EFTA01138522.pdf

From: Gregory Brown < To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bee: jeevacation@gmail.com Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.. 1/10/2016 Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2016 11:53:15 +0000 Attachments: Lisa_Fischern playlist_01.03.16.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(I).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(14).png; image(I5).png; image(16).png; image(17).png; image(18).png; image(19).png; image(20).png; image(21).png; image(22).png; image(23).png DEAR FRIEND Capitalist. Socialist. Communist. DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE? I recently read a New York Times' article by Philip Bump - Capitalist, Socialist, Communist, do you know the difference - which I understood but I am not sure that many Americas do, as the proponents of Capitalism has won that argument in the West castigating the others as both negative and evil. But for those of you who only read the cliffs notes here is difference, as described by Alasdair Russell who is socialist member of the Labour Party in the U.K. EFTA01138522  Capitalism: One group of people own what's called the means of production (factories, etc.). These are the capitalists. Another group of people work in the factories etc., and the first group pay them some money for their work, but take much more for themselves. These are the workers. Communism: Society has organized itself into a system whereby everybody works as much as they can, and receives whatever they need. (From each according to their ability, to each according to their need). Socialism: Traditionally, this is the transitional stage between capitalism and communism. The state organizes the economy and society so that there are no more capitalists, and the workers run the place. Eventually, this organization will become less and less as Communism begins. Phillip Bump starts his article — The day after the first Democratic presidential debate, Donald Trump called Bernie Sanders a maniac. "This socialist-slash-communist," Trump said to raucous cheers. "I call him a socialist-slash-communist, because that's what he is." Well, no. The terms "socialist" and "communist" are often confused, thanks in large part to the Cold War. Layer on top of that the nuance of the term "democratic socialist," which is how Sanders describes himself, and it's easy to see why people might generally be confused. Having been told their entire lives that both Socialism and Communism is evil, whether they can tell the distinction between them is not important as they being used to disqualify someone who is far more trustworthy than his accuser. To offer America a bit of a primer, Mr. Bump reached out to Dr. Lawrence Quill, chairman and professor of political science at San Jose State University, over e-mail. He explained the difference between communism, socialism, capitalism and democratic socialism -- in very professorial terms. Capitalism - or really the concept of "liberalism" — arose in the '7th century, and centers on the right to private property. In Adam Smith's foundational "Wealth of Nations," Quill notes, "is recognition that capitalism is going to make the lives of a good majority of the population miserable, and that there will be a need for government intervention in society and the economy to offset the worse effects." Socialism was in part a response to capitalism, largely through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Socialism focuses on the inequalities that arise within capitalism through a number of possible responses. Quill outlined some possibilities: "[T]he state might 'wither away' or collapse altogether, in others it would regulate the production of goods and services, in yet others it would become thoroughly democratic" -- all with the aim of reducing that inequality. You can see that's where democratic socialism arises. That philosophy, Quill writes, seeks "democratic control of sectors of society and economy in order to avoid the pitfalls of an unregulated market and -- this is most important -- the kind of terrible authoritarian government that emerged in the Soviet Union." EFTA01138523 Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been making waves as the only democratic socialist running for president. Here's what you need to know about being a democratic socialist and how it's different from socialism. Communism "was the endpoint of Marx's ideas," Quill writes, though Marx didn't delineate what it would look like, exactly. "Wefind hints in works like The German Ideology (1846) where there is a description of working life that is unalienated, i.e. creative and various -- we hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and become opera critics in the evening." During the Cold War, though, the idea came to be inextricably and pejoratively associated with the Soviet Union and with the elimination of private property. The term, in Quill's words, "served as a shorthandfor all things un-American" -- which was the way that Trump used it. Quill's most important point is that "all of these terms are 'umbrella concepts'; in other words, they are host to a family of related ideas, not all of them compatible with one another." We tend to use the terms concretely, which necessarily introduces inaccuracies. Or, as Quill put it, "they [can] serve as excuses not to think, as belief systems that discourage explorations of the mismatch between theory and practice and the inconsistencies of any grand theory." So that's the college-level curriculum, so to simplify it a bit Mr. Bump asked Tori Waite, who teaches high school history at Del Mar High School in San Jose, as it was in High School where most of us were first introduced to these ideas in high school. "When we teach about the different types of economies," Waite said, "the first thing we do is we talk about economic questions. How is it made? Who makes it? Who gets to buy it? Based on the economy, different people answer those questions." Simplifying Quill's explanation: "In a communist country, the government answers those questions. There's no private business. There's no private property. The government decides." "In a capitalist society, the people make those decisions. The businesses, the market decides how much products will cost, how many there are, where it will be made." "In the socialist system, there's a mix of both. The government operates the system to help all, but there is opportunity for private property and private wealth. That's generally how we talk about it." Back to Quill's point: A socialist government could control all of the means of production -- or it could, for example, use taxes to redistribute resources among the population. Both Quill and Waite note that the United States is not a purely capitalist society. There are and have long been socialist aspects to how the government makes decisions and applies its power, while still striving to keep the marketplace as free as possible. And, of course, while allowing democratic decisions to guide what it does. Mr. Bump points out that the example of the United States, with its many social programs that enjoy near universal support in the country, serves as a reminder that these ideas exist on a three-dimensional scale, in which differentiation is often tricky. EFTA01138524  Please Tell Me That This Isn't True Republicans in Congress, caught on tape, may have committed treason under the Espionage Act. If this is true which I am inclined to believe, because it was revealed by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by U.S. Intelligence officials, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached out to republican congressmen, who had been considering voting in favor of the Iran peace deal, asking what they wanted in return for voting against the deal the partisan-ism has reached a new level of ugliness and danger in our country. Because in the end, not a single republican voted for the deal, meaning that Netanyahu's bribes succeeded in swaying the ones who had been on the fence. That means that not only is Netanyahu actively working to undermine the sanctity of the United States government, the republican congressmen involved may have committed treason under the Espionage Act. While it's not uncommon for members of congress to offer each other political favors in exchange for votes on various bills, it's an entirely different legal matter when those offers come from a foreign head of state. Not only were they caught accepting favors from Netanyahu in exchange for votes on the Iran deal, they also received confidential details of the Iran negotiations directly from Netanyahu himself. Republicans have long criticized the Obama administration for its wiretapping of Netanyahu, but now we know why: they didn't want the details of their own wrongdoing to be discovered in the process. The Wall Street Journal has more on the story. United States President Obama has long had a strained relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the two nations being historically dose allies. Obama's reasoning has been straightforward: Netanyahu is a corrupt warmonger has intentionally made his region unstable for his own political gain. Republicans have fired back by accusing Obama of simply being anti-Israel. But the WSJ has said that the wiretaps now show that at least some republicans in congress had an entirely different reason for siding with Netanyahu: he was bribing them to change their votes on key issues. And where I come from this is considered treason. Now let's see if the same people who instigated 17 different congressional investigations into Benghazi will follow up on U.S. politicians accepting bribes taking bribes from a foreign leader to undermine the interest of the American government and its people. EFTA01138525 Given the fact that Republican politicians are notorious for the amount of money they accept from special interests within the United States, what makes anyone think they wouldn't accept them from a foreign government? The fact that forty-seven Republican Senators sent a letter to the Iranian government without consulting the administration in a direct attempt to undermine the President's policies is only further evidence of their treachery, putting their ill-gotten rewards above the effectiveness of our foreign policy and consequently the good of our nation and the security of the voters they claim to represent. Their incredibly hypocrisy only confirms just how deeply the Republican Party is beholden to Israeli lobbying groups like AIPAC and to the government of Israel itself. "A U.S. intelligence officialfamiliar with the intercepts said Israel's pitch to undecided lawmakers often included such questions as: "How can we get your vote? What's it going to take? Mr. Netanyahu and some of his allies voiced confidence they could win enough votes." The answers to Israeli proposals have yet to be fully revealed, but it is clear that favors were offered — bribes were proposed — and from the subsequent behavior of Republican lawmakers, we can only infer that our legislators accepted those bribes, from a foreign government in exchange for opposing the diplomatic efforts of the Obama Administration. At the very least, the very discussion itself indicates that they conspired with a foreign government to undermine the foreign policy agenda of their elected Commander-in-Chief, which certainly amounts to treason. r; = ppm ig!iirt.1111.01141 iniiirRom Treason: Leaked Wiretaps Reveals Netanyahu Bribed Republicans To Sabotage Obama's Iran Peace Deal How much money does it take for a foreign nation to buy a United States Senator? Just ask Republican Tom Cotton. For a lousy $i million paycheck, Israel hired Cotton to lead an effort to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama Administration toiled for months to achieve. Consider the behavior being endorsed by the Republican Party. An elected U.S. senator travels to another country as part of his purchased partnership with a foreign official. Together, their goal is to undermine American foreign policy. The Republican senator is working for Israel, and against the EFTA01138526 United States of America. And there is a reason for that. The Kristol's Emergency Committee for Israel gave Torn Cotton nearly $i million in his race for the Senate just five months ago. Clearly, Israel successfully bought their new puppets considering Republicans crusaded against the deal for months. And the fact that America's broken campaign finance laws gave Israel the secret opportunity to donate to campaigns like Cotton's only makes Republican and Israeli treachery all the more credible. Again.... Cotton got a million dollars for his campaign from an Israel Super PAC and then went to work for his Israeli overlords to sabotage American foreign policy. Again.... Where I come from, no matter how well intention, this is treason. ****** So True ****** Why is America so Hostile to Gun Control? EFTA01138527 This week the president of the United States and the mayor of the District of Columbia both used this week to address violence within the sphere of their responsibilities. And they are catching flak for it. And as Trevor Noah pointed out on 'The Daily Show' prominent Republicans were trashing the President proposals prior to his announcement.... But why? The Daily Show: https://www.facebook.com/susan.ajohnson.002/postshol53543252513m President Obama's focus was on the weapons that now kill as many people as car accidents and on the need for gun-control measures. He said at the White House on Tuesday: "Every single year, more than 30,000 Americans have their lives cut short by guns — 30,000. Suicides. Domestic violence. Gang shootouts. Accidents." And he added this grabber: "In 2013 alone, more than 500 people lost their lives to gun accidents — and that includes 3o children younger than 5 years old." The next day, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) went to the city's Eastern Market Metro station to announce the formation of a task force to combat gun robberies, which last year increased to 1,249, 10 percent more than the 1,112 recorded in 2014. This year isn't off to a good start — 25 gun robberies in the first six days of 2016. Robberies without guns numbered 28. Yet robberies aren't the only crime on the rise in our nation's capital. Last year ended with 162 murders. There were 105 in 2014. Something, however, may get lost in these numbers. How can the toll taken by death be measured with any degree of accuracy? It's impossible to quantify the sense of loss and grief that follows; the sadness, emptiness and loneliness that death leaves behind. The families and friends of those 30,000 people whose lives were cut short by guns may have some idea. What is the impact of more than 3,000 total street robberies in a city? Gauge the distress of having possessions taken by force — imagine the fear, anger, insecurity and unwanted memories that robbery leaves behind. The violence assailed by Obama and Bowser is disturbing. So is the opposition mounted against them for trying to do something about it. Criticism of Obama's proposed regulations to ensure that laws on the books are enforced as written and intended is sickening. Unlike the "he's gonna take away your guns" rhetoric coming out the mouths of some gun enthusiasts and their sycophantic Republican presidential hopefuls, Obama's plan to reduce gun violence is light stuff. It would: • Require all those in the business of selling firearms to be licensed and to conduct background checks. • Overhaul the FBI's background check system to make it more efficient and effective and provide the bureau with more staff. • Beef up staffing of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to crack down on firearms trafficking. EFTA01138528  • Increase funding for mental-health treatment and mental-health reporting to the background check system and direct the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security to pursue research into gun-safety technology. Several law professors who looked at the constitutionality of Obama's executive actions said that they "ensure robust enforcement of the law" and are "entirely compatible with the will of Congress and the President's constitutional authority." But listen to the resisters. "Obama wants your guns," says Ted Cruz's campaign website. Obama is "making an end-run around the Constitution" to "restrict one of the basic, fundamental principles of our country," Donald Trump's campaign manager told CNN. "Just one more way to make it harder for law-abiding people to buy weapons to be able to protect their families," said Marco Rubio on Fox News. "Obama's executive orders trample on the 2nd Amendment," said a Jeb Bush tweet. Obama "is advancing his political agenda," a Ben Carson tweet said. "I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools' my first day in the White House," said Donald Trump to an audience in Burlington, Vermont These politicians are not interested in saving lives. Better to save political hides from National Rifle Association attacks. The president's modest proposals should triumph over demagoguery and plain stupidity. The idea that nothing should be done when more than 30,000 people are dying as a result of gun violence is beyond ridiculous. And for those who believe that laws prohibiting felons, crazy people and terrorist access to guns should not be enacted... are insane. Obviously, the President's proposals won't stop gun violence but even if it stops 5, 10, 15 percent shouldn't everyone support them? Bravo Mr. President. ****** White Privilege Please Don't Call Them Patriots When They Are Actually Terrorist EFTA01138529 Shortly after n a.m. last Sunday at least 150 heavily armed white men seized control of a federal building/compound outside of Burns, Oregon. They are led by a cadre which includes Ammon and Ryan Bundy who are the sons of tax-dodging cowboy Cliven Bundy, the rancher who led a successful armed rebellion against federal law enforcement officers in Nevada last year. Since that event, Ammon and Ryan Bundy have been traveling the United States, meeting with other white "militia" groups, and inciting violence against the federal government. Yet almost no major media, nor are any of the contenders running for President call them terrorist. The Washington Post: "Those who want to go take hard stand, get in your trucks andfollow me!" Ammon Bundy declared to rally-goers at the conclusion of Saturday's event, according to several people who were in attendance. Not long afterward, the group then took over the federal wildlife preserve in Burn. Harney County Sheriff David M. Ward said authorities from several law enforcement organizations were monitoring the ongoing incident. "These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers," Ward said in a statement Sunday. "When in reality these men had alternative motives, to attempt to overthrow the county andfederal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States." Several of the men occupying a federal wildlife preserve in Oregon have even recorded "goodbye" videos to their relatives in anticipation of being killed in battle with the United States government. Others have threatened to use deadly force if local police or other government forces attempt to remove the protesters from the land and building they have occupied. The actions taken by Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, and their supporters in Oregon are the very definition of terrorism and armed insurrection. It would seem that the year 2016 has begun with a strident example of unapologetic white privilege in action. Actually Oregon is a perfect place for such a gesture, as it was admitted to the Union in 1859 with a constitution that explicitly banned blacks from the state. Black Americans were barred from moving to Oregon until 1926. The Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist organizations used violence and other forms of intimidation in their (failed) efforts to prevent black Americans from settling in the area. At present, white nationalist organizations continue to claim the area as a foothold and primary base of operations. EFTA01138530  Last Time Black Protesters Had An Anned Standoff. The Police Bombed A City Block White privilege has many components. One of its most powerful aspects is the ability to twist reality, and by doing so, free white folks from personal responsibility (as well as group accountability) for their actions. There are many examples of this phenomenon in the United States. White men who commit mass shootings are "mentally ill" and not "terrorists." Heavily armed white cops who kill unarmed and defenseless black people were acting "in reasonablefear of their lives." White conservatives who gather by the dozens and hundreds and then point loaded guns at federal authorities are described by the right-wing news entertainment media as "patriots." And of course to be "white" is to be unmarked by "race." Therefore, there is little mention of the fact that these right-wing traitors are white men. Moreover, the connections between the Christian White Identity Movement will also go uncommented upon by the mainstream corporate news media. Example — as the latter's coverage of the events in Oregon has followed this script very closely. The New York Times described the events in Oregon as "Armed Group Vows to Occupy Office in Oregon for `Years': ABC News reported on a "Peaceful protestfollowed by Oregon wildlife refuge action." Surprisingly, Fox News, while still quite literally whitewashing their headline, came the closest to the truth with their, "Armed militia occupying Oregon government building." It does not take an amazing act of creativity to envision how the same actions — and much less — if taken by blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, or First Nations peoples would likely be described by the American corporate news media. If Muslims took up arms, occupied a federal building, recorded martyrdom videos, and threatened to kill police and other authorities, they would be called "terrorists." Let's be honest: If the Oregon terrorist "militiamen" were Black, Muslim, or Hispanic, THEY'D BE DEAD BY NOW! Instead — this week in Oregon journalist mingled freely with the activist supporting these "so called militia" with no police cars zooming to the seized buildings with sirens blaring and SWAT teams arriving in armored vehicles sitting up an armed perimeter to control the situation. EFTA01138531 When unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters showed up to peacefully protest at Mall Of America, this is a fraction of the police that showed up, dressed in militarized gear. They secured the fuck out of that escalator. Remember this image as you watch this Oregon protest go down. Those are armed white men who stated clearly that they would use violence. Not unarmed peaceful protesters. So where are the police? Where are the talking heads on the news calling them terrorists? It seems that when armed white men make a stand, police remember their training and focus on de-escalation out of respect for life. This land they trying to claim was stolen from Native Americans. This isn't even a real cause. It's not about guns or states' rights or cattle. It's about white men realizing their era of privilege is ending. And the government is giving them a pass just like they daddy got a pass after pointing guns at police two years ago. Do they have a right to protest? Sure. But let's call them what they are.... TERRORIST!!! See the hypocrisy? The contemporary 'citizens militia' movement has appropriated and perverted the concept of militias in use at the time of the American Revolution. Lacking a regular army, the colonists initially relied on local bodies of armed citizens to resist tyranny. Despite their celebrated stands at Lexington and Concord, however, militiamen fared poorly against British regulars. The Continental Congress quickly established a conventional army. Militias did play an important role in winning American Independence, but only when they operated under proper authority and in support of regular troops. The Founding Fathers envisioned militias as protectors of the government not protectors of the people from government. Militias are thus the ancestors of the modern National Guard, not of self-proclaimed "patriots" who show utter contempt for any form of authority beyond themselves. The extremists playing solider in EFTA01138532 the woods of Oregon are at best criminals and at worst domestic terrorists, and they need to be identified as such. Fighting extremism requires contesting ideology as much as combating organizations. These people must, therefore, be denied even the shred of legitimacy they try to claim. As such why then are virtually all media outlets dignify these people by calling them "militiamen?" They are terrorists, pure and simple. Let's remember that these are some of the same people that skewered Black Lives Matter for being discordant and disruptive, the same people that mocked the death of Tamir Rice, the same people who post over and over again about how Eric Garner should have just followed the rules, and the same people that say Michael Brown deserved what he got for allegedly refusing to comply with police orders -- are the exact same people who get an erection every time some stars-and-bars waving neo- confederate chambers a round in the direction of a cop. To be sure, the government has at times resorted to violence in response to right-wing terrorists, but the more common reaction from the police and military is that of seeming nonchalance, as has been observed with the siege in Oregon, which contrasts tremendously with the deadly violence often used against radical armed groups of people of color. And the racist hypocrisy and double-standards of politicians and the media has been a constant, with terms like "terrorists" and "thugs" unquestioningly applied to radical people of color, armed or not, whose murder is readily justified, while similar white radicals are defended and described with a heavy dose of euphemism. This racist hypocrisy that has even descended into tacit support for terrorism from prominent Republicans like Donald Trump, is a grave danger, not only because it reinforces the proto-fascist mindset of the core right-wing constituency but also because right wing terror is an increasingly grave threat to the nation. Indeed, more Americans have died at the hands of right-wing terrorists than jihadist ones since 9/11 and yet the latter is granted wall-to-wall fear-mongering coverage and the former is almost entirely ignored by politicians and the media. Apparently, blue lives only matter when they're busting up civil rights demonstrations -- but not at all when they're jumping in front of bullets in abortion clinics or trying to apply the law to white criminals. The Hammond family very well might have a legitimate grievance against the government, except that even they have renounced the actions of these yahoos. And yes... I am a New Yorker living in Los Angeles, so I really can't speak to the burden the government foists on the cattleman. But what I do know is that if these ranchers were paying market prices for grazing rights, they would be paying much more than the government currently is charging them. And more importantly, what I do know is that if these same people were armed Muslims or people of color advocating the overthrow of government the outcome would be drastically different.. Hence White Privilege.... And this is my rant of the week... WEEK's READINGS EFTA01138533  Humans Need Not Apply NO MAINTENANCE MIN. LIFETIME 35,000 HOURS ROI: 3-8 MONTH Web Link: https://voutu.be/7Pq-S557XQU I recently watch an interesting 15 minute documentary, Humans Need Not Apply that posed an interesting observation/question. It starts out explaining that there was a time when every human use to have to hunt or gather to survive, leading to humans making tools to make life easy. From sticks to plows to trackers, we have gone from everyone needing to make food to modern agriculture whereby almost no one has to make food and we still have an abundance. But this evolution is not just in farming, it is everything and everywhere. We have spent the last several thousand years inventing tools to reduce physical labor of all kinds. These mechanical muscles are stronger, more reliable and more tireless than human muscles ever could be. And in many ways this is a good thing because replacing physical muscles with mechanical muscles gives us more time to specialize, leaving everyone better off, even those who are still doing physical labor. This is how economies grow and standards of living rise. Over the last sixty plus year a number of people have specialized to become programmers and engineers, whose job is to build mechanical minds. And just like mechanical muscles made human labor less in demand, so are mechanical minds making human brain labor less in demand. This is an economic revolution. And although you may think that we have been here before, but we haven't. This time is different. EFTA01138534 When most people think of automation they usually think of giant custom built expensive efficient really dumb robots doing repetitive tasks. And the only reasons why these big machines haven't taken over the world is because they are only cost effective in narrow situations. They are the old kind of automation. The new kind don't require skilled operator and technicians and millions of dollars. The new kind can see and can learn what you want them to do by watching you do it. More importantly they cost less than the annual salary of a human worker. And unlike their older brothers they aren't programmed for one specific job, doing whatever work within the reach of their arms. This new generation are considered general purpose robots and this is a big deal. Think computers, which started out as highly custom and highly expensive but when cheap general purpose computers were introduced they quickly became vital to everything. A general purpose computer and as easily calculate change, assign seats on an airplane or play a game, just by swapping its software. This huge demand for general purpose computers is what makes them both more powerful and cheaper at the same time. And even when a general purpose computer is slow, their hourly cost are pennies worth of electrify, whereby his human replacement at least cost minimum wage. A tenth of the speed is still cost effective when it is a hindered of the price. And although today these computers are considered dumb, they are still smart enough to takeover many low-skilled jobs. Evidenced by automated check-out cashiers in supermarkets and DYI stores. So in new supermarkets where there were 3o human cashiers, there can be one human overseeing 3o automated cashier machines. Let's take the hundreds of thousands baristas employed around the world. There is a barista robot coming to replace them. And although your favorite barista may make your double- mocha lane just like you like it, millions people don't care and just want a decent cup of coffee. By the way this robot can be part of a giant network of robots that remembers who you are and how you like your coffee no matter where you are... Pretty convenient I would say... We think about technical change as the fancy new expensive stuff like the latest satellites. But the real change comes from last decades stuff getting cheaper, smaller and faster. And this is what is happening to robots now. And because their mechanical minds are capable of decision making, they are out-competing humans for jobs in a way that no form of mechanical muscle ever could. Imagine a pair of horses talking about technology. One is concern that technology might somehow replace them while the other points out that technology has made their lives much easier, no pulling plows, street cars, riding across the country delivering mail or into battle all terrible. With the other speculating that the new city jobs of pulling people around in small carriages being cushy and even if this car EFTA01138535 thingy comes off there will be new jobs for horses that we can't imagine. Obviously we know what happened. Although there are still working horse but nothing like before with the horse populating peaking in 1915 and since then it gone down precipitously. The idea of better technology making better jobs for horses sounds ridiculous but swapping people for horses you can get the drift of what possibly is in store. Mechanical muscles push horse out of the economy mechanical intelligence most likely will do the same to humans.... Maybe not immediately or not everywhere but in large enough numbers whereby someday soon, it is going to become a problem if we are not prepared.... And we are not prepared. • Today you may think that technology won't replace your job but technology is gets better, cheaper and faster at a rate biology can't match. Just like the car was the beginning of the end for the horse-labor economy, today's AUTOS show us the shape of things to come. Self-driving cars aren't the future they are here and they work. Self-driving cars have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles up and down the California coast and though cities all without human intervention. The question is not if they will replace today's cars, but how quickly. And they don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than us. Human drivers kill 40,000 people a year with cars, just in the United States. Given that self- driving cars don't blink, don't text while driving, don't get sleepy or stupid, it is easy to see them being better than humans because they already are. Calling self-driving cars at all is like calling the first cars, mechanical horses... Cars in all of their forms are so much more than horses, therefore using the name limits your thinking about what they really can do. So as the video suggests, let's call self-driving cars AUTOS, "the solution to the transportation from one point A to point B." Self-driving cars only look like cars because they are designed to transport humans, but little AUTOS work in warehouse and gigantic AUTOS work in open-pit mines, both moving stuff around. Who knows how many jobs will be replaced but the transportation industry today employs about 3 million people and worldwide more than 70 million jobs. And for many, these jobs are over.... The idea that unions may save these jobs is almost nil, as history has shown us that workers often fight new technology but they always lose in the end. Economics always win and there are huge incentives across widely diverse industries to adopt AUTOS, especially in most transportation companies where labor is approximate 1/3 of the cost (that's straight salaries, not including time, accidents, etc.), so anyway to reduce this cost will be embraced and adopted. AUTOS are coming but there are also many places that are less visible that you can see changes today. It is easy to assume that dumb robots and AUTOS have always and will just replace low-skilled jobs we didn't want people doing anyway, but today's intelligent machines will soon challenge white-collar workers as well. For those workers sitting in front of a computer screen typing, BOTs are coming for them too. Software BOTs are faster and cheaper than physical robots and given that white collar workers are more expensive than low-skilled workers, the incentive to automate their work is great. Currently there are legions of engineers and programmers whose entire jobs are to replace white-collar jobs. And although software BOTs won't replace all white-collar workers, engineering today is focused on creating BOTs that teach themselves how to do things that the programmer could never teach them to do themselves. EFTA01138536  lbw h °ligroin, to L i.N.143 OE AfmaIn••••••••••.••••64.1. Their Own 4m.••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• aommokilm•••••••=sk " ri Ztr 4/ 11 0 t WafaZgeg..cittrr,... tto“).• Ito - /*WS *Er, • T 11••• ime•••••••••••••imilm. hour. • Ramo,. a •manowerettemaese invonithetwoortmoromoo How this works is extremely complicated, but the bottom line is that there are limited ways to show a BOT a bunch of stuff to do and then show the BOT a bunch of correctly done stuff and it will figure out a solution to get it done. So just with a goal and no knowledge of how to do it, the BOTs of the future and in many cases now will learn and solve. Take the stock market, which in many ways is no longer a human endeavor. BOTs that have taught themselves to trade stocks and are now trading stocks with other BOTs who have taught themselves. Today, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is not full with traders doing their job as much it is a TV set for the media. BOTs have learned the market, as well as learned to write. If you picked up a newspaper lately you have probably read a story written by a BOT. There are companies now that teach BOTs to write anything, sports stories, obituaries, as well as company quarterly reports that were the purvey of analyst. Paperwork, decision making, writing all fall in this category challenging the demand of human labor. Even the professions are not safe from BOTs. When you think lawyer, it is easy to think trials. But the bulk of lawyering is actually drafting legal documents, predicting the likely outcome of lawsuits and something called discovery, where boxes of paperwork are dumped on the lawyers who then need to find the pattern or the one out-of-place transaction among thousands and sometimes millions of documents. This can be BOT work, as discovery is already not a human job in many law firms. Not because there isn't paperwork to go through, as there is more than ever but to go through, but because clever research BOTs can shift through millions of emails, memos and accounts in hours, not weeks, crushing human researchers not just in cost and time, but most importantly in accuracy. BOTs don't get sleepy reading through a million emails but this is the simple stuff. IBM has a BOT named Watson, whom you may have seen on TV destroying humans playing Jeopardy but that was just a fun side-job for him. Watson's day job is to be the best medical doctor in the world; to understand what people say in their own words and give back diagnoses. He is already doing this at Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York, with guidance on lung cancer treatment. And just like AUTOS don't have to be perfect, they just have to make less mistakes then humans, the same goes to doctor BOTs. Human doctors are no less perfect as the frequency and severity of misdiagnosis is terrifying with an estimated 400,000 preventable deaths a year. Human doctors can be severely limited with dealing with patient's complicated medical histories. Understanding every drug and every drug's interaction with every other drug is beyond the scope of human know-ability, which doctor BOTs can do. There are research BOTs whose sole job is to test thousands of new drugs at a time. Moreover, human doctors can only improve through their own experiences, while doctor BOTs can learned from the experience of every other doctor BOT it is connected with. They can read the latest in medical research and keep track with everything that happens with all of their patients worldwide and make correlations that would be impossible to find otherwise. Not all doctors will go away but when the doctor BOTs are comparable to humans and they are only as far away as your phone or computer the need for general doctors will be less. As for you creative types, creative BOTs are on the way. Creativity may feel like magic but it isn't. Yes, the brain is a complicated machine and one of the most complicated machines in the whole universe, EFTA01138537 but it hasn't stopped us from trying to simulate it. Just like mechanical muscles allowed us to move into thinking jobs, mechanical minds will enable us to move into creative jobs. Therefore, even if we assume that the human mind is blissfully creative, it's not true in every field, as artistic creativity is not what a majority of creative jobs depend on, because the number of poets, writers, musicians, directors and artist who act who actually make a living doing their work is a tiny portion of the labor force and given that these are professions dependent on popularity they will always be a small portion of the population. There can't be such a thing as a poem and painting based economy. Still today there are BOTs that create music, draw and paint without most people realizing the difference. Thus the route of artificial intelligence being creative is really no different than people being surprised when computers started beating Grand Master chess champions at chess. And so goes the same for human talents. What we are talking about is not science fiction these robots are here right now. There is a terrifying amount of working automation in labs and warehouses around the world today. We have been though economic revolutions before but today's robot revolution is different. Horses aren't unemployed now because they became fat and lazy as a species. They just became unemployable, as there is little work that horses can do to pay for their housing and hay. And many bright capable humans will find themselves like the horse. Unemployable through no fault of their own. But if you think that new jobs will save us there in one final point to consider. OCCUPATION NUMBER of WORKER Transportation 3,628,000 Retail Salesperson 3,286,000 First Line Supervisors 3,131,000 Cashiers 3,109,000 Secretaries 3,082,000 Managers, all others 2,898,000 Sales Representatives 2,865,000 Registered Nurses 2,843,003 Elementary School Teachers 2,813,006 Janitors /Cleaners 2,186,000 Waiters & Waitresses 2,067,000 Cooks 1,951,000 Nursing, psychiatric, and 1.928,030 Customer Service 1,896,000 Labors & Freight 1,700,000 Accountants & Auditors 1,646,000 First Line Supervisors 1,507,000 Chief Executives 1,505,000 Stock Clerks & Order Fillers 1,456,000 Maids & Housekeeping 1,407,000 Postsecondary Teachers 1,300,000 Bookkeepers 1,297,000 Receptionists 1,281,000 Construction laborers L267,000 Childcare Workers 1,247,000 Carpenters 1,242,000 Secondary School Teachers 1.221,000 Grounds Maintenance 1,195,000 Financial managers 1.141,000 Non-Retail Managers 1,131,000 Construction Managers 1083,000 VVMS 1,040,000 Computer Programmers 1,026,000 Two hundred years ago the U.S. census only tracked lo kinds of jobs, while today there are loos of kinds of jobs, but many of the new ones are not a significant part of the labor force. Above is a list of jobs ranked by the number of people who perform them. It is a sobering list that starts with transportation at the top and all of this work existed in some form a hundred years ago and almost all of them are easy targets for automation, but only when we get down to 33 (Computer Programmers) do we find a job category that wasn't around a loo years ago. This doesn't mean that every barista worker or while collar employer will lose their job. During the Great Depression 25% of American EFTA01138538 workers were unemployed, while the above list only equals 45% of the country's labor force. But without a doubt, automation replacing human labor could easily push us over the 25% unemployment figure of the Great Depression. And this would be a big problem. We have to understand that automation isn't bad as much as it is inevitable. So we need to start thinking now about what to do when large sections of the population are unemployable through no fault of their own. Because if we don't, one day in a future for most jobs, humans need not apply. How do S