Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

[Adeptus]

15 mins worth watching... He talks about what's next for Europe and the USA.

(Apologies. He's actually Scottish, guess I don't know my accents)


Some additional info on this guy, as I hadn't heard of him before:

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Blyth
Website: www.markblyth.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mkblyth?lang=en
Brown University page: http://watson.brown.edu/people/faculty/blyth

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

His claim that 10% of us could provide everyone everything seems....

[vt]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

It looks like some don't understand supply and demand:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin...p#527a11e7762e


It's China too:

Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
By Jane Wakefield
Technology reporter

25 May 2016


One factory has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots", a government official told the South China Morning Post.
Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, added: "More companies are likely to follow suit."
China is investing heavily in a robot workforce.
In a statement to the BBC, Foxconn Technology Group confirmed that it was automating "many of the manufacturing tasks associated with our operations" but denied that it meant long-term job losses.
"We are applying robotics engineering and other innovative manufacturing technologies to replace repetitive tasks previously done by employees, and through training, also enable our employees to focus on higher value-added elements in the manufacturing process, such as research and development, process control and quality control.
"We will continue to harness automation and manpower in our manufacturing operations, and we expect to maintain our significant workforce in China."
Since September 2014, 505 factories across Dongguan, in the Guangdong province, have invested 4.2bn yuan (£430m) in robots, aiming to replace thousands of workers.
Kunshan, Jiangsu province, is a manufacturing hub for the electronics industry.
Economists have issued dire warnings about how automation will affect the job market, with one report, from consultants Deloitte in partnership with Oxford University, suggesting that 35% of jobs were at risk over the next 20 years.
Former McDonald's chief executive Ed Rensi recently told the US's Fox Business programme a minimum-wage increase to $15 an hour would make companies consider robot workers.
"It's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who is inefficient, making $15 an hour bagging French fries," he said.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

It looks like some don't understand supply and demand:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin...p#527a11e7762e


It's China too:

Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
By Jane Wakefield
Technology reporter

25 May 2016


One factory has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots", a government official told the South China Morning Post.
Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, added: "More companies are likely to follow suit."
China is investing heavily in a robot workforce.
In a statement to the BBC, Foxconn Technology Group confirmed that it was automating "many of the manufacturing tasks associated with our operations" but denied that it meant long-term job losses.
"We are applying robotics engineering and other innovative manufacturing technologies to replace repetitive tasks previously done by employees, and through training, also enable our employees to focus on higher value-added elements in the manufacturing process, such as research and development, process control and quality control.
"We will continue to harness automation and manpower in our manufacturing operations, and we expect to maintain our significant workforce in China."
Since September 2014, 505 factories across Dongguan, in the Guangdong province, have invested 4.2bn yuan (£430m) in robots, aiming to replace thousands of workers.
Kunshan, Jiangsu province, is a manufacturing hub for the electronics industry.
Economists have issued dire warnings about how automation will affect the job market, with one report, from consultants Deloitte in partnership with Oxford University, suggesting that 35% of jobs were at risk over the next 20 years.
Former McDonald's chief executive Ed Rensi recently told the US's Fox Business programme a minimum-wage increase to $15 an hour would make companies consider robot workers.
"It's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who is inefficient, making $15 an hour bagging French fries," he said.

VT, this robot fantasy is nothing new. They installed a bunch of pizza vending machines from Italy along the south coast of MA/RI/CT near colleges and city centers 15 years ago. They all went out of business within 24 months.

And so far as fast food vending machines go, ask anyone who lived through NYC back in the black 70 years ago or so...or anyone kicking around Bismarck's Germany for that matter. Automats were everywhere, even in the 1800s. They fell out of style and all went under. McDonalds can try transitioning from a restaurant to a vending machine, but it will mean the end of the company, and swiftly. As an investor, I would buy stock in McD's with minwage going up, but I would sell it if they turn into vending machines.

Going back to the inconvenience, terrible poor service, unhygenic poverty of the 19th century just to save a few bucks on labor costs is not the way forward.

[Adeptus]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

VT, this robot fantasy is nothing new. They installed a bunch of pizza vending machines from Italy along the south coast of MA/RI/CT near colleges and city centers 15 years ago. They all went out of business within 24 months.

dcarrigg, you might have a point on the customer service front end. Perhaps humans do prefer the human touch - I don't know, but robots are getting a heck of a lot smarter than what we had in decades past, and it's happening at an exponential rate. Sooner or later (years? decades?), I would expect robots not to just replace the human cheap labour but to outperform it completely, even from a customer service perspective.

Putting the front end customer service aside, the back-end manufacturing is pretty much an undeniable reality. As much as I liked Bernie Sanders, I never believed for a minute manufacturing jobs were coming back - likewise for Trump's similar claim. The jobs that might come back are the building of the factories, after that, they will simply be robot filled factories with a tiny fraction of robot fixing/programming engineers.

Next up will be the traditional white collared jobs that so many parents hope their kids will become: Doctors and Lawyers. There's already been AIs built to play Oncologist and as expected with any computer they have 100% memory retention & retrieval of near infinite amounts of medical information in miliseconds, they outperformed the best human Oncologists - though for now by a narrow margin, but they did successfully make some edge case recommendations missed by the human Oncologists due to having access to in real time to all research data. With so much cancer research being published daily, a human oncologist will barely be aware of a small percentage of all the new research while an AI can read up, filter/discern in real-time the new info while performing N diagnosis at the same time. The end game is we'll end up with SUPER accurate, SUPER fast medical diagnosis, for SUPER cheap prices - in theory, we can just copy/paste these AI's. Likewise in the legal sector. Computer software can digest and have 100% retention of all laws, amendments, across all sectors of the legal field, including millions of court cases and detailed rulings. Add AI to the mix, then copy/paste a successful AI x 1 million and we'll end up with SUPER accurate, SUPER fast, SUPER cheap legal advice. Bye bye doctors, bye bye lawyers - those may be the new $15 jobs of the future. This isn't fantasy, this is the reality of the exponential advancement of AIs. One moment everything seems like it's always been, in the next moment, the AIs are taking over the world/jobs, and I'm not even talking about the Singularity here, I'm just talking about narrow AIs.

I can't even imagine the challenges in career/jobs my children will have a mere 20 years from now. It's going to be mind boggling. Back to the people prefer the human touch. It's been argued that the jobs of the futures are precisely those which AI / advanced robots are not likely to replace so soon. That is the nurses, the kindergarten teachers, the daycare ladies, etc. But if those are the only types of viable jobs, then there will be an overwhelming supply - thus nearly all jobs will be $15 jobs. Of course I fully expect massive reform before all this happens.

The end of communism & socialism is capitalism. The end of capitalism (with AI & Robots taking all the jobs) is Socialism.

Government reform will have to be more and more left leaning and provide more and more subsidies and "basic income" to the masses over the next 2-3 decades. Failure to do that will result in ever increasing inequality and civil unrest or populist elected leaders, as the Robot Factory owners and Intellectual Property owners of the best AIs will be making all the money.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

Life and Politics in Appalachia

by Kenneth Surin

Email

I’ve lived in a small town with a large public university in the Virginian part of Appalachia since 1999, commuting to the private university in North Carolina where I’ve taught since 1987. It is a prosperous college town, often designated by business and “lifestyle” magazines as one of the best places to retire to in the US, and thus atypical of the region in terms of its relative affluence and the so-called cultural and leisure opportunities it provides.

Politically, the town is a liberal oasis in a desert of Republicanism. In the recent presidential election, Clinton beat Trump by just over 1% in the county where this college town is located (the county went narrowly for Romney in 2012 and Obama in 2008), while losing to Trump by whopping 20-40% margins in all the surrounding counties. In these overwhelmingly rural counties rusty and dented trucks sporting Virginia’s Tea Party “Don’t Tread on Me” license plates are a common sight.

I have never seen this license plate on a BMW or Mercedes Benz when driving through rural Virginia (and neither has anyone I’ve asked). Cynics among my friends say the people in the luxury cars probably rely on the lowish-income Tea Party drivers to vote for Republican tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby giving them a new Merc or Beamer every couple of years.

I started to get an inkling of what was likely to happen in the election during the weekly three-hour commute to and from my job in North Carolina. The only “Clinton-Kaine” yard signs were around where I live, and once I drove into rural Virginia, “Trump-Pence” and “Hillary for Prison” signs were pretty much all I saw. Gore and Kerry lost to Dubya, but I recall there being many more yard signs for them. (A disclaimer: as a non-citizen I can’t vote.)

Virginia is now a swing state, due in large part to the fact that there are three Virginias when it comes to defining the outlines of its political map.

One Virginia is the rural southwestern part of the state (“SWVA”) that is reliably Republican, apart from the college towns dotted here and there, older, whiter, less educated, and poorer (the 2014 median income was $37,663), than the rest of Virginia.

The second is the populous and more highly-educated northern part of the state (“NoVa”) bordering Washington DC, a Democratic stronghold with a relative abundance of decent government and tech jobs (the 2014 median income was $102,499).

The third is the state’s eastern seaboard, centred on Hampton Roads, dominated by the military-industrial complex, which went narrowly for Clinton in the presidential election, but was Republican in all the sub-presidential races.

SWVA, where I live, used to have a local economy dominated by a coal industry now in terminal decline, but which in the manner characteristic of extractive industries did little for local communities apart from paying somewhat well for dangerous jobs while these were needed. There was some furniture and textile production, but that has gone to China, Vietnam, and Bangla Desh. The southeastern part of SWVA used to grow tobacco as well, but the precipitate decline in demand for their crop has been an economic death-sentence for its tobacco farmers.

All that is left for SWVA now are tourism and tiny pockets of the “knowledge industry” around the universities. The region is undergoing population decline, as frustrated and more ambitious younger people leave for better opportunities elsewhere. Generally, those left behind are the elderly and the less qualified educationally.

The pervasive lack of economic opportunity in the region for all but the well-educated has had social repercussions.

The poverty rate for Virginians below the age of 18 rose in 2014 to 15.9% from 14.9% the year before. Despite this increase, Virginia’s child-poverty rate is still much lower than the shocking US national average of 21.7%– in the world’s richest country, more than one in five children live below the poverty level.

In the week when Fidel Castro died, amidst all the mewling in the mainstream US media about his “tyranny”, little mention was made of Cuba’s almost complete elimination of poverty in the face of the crippling US blockade after the 1959 revolution, encapsulated in the Cuban slogan “just enough for all”. Suffering in Cuba can be protracted, but it and its amelioration are shared. Not so in the “land of the free”.

Typical of a SWVA town in decline is Pulaski, 25 miles from where I live. According to US Census data, Pulaski had a population of 8,948 in 2013 (it had been over 10,000 in 1960), a 2010 median household income of $35,861, an unemployment level of 10% in 2013 (it had been 2% in 1970), and a poverty level of 22.4% in 2013 (it had been 14.7% in 1980).

People under the age of 18 made up 21% of Pulaski’s population in 2013 compared to 26% in 1980, according to census data. Likewise, in the last three decades, the share of people in the 18-34 age-range dropped from 24.5% to 20%. Pulaski’s main source of employment had been its textile and furniture factories, but these no longer exist, and young people must look for work elsewhere. Today’s only significant source of employment for Pulaski is the nearby Volvo truck facility, and the entire community suffers when there is a dip in orders.

Virginia is also one of the half-dozen or so US states commonly cited by law enforcement and medical practitioners as having an “epidemic” of OxyContin abuse.

This painkiller and crystal meth (aka “hillbilly cocaine”) drug crisis is concentrated in the relatively high-unemployment and low-income SWVA. When I go to my local pharmacy to get non-prescription allergy medications, I must fill in a detailed questionnaire and produce my driver’s license, which is photocopied.

It is of course much easier for anyone so inclined to buy any number of guns from the several pawn shops and gun shows in SWVA. Apparently, this only involves a perfunctory look at the buyer’s drivers license.

Trump lost Virginia to Clinton overall, but cleaned up in SWVA. In Pulaski county he got 68.06% of the vote to her 27.51%. In the county’s election for the US House of Representatives, the Republican Morgan Griffith, a stooge of the Koch brothers and the fossil-fuel industries, got 69.27% of the vote to his Democratic rival’s 28.08%.

Neither Trump nor Griffith are likely to do even a little for the economically disadvantaged in SWVA. Griffith certainly has done nothing in his two terms in Congress.

All that those who voted for these scoundrels will get in return for their votes is a whipping-up of anti-foreigner sentiment and Tweeted assurances from Trump that their nativist ressentiment will be heard in that garish tower on 5th Avenue. Meanwhile, austerity, privatization, downsizing, and off-shoring will continue, if Trump’s cabinet choices so far are anything to go by.

Trump, after all, has said repeatedly that “wages are too high”. Despite this, he was supported by over 2/3rds of the voters in an SWVA town where 1 in 5 persons lives in poverty, and the median household income is somewhat less than half that of the overall figure for Virginia.

Griffith votes in Washington for economic policies which screw his SWVA electorate, but craftily offsets this by pandering wholesale on “hot button” cultural issues dear to his voters– guns, abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools, lots more capital punishment, immigration control, “less government”, the same old, same old.

America’s ruling elite has failed this disadvantaged electorate for decades. A desperate dice-throw on their part this time gave Trump his voting edge. In their eyes, they had nothing to lose.

Trodden on, they went for Trump’s mendacious pitch that somehow only he could disengage the boots of the “liberal elites” — with their political correctness and fondness for all things foreign, etc.– from their collective necks.

Meanwhile, the websites of Trump’s hotels make a point of highlighting their splendid sushi restaurants.

Trump, on the other hand, now has everything to gain, as he and his family use the presidency to promote their businesses and line their already ample pockets, while Joe and Jill Normal of SWVA, bound hand-and-foot to the towering bar graphs of economically-stagnant livelihoods, continue to get screwed.

The first sign Joe and Jill Normal are likely to receive of Trump’s concern for them will be his support for the projected $3.5 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline that will run right through SWVA for hundreds of miles, carving-up solidly Republican areas, and destroying their property values via eminent domain. The shameless Griffith, who doesn’t even live in the district he represents, says the 42-inch pipeline, which will carry fracked natural gas, is needed because it is in “the national interest”!

This, however, is not a partisan issue, since the long-time moneyman for the presidential campaigns of both Clintons, the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, is already on the same side as Trump and Griffith where the proposed pipeline is concerned.

When it comes to raking-in bucket loads of dosh, the elite speaks with impeccably synchronized voices.

In fairness, therefore, a Hillary Clinton presidency would also make very little difference for Joe and Jill Normal and their children.

Trump and the Clintons have charmed lives absolutely bound-up with the destiny of the American economic elite. Only a fit of absolute madness would lead Trump to buck that destiny.

Clinton made an awkward pretense of bucking this destiny by stealing some of Bernie Sanders’ clothes. She convinced no one.

Trump, the consummate conman, made no such obvious pretense, and simply insinuated he was the man of destiny who, in some occult way, would overcome the privations inflicted on generations of SWVA’s systemically disadvantaged citizens.

A lot of underprivileged people believed the conman—and so, at least for now, he is their man.

Kenneth Surin teaches at Duke University, North Carolina. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

[Techdread]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

Yes, Communism/Socialism might be the best economic system when we reach post scarcity society.
Two decades ago we thought the USA might make it and be able to produce this society but the ingrained individualism makes it hard for that society to see this as the best way.

You only have to see the debates around Health Care and Gun Ownership to see how pedestrian change is in this society.

Sweden used to come close to a viable model but has taken steps back lately to become less egalitarian.

It is good to see that technology is showing how bankrupt right-wing market ideology is, just a pity that when people are hurt they turn to fascism and bloodshed first.


"Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that's rearing its grisly head right now. It's the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their ******* fault. So I might escape having to witness even greater catastrophe." - Iain Banks

[jk]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

Next up will be the traditional white collared jobs that so many parents hope their kids will become: Doctors and Lawyers. There's already been AIs built to play Oncologist and as expected with any computer they have 100% memory retention & retrieval of near infinite amounts of medical information in miliseconds, they outperformed the best human Oncologists - though for now by a narrow margin, but they did successfully make some edge case recommendations missed by the human Oncologists due to having access to in real time to all research data. With so much cancer research being published daily, a human oncologist will barely be aware of a small percentage of all the new research while an AI can read up, filter/discern in real-time the new info while performing N diagnosis at the same time. The end game is we'll end up with SUPER accurate, SUPER fast medical diagnosis, for SUPER cheap prices - in theory, we can just copy/paste these AI's. Likewise in the legal sector. Computer software can digest and have 100% retention of all laws, amendments, across all sectors of the legal field, including millions of court cases and detailed rulings. Add AI to the mix, then copy/paste a successful AI x 1 million and we'll end up with SUPER accurate, SUPER fast, SUPER cheap legal advice. Bye bye doctors, bye bye lawyers - those may be the new $15 jobs of the future. This isn't fantasy, this is the reality of the exponential advancement of AIs. One moment everything seems like it's always been, in the next moment, the AIs are taking over the world/jobs, and I'm not even talking about the Singularity here, I'm just talking about narrow AIs.

ai may well help with diagnoses, recommend tests for further refinement of those diagnoses, and produce probabilities for various treatment options. i think you will still need an oncologist to discuss those probabilities - their meanings and their implications - with patients and families. most people, having learned they have cancer, will not readily examine a spreadsheet of treatment options along with their probabilistic outcomes and their probabilistic side effects and be able to make clear headed decisions on that basis alone.

the other problem is that you have too high an opinion of the information provided by treatment research. "evidence based medicine" is a great slogan, but research populations are carefully selected, have no other conditions, no substance use, no exposure to other meds, and so on. further, treatment studies are of one treatment alone, rarely of 2 combined treatments and never, to my knowledge, of 3 treatments. [perhaps there are oncology studies of 3 agents combined.] such studies are too complex, too expensive and take too much time for anyone to undertake them. thus "evidence based medicine" usually runs out of evidence very quickly.

perhaps "big data" eventually will be able to extract inferences from naturalistic information.

[Techdread]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

Big Data is where it is at.

I can easily imagine a future where a significant proportion of the population has a growing list of chemicals that are actively monitored and are paid or receive lower insurance premiums for this data.

Also a lot of research is being done on A.I avatars would not be hard for to have these programmed to replace face to face meetings, probably be more convenient for some patients too.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

dcarrigg, you might have a point on the customer service front end. Perhaps humans do prefer the human touch - I don't know, but robots are getting a heck of a lot smarter than what we had in decades past, and it's happening at an exponential rate. Sooner or later (years? decades?), I would expect robots not to just replace the human cheap labour but to outperform it completely, even from a customer service perspective.

Putting the front end customer service aside, the back-end manufacturing is pretty much an undeniable reality. As much as I liked Bernie Sanders, I never believed for a minute manufacturing jobs were coming back - likewise for Trump's similar claim. The jobs that might come back are the building of the factories, after that, they will simply be robot filled factories with a tiny fraction of robot fixing/programming engineers.

Next up will be the traditional white collared jobs that so many parents hope their kids will become: Doctors and Lawyers. There's already been AIs built to play Oncologist and as expected with any computer they have 100% memory retention & retrieval of near infinite amounts of medical information in miliseconds, they outperformed the best human Oncologists - though for now by a narrow margin, but they did successfully make some edge case recommendations missed by the human Oncologists due to having access to in real time to all research data. With so much cancer research being published daily, a human oncologist will barely be aware of a small percentage of all the new research while an AI can read up, filter/discern in real-time the new info while performing N diagnosis at the same time. The end game is we'll end up with SUPER accurate, SUPER fast medical diagnosis, for SUPER cheap prices - in theory, we can just copy/paste these AI's. Likewise in the legal sector. Computer software can digest and have 100% retention of all laws, amendments, across all sectors of the legal field, including millions of court cases and detailed rulings. Add AI to the mix, then copy/paste a successful AI x 1 million and we'll end up with SUPER accurate, SUPER fast, SUPER cheap legal advice. Bye bye doctors, bye bye lawyers - those may be the new $15 jobs of the future. This isn't fantasy, this is the reality of the exponential advancement of AIs. One moment everything seems like it's always been, in the next moment, the AIs are taking over the world/jobs, and I'm not even talking about the Singularity here, I'm just talking about narrow AIs.

I can't even imagine the challenges in career/jobs my children will have a mere 20 years from now. It's going to be mind boggling. Back to the people prefer the human touch. It's been argued that the jobs of the futures are precisely those which AI / advanced robots are not likely to replace so soon. That is the nurses, the kindergarten teachers, the daycare ladies, etc. But if those are the only types of viable jobs, then there will be an overwhelming supply - thus nearly all jobs will be $15 jobs. Of course I fully expect massive reform before all this happens.

The end of communism & socialism is capitalism. The end of capitalism (with AI & Robots taking all the jobs) is Socialism.

I think maybe we just view the point of money differently. The point of money in my mind is power. It is a tool to make people do things they otherwise do not want to do. The point of labor is not to make anything useful or provide any useful service. The point is to let the propertied control the day-to-day lives of the property-less. Capitalism evolves out of feudalism. But the fundamental point of each is the same. Power dynamics. Control. Nulle terre sans seigneur.

Robots will not change this. It's not even about 'the human touch.' It's about the pleasure people get from controlling other people. And I don't just mean schadenfreude. I mean the pleasure of private property. If everyone stopped respecting money tomorrow, the billionaire has nothing. Their power all comes from a fiction. A number in recorded in the digital ACH system, no more real or useful in the physical world than the score number at the top of a game of Pacman or Super Mario Brothers. It's the fact that people believe that number matters and behave like it matters that gives them power. You have to keep people laboring and working and toiling for a couple hundred of the these points (dollars), otherwise they stop believing.

Land, of course, is still the centerpiece, the cornerstone, of the system. And they're not making more of it. Might makes right on the first pass, and determines who can live where. On the second pass, it's just respect for dollars. Belief that land can be bought and sold. Belief that you can and should trade your labor--your life--for dollars. But how do you keep people believing this if you don't force the vast majority of them to spend the vast majority of their waking lives participating in it?

This is why the luddite fallacy is a fallacy. The billionaires, as much as they hate to pay labor, need labor to labor or they lose their power. The work people do does not have to be useful or meaningful. Forget what you think you know about capitalism. The output is not important. It's not fundamental. The faith in money is. And you need people to trade their time and do things they don't want to do for money otherwise they might stop believing in the game.

There is no limit to the bureaucracy we can create, public or private sector. In this system, there will always be enough jobs to employ a supermajority of people, and there will never be enough to give one to everyone that wants one. That design is both legal and institutional. It's totally planned. It's deep-rooted in common law. It exists independent of technology. It's socially required. Otherwise the powerful lose their power.

Even if a queen bee had a Star Trek replicator to make her hives and honey and children tomorrow, if she wants to keep her exalted position on top of every other bee, she'd still have to make the workers fly pointless figure 8s all day, otherwise they stop protecting and serving her.

Robots will not change employment drastically exactly for this reason. The reason I suspect you'll never see basic income on a large scale is similar. Because once you do it, what if people ask, "Why have income at all?" See, if you just get numbers (points, dollars) dumped into an account periodically for doing nothing, why not just cut out the middle-step charade and walk into the supermarket and take what food you need instead? Why not just get on whatever plane takes you to where you want to go? Why not just move into any vacant house you please? Why not find an empty spot of beach and build a house of your own? The primary thing stopping anyone from doing anything they ever dream of is lack of money. If money becomes so meaningless as to be given out for free, there are too many obvious cracks in the façade.

Government reform will have to be more and more left leaning and provide more and more subsidies and "basic income" to the masses over the next 2-3 decades. Failure to do that will result in ever increasing inequality and civil unrest or populist elected leaders, as the Robot Factory owners and Intellectual Property owners of the best AIs will be making all the money.

The truth is, Adeptus, that the factory owners and the intellectual property owners already make all the money. You put the word robot in front of the word 'factory' and the letters AI after the word 'property' and precisely nothing changes.

[LazyBoy]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

The end game is we'll end up with SUPER accurate, SUPER fast medical diagnosis, for SUPER cheap prices - in theory, we can just copy/paste these AI's. Likewise in the legal sector.

Even if the rest of what you say comes true, there's no reason to think any thing becomes cheap. The IP would be protected. It would be rented to the hospital at 90% of the cost of the doctors it replaces. The hospital would keep the 10%.

[Mega]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

I watched the full disscuss on Youtube............after much thought i drawn the conclusion he a Nob-head.

Anyone on this site could have told him YEARS ago, back in 2007 i was running round telling everyone the banks where about to crash...my local branch bank staff laughted at me. I went in just after the crash & you could have heard a pin drop drop. The Manager invited me into his office for a quick chat......so being "The man who said Trump would win" is no big thing.

Just look at what EJ has said 10 years ago!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This guy?............simply hedged his bets, nothing new

Mike

[Ellen Z]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

See this article by Mark Blythe in Foreign Affairs.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...lobal-trumpism

Inflation, deflation, and how they relate to Trumpism.

[touchring]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

People don't like to buy their meals from robots, but a lot of the automation is now in the kitchen which is hidden from public view while the restaurants are fronted by real people taking your orders and filling up your soft drink cups.

There're some jobs where robots from replace humans, the oldest and the second oldest profession in the world.

VT, this robot fantasy is nothing new. They installed a bunch of pizza vending machines from Italy along the south coast of MA/RI/CT near colleges and city centers 15 years ago. They all went out of business within 24 months.

And so far as fast food vending machines go, ask anyone who lived through NYC back in the black 70 years ago or so...or anyone kicking around Bismarck's Germany for that matter. Automats were everywhere, even in the 1800s. They fell out of style and all went under. McDonalds can try transitioning from a restaurant to a vending machine, but it will mean the end of the company, and swiftly. As an investor, I would buy stock in McD's with minwage going up, but I would sell it if they turn into vending machines.

Going back to the inconvenience, terrible poor service, unhygenic poverty of the 19th century just to save a few bucks on labor costs is not the way forward.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Mark Blythe, the Irish guy who predicted Brexit & Trump

See this article by Mark Blythe in Foreign Affairs.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...lobal-trumpism

Inflation, deflation, and how they relate to Trumpism.

Thank you Ellen,

A very entertaining read, informative to say the least. I particularly liked this:

"Parliaments in turn were reduced to tweet-generating talking shops as central banks and policy technocrats wrested control of the economy away from those elected to govern."