Only Andrew Yang is trying to deal with tech changes

To The Daily Sun,

We are going through what Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has called the “fourth industrial revolution.” A common comparison is the third industrial revolution. We made it through and are doing great; instead of horse and buggy, we have cars. The only problem with this analogy is we are the horses in this picture. The horses didn’t turn out so great. Also, the industrial revolution had mass riots, so bad that we got Labor Day out of it. This one will be more dramatic because we have Artificial Intelligence (AI).

How many people remember Blockbuster? It peaked in 2004 and fell hard. They employed 84,000 full-time employees. As of 2018, Netflix and Redbox employ a combined 8,000 full-time employees. There are plenty of examples like this: Amazon, self-checkout, AI for radiology, etc. These are very infant AI tasks and technology is moving at a rapid pace.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think these things are awesome and part of moving forward. I like buying things on Amazon. I can’t wait for my car to drive itself. My daughter is 3 years old and I will bet anyone out there she won’t need a driver’s license when she turns 16.

I have a friend in Florida whose sole purpose is to replace workers. He was excited to tell me he helped sell a robot arm for $2 million that will replace eight workers and pay itself back in less than two years.

Here’s the rub: What do we do with the eight workers? If you are someone who thinks they should learn to code, then I implore you to give it a try. Government retraining has been less than 15 percent effective, so do you really want to waste tax money on that? In the past, most of these people left the labor force and applied for a welfare program. This means they aren’t counted as unemployed.

Here is a quote from 2016: “The number 5 percent is a phony number. It’s really 20 percent, close to 20 percent unemployment. That’s just a phony number to make the politicians look good.” — Donald Trump.

What’s the solution? Nobody knows what the jobs of tomorrow will be, least of all the government. They have painfully fallen behind in the field. I think we’ve all grown up with the understanding that preventing a problem is much cheaper than dealing with one.

The only person trying to deal with these problems is Andrew Yang. He thinks we should be benefiting from technology and wants to institute a universal basic income so everyone over 18 will receive $1,000 a month until death. This is a bipartisan solution. Mitt Romney just put out a plan for a kids UBI in Utah, as an example. Yang wants to help set people up to be ready to identify the work of the future and be poised to do it.

Garret Yost

Gilford