I extrapolate.

But first I must say that I’m in the Business Intelligence business and have been for many years. I come from the Augmentation school of…

I extrapolate.

But first I must say that I’m in the Business Intelligence business and have been for many years. I come from the Augmentation school of weak AI.

Automation doesn’t just come. It’s paid for. And considering the way we don’t manage anti-trust, we can be relatively certain to identify 2 maybe 3 multinational corporations from which all of the automation will be paid for. It seems to me that if a Neoliberal strategy is sufficient, then we’ll just let them grow and tax the UBI out of them. More and more of our national life will depend on this automation. And yet this very moment when AI is pathetic yet hoped for, we still don’t have enough good jobs that all of our state college educated population are qualified for. IE plumbers and mechanics.

So I have no doubt that the Bigs will engineer the repairability out of all of their next generation automated products, just as they have with airbags, LCD televisions and smartphones. How long, indeed, will anybody be encouraged to try this at home? DIY will essentially become illegal, and our actuaries will figure out a way for us to buy insurance for everything we don’t know how to deal with in emergencies beyond our ken, like overflowing toilets and garage doors that don’t open themselves. Lord knows kids can’t ride bicycles without helmets. Did you know that for a mere $95 Amazon will install your $200 automated smart doorbell? If you think people are being exploited in e-commerce fulfillment centers (because people can’t be bothered to drive someplace and shop) just imagine what will happen when we cannot be bothered to pickup screwdrivers.

Just think “Too automated to fail”. Until it does. You may have seen Zuck on TV, but I understand the arrogance of software engineers who cannot wait to find yet another industry to ‘disrupt’, meaning destroy. We’ve seen this 1988 movie before. It starred KKR. It was called extracting the real value out of companies by, well, disrupting them. And sure, we lost jobs. But the masters of the universe on Wall Street was creating wealth like nobody’s business. Now we’ve passed on the key to American prosperity to Silicon Valley, and we can be sure that once they’ve automated everything creating wealth like only these special Americans can, we’ll be as right as rain.