Andrew Yang and the Rise of the Robots

The Luddites were a 19th century movement in Britain who destroyed factories and machines because they were taking their jobs.

Of course, the Luddites were completely wrong and those 19th century machines simply improved productivity which freed up labor to move into more valuable areas of production. Thus, capital accumulation lead to to wage growth as capitalists competed for workers with better pay, benefits and conditions. 

And thus, you got this:​

And don't get me wrong, that's great and all. Indeed, in many ways the world has gotten a lot better. But nowadays, when anyone talks about machines replacing humans and ask as I did a while back, "how exactly will the normal person be able to sell his or her labor?" they are likely to get called a"Neoluddites" or something like that. But the Luddites only have to be right once for it to be a disaster. And eventually, they will be.

Indeed, if you can imagine AI that can make pretty much any computation immediately as well as "think" strategically and add that to high-end robots with Iron Man-like capabilities, how could humans possibly compete?

This presents an incredible opportunity. We could conceivably end poverty, protect the environment and achieve all sorts of medical and scientific breakthroughs. It also presents an enormous risk; namely a technofeudalistic dystopia where elites pretty much run everything and not only is there no hope for social mobility, there's also no hope of overthrowing the regime in charge. With robots like those, who exactly is going to overthrow them?

This is why it's rather shocking that of all the Democratic candidates for President (and Trump for that matter), only Andrew Yang is talking about this issue. His plan for $1000/month Universal Basic Income may not suffice, but at least he's actually talking about it. As he notes, "the entire socialism-capitalism dichotomy is out of date" and is basically a 20th century debate. (Capitalism won, by the way.)  Here he describes his thesis to a surprisingly receptive Neil Cavuto:

For an idea of just how big a challenge this is, I recommend reading Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford. It's rather terrifying to say the least.