Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that’s obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. “If machines produce everything we need,” Hawking wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, “everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared – or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.”
As technology advances, the question is no longer whether or not robots are coming for your job. The question is whether or not you should let them take it.
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We’ve seen this pattern before. In successive waves of technological innovation from the industrial revolution to the automative leaps of the 1950s, millions of working people found themselves replaced by machines that would never inconvenience their owners by getting sick or going on strike. This time, however, it’s not just working class jobs that are threatened. It seems that Robespierre was right – it’s the prospect of angry unemployed lawyers and doctors that really prompts the elite to panic, or at least to produce urgent hardbacks and suggest to major news outlets that wealth redistribution might not be such a bad idea after all.
There is little to argue with in Kaplan and Ford’s basic predictions. Whatever happens, it seems that by the time most of us reach retirement, machines will be doing far more of the jobs that nobody really wanted to do in the first place. In any sane economic system, this would be good news. No longer will millions of men and women be stuck doing boring, repetitive, often degrading work for the majority of their adult lives. That’s fantastic. Or it should be. Did you really want the job those thieving android scabs are about to take from you? Wouldn’t you rather be writing a symphony, or spending time with your kids, or plucking your nose-hair? All else being equal, don’t you have better things to do than spending most of your life marking time at work to afford the dignity of not starving?
All else, however, is very far from equal – and that’s the problem. Technology is not the problem. The only reason that the automation of routine, predictable jobs is not an unmitigated social good is that the majority of the human race depends on routine, predictable jobs, and the wages we get for them. The rioting textile workers who smashed their weaving machines in the eighteenth century did not do so because they simply loved working twelve-hour days in dangerous, dirty conditions. They did it because they had been given a stark choice between drudge work and starvation. Two hundred years after the Luddite rebellions, most of us, when you get down to it, would not work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for forty years if we had a choice – but the necessity of earning a wage gives us no other option. In fact, advanced automation should for some time have made it unnecessary for any of us to work more than a handful of hours a week, as originally foreseen generations ago by thinkers like John Maynard Keynes – but somehow, most of us are working longer hours for lower wages than our grandparents.
The problem is not technology. The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we’ve created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a single parent, an unemployed veteran or an unpaid intern – the logic of late capitalism grants you no right to live unless you are making money for someone else. If our economic system defines the basis of human worth as the capacity to do drudge work for someone else’s profit then the question that has troubled science fiction writers for a century is solved: not only are robots human, they may soon be more human than us. ...
How to get rich by running for president
The year 2008 was great for Mike Huckabee—but not as a politician. The former Arkansas governor bailed out of the presidential race in March of that year after losing steam in the early primary elections. But simply running for president elevated Huckabee to the status of celebrity, while helping him build a devoted following among southern and Midwestern evangelicals. Huckabee has since converted the renown that comes with running for national office into a business enterprise that has made him wealthy, with a palatial beachfront home, access to private jets and other perks of the 1%.
Huckabee is running for president again, of course, which makes him one of perhaps 12 or 15 candidates likely to enjoy free media attention and additional publicity funded by donors—even though polls show they have virtually no chance of winning. The presence of so many obscure candidates in the 2016 race—Jim Gilmore, Lincoln Chafee, James Webb, George Pataki, and so on—prompts an obvious question: Why are they running? Huckabee’s experience suggests one answer: Because running for president can be a highly lucrative form of work.
No serious candidate* will admit to running for president purely as a self-promotional stunt. Some may be trying to gain exposure for a more serious run for office in the future. Others may be using a run to promote their companies or personal brands, like Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000 and Donald Trump now. And many candidates no doubt feel they have a serious message to convey to voters, while perhaps also angling for a Cabinet position, ambassadorship, or other plum job if their party’s nominee ends up winning the White House. “You can emerge from the campaign as a power broker, as somebody influential with the media and with lobbyists,” says Julian Zelizer of Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. “I’m sure that’s on the mind of some of these candidates.”
Still, savvy candidates can nonetheless parlay the fame that comes from televised debates, a decent showing in a couple of early primaries, and wall-to-wall media coverage into a juicy 7- or 8-figure income. Huckabee serves as a good case study of the business of running for president because his financial disclosures represent an instructive before-and-after story. Huckabee was Arkansas governor for 12 years, from 1996 to 2007, living for most of that time on a modest salary of around $70,000. He announced his first run for president almost immediately after leaving the governor’s office, in January 2007, when he also started giving paid speeches and accepting other business offers fitting an ex-governor.
At the time, Huckabee was comfortable but far from rich. On the 2007 disclosure form he filed (required for all presidential candidates), Huckabee listed business income of about $325,000, including his governor’s salary, book royalties and a one-time consulting fee of $40,000. He also earned speaking fees of nearly $140,000 during the 15 months prior to filing the 2007 disclosure form, most of it in the first quarter of 2007. Overall, his annual income back then was close to $400,000.
That was pretty good, but life was about to get much better for "Huck," as he's known. After dropping out of the 2008 race, he scored a Fox News TV show and a national radio program. Huckabee had written several books before running for president, but the books he’s written since then have sold much better, including his 2015 bestseller "God, Guns, Grits & Gravy."Huckabee now earns two to three times as much for giving a speech -- and he gives a lot more of them. He also runs a group of companies called Blue Diamond that handle his travel, publishing ventures and other lines of business, with his wife Janet on the payroll of at least one of them....
There’s nothing inherently wrong with cashing in on fame, as countless other Americans have done in just about every industry. Huckabee, for his part, is an entrepreneurial character with a folksy personality that makes him popular in broad patches of middle America. Santorum has gravitated away from a traditional revolving-door career and found a way to make a living that's more in line with the conservative social values he espouses as a candidate. Both are capitalizing on opportunity in ways many other Americans would if they could.
Besides, Huckabee and Santorum are serfs compared with some other prominent candidates. Democrat Hillary Clinton typically earns at least $225,000 per paid speech, and she pulled in nearly $12 million in speaking fees in the 15 months ended March 31 of this year. Her husband Bill, the former president, earns even more....
The best thing about the business of running for president is that other people typically pay for it. A few superrich candidates fund their own campaigns—as Donald Trump is doing, and Steve Forbes and Ross Perot did before him—but most candidates spend only what they’re able to raise from donors. Huckabee raised about $16 million when he ran in 2008. All of it came from donors, meaning none of his campaign spending was self-financed. But Huckabee’s haul was a tiny fraction of what party nominees John McCain and Barack Obama raised, which limited his staying power in the primary races.
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Huckabee, who now resides in Florida, has reportedly developed a taste for the good life, prompting controversy over whether he’s duping donors into funding what is basically a private venture that principally benefits himself and his family. But Zelizer of Princeton says most donors know what they’re paying for when they help fund a low-probability candidate. “Some of these donors may be gullible, but I think they’re making other bets,” says Zelizer. “Maybe they’re able to walk into the room with a power broker.” There are worse ways to spend money, if you've got a lot to spend.
It’s safe to say that Hillary Clinton is no luddite. But the 2016 US presidential hopeful acknowledged this week that new technology is transforming the world of work and warned that we need to wake up to the consequences. She was right to do so.
In a major speech on the economy, Clinton talked about the threat to middle-class jobs posed by the so-called “gig economy”. The internet has enabled millions of people to make money by renting out a room or using their own cars to become part-time minicab drivers. That, said Hillary, is “creating exciting opportunities and unleashing innovation but it’s also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future”.
The digital and technological revolution that created companies like Amazon and Facebook is making life easier, more entertaining and cheaper for many of us. But it also places secure jobs at risk and threatens to lay entire industries to waste. A Labour party whose founding mission was to make sure work pays needs to find its own answers to some of the hard questions Clinton identified.
Ask any taxi driver, self-employed accountant or small hotelier and they will tell you the disruptive force of new technology is turning their world upside down. The arrival of Uber in the UK has reduced the cost of taxi fares for consumers, for example. But cabbies who are more heavily regulated in our cities see their incomes plummet as a result.
Tourists and travellers pay less for accommodation by using websites like Airbnb; but hotels suffer – along with their employees – because they have to pay business taxes that Airbnb is exempt from. New accountancy software makes it easier for people to do their own finances (and enriches its inventors) but threatens the employment prospects of accountants – a white-collar profession traditionally regarded as one of the most secure.
As someone who loves new technical innovation – whether it’s a new game, a new phone or new music service – I think we should do more to celebrate technical innovation in Britain. But we also need to ensure the wealth created by the digital revolution doesn’t produce a “winner takes all” economy in which a tiny number of dotcom billionaires displace millions of workers in formerly secure jobs. We need to protect the interests of professionals and blue-collar workers even as we seek to reap the rewards generated by the new digital economy.
It is a difficult balance to strike. I don’t have all the answers. But I do know that technology will become as potent a force as globalisation in the coming decades. In fact, most economists already agree that it is technological change, rather than globalisation, that does most to explain wage stagnation and rising inequality in advanced democracies.
It took Labour too long to acknowledge that many voters felt immigration, one of the defining features of globalisation, was the most important issue facing the country. It would be wrong to make the same mistake twice by underestimating the impact the digital revolution will have on wages and jobs.
I am a huge enthusiast for new technology. I served as the country’s first digital minister under Gordon Brown. I even review video games for the New Statesman. Over time, technology could mean we all spend less on everything from the weekly shop to cars, clothing end energy. It will give millions of people the chance to do more creative and fulfilling work.
But the effect the digital revolution could have on middle-class jobs could be as dramatic as that experienced by the working classes in the industrial age, as machines began to take on the jobs they’d done for centuries.Could be ? Could Have ? What fucking reality are you living in Mister Watson ? Try the fucking reality in which those jobs have already been decimated in the name of right-wing economic extremism.
Reforming socialists have always believed change can be harnessed so that it produces better outcomes for everyone. So it is absolutely crucial that we continue to close the digital divide, so that all our workforce has the skills and training it needs so to claim a share of the enormous wealth the digital age is creating. It is too easy to pretend everyone has superfast broadband or a laptop. They don’t. We need to ensure everyone benefits – whether they’re from a country estate, or a council estate.
The biggest crackdown on trade union rights for 30 years will be unveiled on Wednesday, including new plans to criminalise picketing, permit employers to hire strike-breaking agency staff and choke off the flow of union funds to the Labour party.
The scale of the reforms goes far wider than the previously trailed plan for strikes to be made unlawful unless 50% of those being asked to strike vote in the ballot.
In a set of proposals on a par with those introduced by Norman Tebbit in 1985, Sajid Javid, the business secretary, is also to require that at least 40% of those asked to vote support the strike in most key public services. In the case of 100 teachers asked to strike, the action would only be lawful if at least 50 teachers voted and 40 of them backed the strike.
The double threshold would have to be met in any strike called in health, education, fire, transport, border security and energy sectors – including the Border Force and nuclear decommissioning.
In further changes, Javid will:
• Require all unions, not just those affiliated to Labour, to ask each existing union member whether they wish to pay the political levy and then repeat the question every five years. The £25m annual political fund income from 4.5 million political levy payers funds a wide range of political campaigning including being a chief source of funding for Labour.
• Propose that unlawful or intimidatory picketing should become a criminal as opposed to civil offence and new protections should be available for those workers unwilling to strike. A named official will be required to be available at all times to the police to oversee the picket including the numbers on the line, currently set at six, in an existing code of conduct.
• Compel unions to renew any strike mandate with a fresh ballot within four months of the first ballot and give employers the right to hire strike-breaking agency staff as well as require a union to give the employer at least a fortnight’s notice before the industrial action starts.
• Empower the government to set a limit on the proportion of working time any public sector worker can spend on trade union duties.
• Give the government certification officer powers to fine trade unions as much as £20,000 for breaches of reporting rules including an annual audit on its protests and pickets. The certification officer will also have power to initiate investigations and will in future be funded by a joint levy of unions and employers
• Require a clear description of the trade dispute and the planned industrial action on the ballot paper, so that all union members are clear what they are voting for.
The number of working days lost due to strikes was 704,000 in the 12 months to April 2015, but this is a far cry from the near 13m days lost through strike action on average in the 70s, the heyday of union militancy.
The government says it feels forced to act due to the number of strikes called on the London underground, railways or in schools based on small turnouts or two-year-old ballot mandates.
The leader of the train drivers’ union Aslef, Mick Whelan, has already likened the attack on union rights as resonant of fascist Germany.Guess yer gonna need to distance yerselves even further from the unions. Perhaps there's a few votes to be had in championing tax-relief for the children of foreign billionaire elitists.
What were his beliefs? At the time, Trump said he was “very pro-choice,” endorsed single-payer as solution to our healthcare crisis—and told Meet the Press he was open-minded to supporting gay marriage.
But on one issue that would affect billionaires like him personally, Donald Trump could not have been more liberal. According to this CNN article from 1999, Trump proposed erasing the national debt—with a one-time “wealth tax” on the mega-rich.Trump, a prospective candidate for the Reform Party presidential nomination, is proposing a one-time "net worth tax" on individuals and trusts worth $10 million or more.And he even used language that would later become slogans for the Occupy movement to sell his proposal.
“By my calculations, 1 percent of Americans, who control 90 percent of the wealth in this country, would be affected by my plan,” Trump said. “The other 99 percent of the people would get deep reductions in their federal income taxes … Personally this plan would cost me hundreds of millions of dollars, but in all honesty, it’s worth it.”
“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours” and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.”There isn't enough work for the existing population, so those in work, should work even longer hours. We need an even more productive & even more-overworked workforce, than that which ensures not enough jobs currently. Makes perfect sense.
Jeb Bush says Americans should work more hours. but they already are working more than ever before for stagnant pay pic.twitter.com/WpsGUqvszI
— Political Line (@PoliticalLine) July 8, 2015
Rich Californians balk at limits: ‘We’re not all equal when it comes to water’
By Rob Kuznia June 13
RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.
People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.
But a moment of truth is at hand for Yuhas and his neighbors, and all of California will be watching: On July 1, for the first time in its 92-year history, Rancho Santa Fe will be subject to water rationing.Plenty of detail in the piece at the Washington Post, but you get the idea. The truly scary thing to me is this line: 'If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.' And by implication, if you can't pay... Which is a very real concern for the future. A future in which large business-interests are already looking to privatise water-supplies.
The multi-billionaire owner of luxury jewellery Cartier has said that the thought of the poor rising up and overthrowing the rich keeps him awake at night.
Speaking at a summit in Monaco, Johann Rupert said he fears that a poor uprising will mean the middle classes won't want to buy luxury goods in the future for fear of exposing their wealth.
The fashion tycoon was came up with the scenario as a bizarre way in which to make a point about social inequality in the world.
According to Bloomberg, he said he had been reading about changes in labour technology, as well as recent Oxfam figures suggesting the top one per cent of the global population now owns more wealth than the other 99 per cent.
He asked: 'How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare?
'We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It's unfair. So that's what keeps me awake at night.'
He also expressed concern that robots are replacing workers, suggesting that artificial intelligence will fuel mass unemployment.
South African Rupert is estimated to have amassed a fortune of around $7.5 billion from brands including Cartier, Chloe and Vacheron Constantin.Fear of the poor is what gave us the New Deal in the United States and the Social Democratic consensus of the post-war era in Western Europe. But the elites have learned since then, and presumably are hoping that the populations today are sufficiently cowed by the powers that can be ranged against them by the government not to rise up. After all, in today's order, they can just label anyone who questions authority a 'terrorist', at which point they can be disappeared, or even simply executed at the whim of the government. And if the poor or the disaffected in general were to rise up en masse ? Time for the machine-guns I suppose.
The film, set in a dystopian America between 2017 and 2019, is about a television show called The Running Man, where convicted criminal "runners" must escape death at the hands of professional killers.2017, huh. Two year away now.
Plot [edit]
In 2017, after a worldwide economic collapse, American society has become a totalitarian police state, censoring all cultural activity. The government pacifies the populace by broadcasting game shows where convicted criminals fight for their lives, including the gladiator-style The Running Man, hosted by the ruthless Damon Killian, where "runners" attempt to evade "stalkers" and near-certain death for a chance to be pardoned.