Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
If anyone caught it, the last June Waking Up podcast has Andrew Yang on talking about universal income.
Granted, I was already ready to buy in, but he makes a really strong argument, suggesting it’s not just the low-level jobs that will be lost in great numbers to AI (retail, food service, truck driving), but also jobs that require a significant amount of money and training to be qualified for (Oncology for example).
The main takeaway is a very dire look at our future without a universal basic income on the horizon.
|
I did listen, and it was a good interview. Young seems like a pretty sharp guy, and he's right that we need to start talking about this stuff now, not in another 10 or 20 years. Not sure his presidential candidacy is anything more than a stunt, though.
And one thing I did disagree with was when he said people need to be encouraged much more strongly to move to the urban centres where jobs are. I used to think the same way, but now I think it's perfectly understandable that some people want to stay close to their support networks, especially when they start families of their own. I'm not sure it's a great thing for society when we pull those networks apart and then try to replace them with expensive social services or just expect people to struggle on their own. This is an issue that's dealt with in The Road to Somewhere that I cited upthread. And if half of people are going to rely on UBI for much of their income anyway, I'm not sure I see the value in crowding them all together in a handful of expensive megacities away from their social network.