Headline Feb 28, 2018/ ''' *BEWARE OF ROBOTS* '''

''' *BEWARE OF ROBOTS* '''

IN THE COUNTRY of these great American students - the United States of America, among, the many, many Democrats who will seek-

Presidential nomination in 2020, - most probably all will get to agree on a handful of issues : Protecting DACA, rejoining the Paris climate agreement, unraveling President Trump's tax breaks for the wealthy.

But, so far, Only and only one of them will be focused on the *robot apocalypse*. And that candidate is Andrew Yang, a well connected New York businessman who is mounting longer-than-long shot bid for the White House.

Mr. Yang, a former tech executive who started the nonprofit organization *Venture for America*,    believes that automation and advanced artificial intelligence will soon make millions of jobs obsolete - yours, mine, those of our accountants and radiologists and grocery store cashiers.

He says America needs to take radical steps to prevent *Great Depression-level unemployment and a total societal meltdown*, including handling our trillions of dollars of cash.

''All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society,'' Mr. Yang, 43, said over lunch at a Thai restaurant in Manhattan last month, in his first interview about his campaign.

In just a few years, he said. ''we're going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college.''

''That one innovation,'' he continued,  ''will be enough to create riots in the street. And we're about to do the same thing to retail workers, call centre workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.''

Alarmist? Sure. But Mr. Yang's doomsday prophesy echoes the concerns of a growing number  labor economists and tech experts who are worried about the the coming economic consequences of automation.

A 2017 report by  McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, concluded that by 2030 - three presidential terms from now - as many as one-third of American jobs may disappear because of automation.

[Other studies have given cheerier forecasts, predicting that new jobs will replace most of the lost ones].

Perhaps it was inevitable that a tech-skeptic candidate would try to seize the moment.

The scrutiny of tech companies like Facebook and Google  has increased in recent years, and worried about monopolistic behavior, malicious exploitation of social media and the addictive effects of smartphones have made a once-bulletproof industry politically vulnerable.

Even industry insiders have begun to join the backlash.

To fend off the coming robots, Mr. yang  is pushing what he calls a ''Freedom Dividend'', a monthly  check for $1,000  that would be sent every American from age  18 to 64 , regardless of income or employment status.

These payments, he says would bring every one in America up to approximately the poverty line, even if they were directly hit by automation.

Medicare and Medicaid would be unaffected by Mr. Yang's plan, but people receiving government benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program could choose to continue receiving these benefits, or take the $1,000 monthly payments instead.

*The Freedom Dividends* isn't a new idea. It's a rebranding of universal basic income, a policy that has been popular in academic and think-tank circles for decades, was favored by the -

Rev- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and the economist Milton Friedman, and has more recently caught the idea of of  Silicon valley technologists,........ Ellon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the venture capitalist  Marc Andreessen have all expressed support for the idea of universal basic income.

Y Combinator, the influential start-up incubator, is running a basic income experiment with 3,000  participants in two states.

Despite its popularity among left leaning academics and executives, universal basic income is still a  leaderless movement that has yet to break into mainstream politics. Mr. Yang thinks he can sell the idea in Washington by framing it as a pro-business  policy.

''I'm a capitalist,'' he said, ''and I believe that universal basic income  is necessary for capitalism to continue.''

Mr. Yang, a married father of two boys, is a fast-talking extrovert who wears the latest executive uniform - a blazer and jeans without a tie. He keeps a daily journal of things he's grateful for and peppers conversations with business-world catchphrases like ''core competency''.

After graduating from Brown University and Columbia Law school, he quit his job at a big law firm and began working in tech.

He ran an Internet start-up that failed during the first dot-com bust, worked as an executive in Health care start-up and helped build a test-prep business that was acquired by Kaplan in 2009, netting him a modest fortune.

The Honor and Serving of the latest  Operational Research on  Labor Economics and Markets continues. And with many thanks to researcher and author Kevin Rose.

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Economists, Researchers, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW! - the World students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! -the Ecosystem 2011:

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