paid and micromanaged thanks to the proliferation of cheap IT and monitoring software is more likely to be the job killer in the immediate future.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/25/dead-end-jobs-car-wash-regulation-casual-cheap-labour-britain-low-pay-trap
How so?
Are the less g-loaded jobs going to continue existing in the Third World? Basically, I’m wondering if there are actually going to be enough smart Third Worlders to engage in successful up-keeping of AI.
Most of them are already near monopolies, and the trend will be towards total monopolistic companies, so we really have no choice.
Off topic
https://www.rt.com/news/459278-pompeo-develop-russia-relations/
Surely the Russians are not going to be stupid enough to accept anything that these thugs have to offer. By now I would assume they are completely aware that the US establishment is pushing for nothing else but the total subjugation of Russia.
I can try to locate a source. There was a study a couple of years ago about what percentage of jobs in US regions were estimated to be automatable, places like SF and NYC had the least and rural red regions had the most. There was a map to go with it, IIRC I posted it in “Our Biorealistic Future.”
Even if we grant that this is true, it doesn’t eliminate my skepticism about the automation apocalypse.
Such automation will only be implemented if the benefits exceed the costs. Those benefits would come in the form of either lower prices or higher earnings. Either creates a surplus which will be spent elsewhere, increasing aggregate demand. Thus employment will increase elsewhere. Don’t forget that an increase in unemployment will reduce wages, which makes human labor more attractive.
The automation apocalypse prophecy will only occur if future robots are to human workers what internal combustion engines were to horses. This would require future robots to be nearly as fungible and effective as human manual labor but cost less to acquire and operate. Such robots do not exist and in my opinion will not exist. Robots as they exist now are not only expensive, but generally only suited to a single or small number of operations. You also can’t fire robots when business conditions deteriorate.
Even this sort of automation might not cause an apocalypse, at least other than the transitory adjustment shock. We have a good historical example here: slavery. Slaves were the ideal replacement for wage labor. Did free labor disappear in any historical slave societies? No.
And actually, past forms of automation did indeed end plenty of industries. Blacksmiths for instance. Metal tools are now produced in factories and generally discarded rather than repaired or remanufactured.
It’s also worth pointing out that this is the third time we’ve had an AI fad. There were previous AI fads in the ’50s and the ’80s. What’s the reason to suspect this current AI fad will end any differently? Instead of a revolution we might well get a third AI winter.
Lastly, it’s worth pointing out that as far as I can figure out the automation apocalypse hypothesis gained traction in the pages of the Economist, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal in order sweep immigration and offshoring under the rug.
So far the automation apocalypse is purely speculative yet people like Yang are proposing extremely radical “solutions” to a problem that does not exist.
If the automation apocalypse does come true, then the solution is certainly not UBI. It’s compulsory sterilization of the entire left half of the bell curve (perhaps in exchange for UBI or other means of guaranteeing a humane existence while they live out their days, though personally I’m more keen on thermal depolymerization).
Interesting theory.
HL Mencken, of course, said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins.” Seems truer today than back then.
JCTC or the Jewish Conspiracy to Censor shuts down Soph, the 14 yr old Youtube personality.
She is on Bitchute:
https://www.bitchute.com/channel/RXA1oESUqP1c/
https://twitter.com/sewernugget/status/1128357388531187713
https://twitter.com/NickJFuentes/status/1128125816498479104
https://twitter.com/MarkDice/status/1128106887524655104
https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1128074193264947205
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1128110010548883456
https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1128111283339812864
https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/1123776861081935874
https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/1128287757959352321
https://twitter.com/PeterSweden7/status/1128363451632508929
Automation has always created jobs as well as wealth. There is no reason to believe this is going to grind to a halt. However, the Juggernaut of progress always crushes area sacrifices as it moves forward.
I think it’s even funnier that it’s from Joe “Kill a straight white man on your way to work tomororw” Bernstein.