Bernie Sanders, Automation, and the Fate of the US

[paulthompson]

Last edited Wed Mar 30, 2016, 09:14 PM - Edit history (1)

My name is Paul Thompson. I used to post at DU a lot in the early 2000s, and Harper Collins published a book I wrote in 2004 called "The Terror Timeline." I stepped away from commenting on politics (including posting at DU) a few years after that for reasons I won't go into here, but I want to break my silence because I feel it's so very important that we elect Senator Bernie Sanders as our next president.

There are many reasons I believe Sanders is the best choice. However, I've been lurking at DU a long time now, and I haven't seen even Sanders' supporters talk much at all about what I feel is one of the very most important reasons, so I've written the essay below to explain it. It's a long, fact-based essay (sourced in the way I sourced my on-line Complete 9/11 Timeline), but I strongly encourage you to read all of it, because what it discusses is extremely important and will effect everyone's lives in a very major way. And, surprisingly, it's not an argument I've seen carefully explained in a political context anywhere else.

Bernie Sanders, Automation, and the Fate of the US

If there's one economic argument Sanders likes to make, it's that income inequality in the US is unfair and out of control. Secretary Hillary Clinton and some of her supporters have complained that he's been a one-issue candidate on that very issue. However, I would argue that, if anything, Sanders doesn't emphasize the issue enough! The reason? Income inequality is bad now, but it's likely to get much, much worse in the very near future due to the effects of automation. We need immediate, drastic action, exactly in line with the policies Sanders proposes, and the moderate policies Clinton proposes will do very little to help with the severe economic crisis to come.



This may sound like over-the-top hyperbole, but I truly believe we are coming to a fork in the road, and one path points towards utopia and the other points towards dystopia. There is a coming automation revolution that will lead to a drastic reduction in the amount of paid employment in the US and in fact the whole world. I will prove it below with what I believe is incontrovertible evidence.

If there is a drastic reduction in income inequality at the same time automation drastically changes the economy, then the benefits of new technologies will mean that the vast majority of people will be able to enjoy very high standards of living while working much less than ever before. It really could be a utopian, golden age unprecedented in human history. But if present trends continue, nearly all the benefits will go to the top one percent or less, and most everyone else will have a nightmarish, hopeless future.

Think of the 2013 sci-fi movie "Elysium" starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, where a small number of people live in a luxurious space station and everyone else stays on Earth in poverty, fighting for scraps. Except probably for the space station aspect, that is exactly the general direction we are heading, because all indications are that the rich will keep getting richer and everyone else will fall behind.

A study published by Oxfam last month revealed that the 62 richest billionaires own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world's population. Furthermore, the top 1% of people own more wealth than the other 99% combined. (Guardian, 1/18/2016) In the US, the bottom 80% of Americans have just seven percent of the nation's wealth, and the top one percent has 40%. (Business Insider, 6/15/2015)



Those statistics are very concerning in and of themselves. I've long considered myself a progressive, not a socialist, but one doesn't have to be a socialist to see that those numbers are way out of whack.

Furthermore, things are getting worse, fast. That same Oxfam report shows that the wealth of the world's richest 62 billionaires has risen by 44 percent in the last five years, growing by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.7 trillion. Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half of humanity has dropped 41 percent in the same time period, shrinking by over a trillion dollars. Since 2000, the poorest half of the world's population has received just one percent of the total increase in global wealth, while half of that increase has gone to the top one percent. (Salon, 1/21/2016)



These statistics show that the situation is changing faster than most people realize, and a lot of it is due to automation. We are standing on the edge of a cliff, where it is highly likely that tens of millions of American jobs will be lost in the next two decades and there won't be enough good jobs, or even jobs period, to replace them. Unless something drastic is done in the next few years, our economy could be plunged into another great depression. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and yet very few people are talking about it yet, not even Sanders.

I'm going to spend most of this essay trying to shock you into seeing just how serious the economic threat is, because I get the impression that while most people are aware that jobs are being lost to automation, they see it as more of a minor factor instead of a drastic game-changer.

In fact, if you're not scared shitless about how automation is changing the economy and society, chances are you don't know enough about the issue. And that's understandable, because the media hasn't covered it much, and there hasn't been any sort of national debate or discussion on it yet.

HALF OF ALL JOBS COULD BE LOST

A 2013 report by Citigroup and Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of the University of Oxford predicts that nearly HALF of all current jobs in the US could be replaced by automation in the next twenty years. HALF! (The Atlantic, 7/2015)

Bank of America-Merrill Lynch recently published a report which agrees with the Citigroup-Oxford study that half of all US jobs could be lost to automation. (The Guardian, 11/5/2015)

Similarly, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) predicts that by 2025 (so ten years instead of twenty years), up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots. The BCG is a multi-national management consulting firm that advises more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500. (BBC, 9/14/2015) Additionally, the BCG believes that automation will cut labor costs by 22 percent in the US by 2025, driving wages down even for those who keep their jobs. (Associated Press, 2/10/2015)

The Bank of England recently published a report warning that about half of all jobs in the US - over 80 million jobs! - plus half of all jobs in Britain could be lost in a similar time frame. Andy Haldane, the bank's chief economist, says that new technology has been widening the gap between rich and poor, hollowing out the middle class for some time now, but "technology appears to be resulting in faster, wider, and deeper degrees of hollowing-out than in the past. Why? Because twentieth-century machines have substituted not just for manual human tasks, but cognitive ones too. The set of human skills [that] machines could reproduce, at lower cost, has both widened and deepened." (The Guardian, 11/12/2015,
CNN, 11/13/2015)

The same trend is happening in other countries around the world. As just one example, the Nomura Research Institute in Japan predicted in a recent report that nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be performed by robots by 2035. (The Guardian, 2/1/2016)

Prominent politicians and business leaders haven't been talking about automation to the public, but most of them surely know what's going on. Every year, the world's political and business elite meet at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. Automation has been one of several official themes for the past few years, and in this year's meeting in January, the main official theme was "mastering the fourth industrial revolution," which is another name for automation and related technological advances.

This year's official report explained, "Developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and biotechnology, to name just a few, are all building on and amplifying one another. This will lay the foundation for a revolution more comprehensive and all-encompassing than anything we have ever seen." The report predicts millions of job losses in the next five years alone, and asks if economic trends which are "failing the middle classes" could lead towards “a world without work." (The Guardian, 1/19/2016)

Also in January, the Swiss bank UBS, considered the world's largest manager of private wealth assets, published a report that suggests new technology will generally widen the gap between rich and poor around the world: "Automation will continue to put downward pressure on the wages of the low-skilled and is starting to impinge on the employment prospects of middle-skilled workers. By contrast, the potential returns to highly-skilled and more adaptable workers are increasing." The report suggests that government intervention will be necessary to cope with the growing inequality. (The Guardian, 1/19/2016)

Many new inventions focus on reducing the amount of work needed to do things, and that naturally is seen as a good thing. But what if so many new technologies eliminate so much work that there aren't enough jobs to go around? A capitalist (or even a socialist) economy needs both buyers and sellers. As the poor and middle class grow poorer, and more jobs are taken away by automation, there may not be enough buyers of products, forcing sellers to downsize or go out of business. That in turn would result in more job losses, creating a vicious cycle, a death spiral for the economy.

This is why Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's chief economist, has suggested that if current trends continue, the world economy "would be so thoroughly hollowed-out that it may no longer be able to support itself." (The Guardian, 11/12/2015)

There are other reports that make similar predictions. Few experts dispute that many jobs will be lost to automation; it's just a matter of how many, and how fast, and how many new jobs will be created to replace the lost ones. If the general trends described above are true, than the US stands on the brink of economic disaster. That won't happen immediately, true, but we only have a few years to prepare with forward-thinking policies.

Based on this evidence alone, perhaps you already can see why I feel it is so very imperative that Sanders needs to win the presidency in 2016. Income inequality is bad enough now, and almost inexorable technological progress means that it is going to get much worse, unless the government steps in soon with an agenda precisely along the lines of what Sanders, and only Sanders, is proposing right now.

WHAT IS AUTOMATION?

I will return to some of the issues mentioned above, but first, it's important to ask just what "automation" is. There has been growing talk of robots in recent years, and they are showing up more in TV and movies. Robots are coming, and they are the most dramatic face of automation, but it is likely to be many years before we see walking, talking versions of C3P0 from "Star Wars" on the streets. We can call it "automation," "computerization," "robotization," or "artificial intelligence" (AI), but it all points to the same thing, which is that as computers of all kinds grow more powerful and capable, they will be doing more work that has been done by humans.

In fact, automation has been going on for decades now, in all sorts of ways that usually don't directly involve robots. We can see it in our daily lives. ATMs handle most bank transactions. You may rent a movie using a Redbox kiosk or stay at home and use Netflix, and that has driven video store chains like Blockbuster out of business. Automated check-in kiosks are seen in airports. Travel agencies have been wiped out because of the Internet. Financial software do most of the stock trading now, causing most large financial institutions to shrink the size of their workforce. And so on.

The 2015 Bank of America-Merrill Lynch report mentioned above says, "We are facing a paradigm shift which will change the way we live and work. The pace of disruptive technological innovation has gone from linear to parabolic in recent years. Penetration of robots and artificial intelligence has hit every industry sector, and has become an integral part of our daily lives. ... One major risk... is the potential for increasing labor polarization, particularly for low-paying jobs such as service occupations, and a hollowing-out of middle income manual labor jobs." (The Guardian, 11/5/2015)

JUST WHAT IS BEING AUTOMATED?

Predicting the future is very difficult. For decades, there has been warnings about robots and automation taking jobs that largely haven't come true. As a result, it's natural that there's a lot of skepticism about current predictions. But this time IS different. According to a recent report from worldwide management consulting firm McKinsey and Company, up to 45 percent of activities people are paid to do can be automated just by adapting technologies that already exist. (US News and World Report, 1/8/2016)

It's simply that, in the same way that it takes about ten years from the discovery of a new oil field until the infrastructure is built that allows the oil from it to be brought to market, it takes time to make the hardware and software and market the products that take advantage of the new technology.

We stand on the brink of entire industries being heavily impacted by automation, leading to the loss of tens of millions of jobs. We can essentially look into the future by examining the research and development taking place now. Let's look at some examples.

- Self-driving cars are already here. Since October 2015, some Tesla models allow highway driving without having hands on the steering wheel. (Gear Patrol, 10/23/2015) More people are employed in the transportation industry than any other, and that industry is likely to be one of the first hit hard by automation. Later this year, automated taxi pods will start running on the streets of Milton Keynes, Britain, offering rides around the town. (BBC, 9/14/2015)
Platoons of driverless trucks are also going to be tested out in Britain later this year. (The Guardian, 3/6/2016) A driverless shuttle began being tested on the roads in the Netherlands two months ago. And in April, the Netherlands will begin testing driverless semi-trucks as well. (The Guardian, 1/28/2016)

- A new bricklaying robot can create the brick framework of a house in just two days, working about 20 times faster than a human bricklayer. It has a top laying speed of 1,000 bricks per hour. (Gizmag, 6/30/2015) Think what that one invention alone will do to the construction industry, but it is just one of many.



- In 2015, the world's first "robot hotel" opened in Nagasaki, Japan. Nearly all customer interactions are with robots, and there's only a staff of ten people watching on video behind the scenes to make adjustments and deal with malfunctions. The owners plan to open hundreds more robot hotels around the world in the coming decade. (The Telegraph, 7/16/2015)

- A highly automated fast food restaurant named Eatsa opened in 2015 in San Francisco. Although some people work behind the scenes, most customers never interact with any employees. Eatsa plans to become a national chain, and become even more automated. (The San Francisco Chronicle, 9/1/2015, The New York Times, 9/9/2015)



- A vast indoor farm in Japan plans to be totally automated by mid-2017. Industrial robots will carry out all tasks except planting seeds. Owners expect it will more than double production while lowering costs. Additionally, new robots have been developed that are capable of quickly picking only ripe strawberries, and another type of new robot is picking ripe tomatoes. (The Guardian, 2/1/2016)

- The first robot-only factory is being built in China's Dongguan factory city. The factory plans to reduce the current workforce of 1,800 by 90%. Since September 2014, a total of 505 factories in Dongguan alone have invested $615 million in robots, aiming to replace more than 30,000 workers. (BBC, 9/14/2015)

- Royal Caribbean has installed a robotic bartender on one of their luxury cruise ships. Drinks are ordered on a tablet and then a robotic arm mixes, shakes, and pours the drink. (BBC, 9/14/2015)

- Two weeks ago, Boston Dynamics, a company owned by Google, publicly unveiled a video showing off its new multipurpose robot called "Atlas." Venture capitalist Jason Calacanis commented, "This is really the end of manual labor. When you watch this video, he's walking through the snow; he's wobbly, but he gets back up. Manual labor is going to end in our lifetime, and in this video you can see how close we really are. It's a huge societal issue with jobs, but it's going to be a huge lift in terms of efficiency of companies that nobody expected. ... It's picking up packages right now. These things are going to be walking down the street 10 to 15 years from now, delivering pizzas; they're going to be in your office moving packages around." (CNBC, 2/25/2016)



These are just a few examples - I could site dozens more. This is happening in industry after industry. Robots or computers can work nearly non-stop, don't need to be paid, never go on strike, don't need health care, and so on. In the most advanced manufacturing sectors, for instance Japanese carmakers, robots are already able to work unsupervised around the clock for up to 30 days without interruption. Sending manufacturing jobs to low-cost economies have been shown to save up to 65% of labor costs, but replacing humans by automation saves up to 90%. (The Guardian, 11/5/2015)

Unfortunately, jobs of all types and incomes could be affected. For instance, doctors may well suffer more job losses than hairdressers. There simply aren't many jobs that are completely "automation proof." (And if there are now, computer power and capability continues to improve year after year, with no end in sight.) The previously mentioned McKinsey and Company report found that only four percent of jobs across the US economy require creativity at a median human level of performance, and only 29% require a median human level of performance in sensing emotion. (US News and World Report, 1/8/2016)

So not only are 45 percent of jobs likely to be automated just by adapting technology that already exists, but if the technology to understand natural language are able to reach the median level of human performance, an additional 13 percent of US jobs could be automated. (McKinsey Quarterly, 11/2015)

Furthermore, probably the greatest barrier to automation taking most jobs is vision. It's hard to overestimate just how important seeing and understanding one's surroundings is to performing many tasks. But robots of all kinds are quickly gaining the ability to "see" in a functional manner. Once they can do this, they can learn to perform a new task simply by watching a human or other robot do it first. (The Conversation, 12/21/2015, Forbes, 5/26/2015)

Last month, Moshe Vardi, director of the Institute for Information Technology at Rice University in Texas, said, "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?" Vardi believes there will always be some need for human work, but automation could drastically change the landscape, with no profession safe. He asks, "Can the global economy adapt to greater than 50 percent unemployment?" (AFP, 2/14/2016)

MACHINES ARE GETTING BETTER, FAST

In truth, the robots of today stills have trouble with all sorts of basic tasks like walking or talking, and they're decades away from being "sentient," if that ever happens at all. (Worrying about robots taking over the world Terminator-style or peacefully becoming the superior intelligent "species" on Earth are longer term issues way beyond the scope of this essay.) But most job losses are coming through increasing computer power that doesn't have to involve actual robots or computers having human-like consciousness.

Most people are familiar with Moore's Law, which states that computing power doubles approximately every two years. However, it's hard to understand what that really means. AI author Martin Ford points out that if you had deposited a single penny at an equivalent interest rate of Moore's Law in 1949 (around the time computers first entered the marketplace), you would now have $86 million! (The Guardian, 10/1/2015)

Taking Moore's law literally, computer processor power increases by a factor of 1,000 every 15 or 20 years. Remarkably, that has been the case at least until the last few years, where there are signs it has slowed down some. But even at a slower rate, computers are improving at a rate that is hard for the human mind to comprehend. If a computer or robot can't do a given task now, it's probably just a matter of years until it will.

If anything, current estimates of what will be automated in ten or twenty years' time probably underestimate what computers and robots will be capable of doing. Andy Haldane, the previously mentioned chief economist of the Bank of England, has noted, "Machines are already undertaking tasks which were unthinkable - if not unimaginable - a decade ago." (Computer World, 11/23/2015)

An article in The Atlantic about AI authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee has similarly noted, "Computers are so dexterous that predicting their application ten years from now is almost impossible. Who could have guessed in 2005, two years before the iPhone was released, that smart phones would threaten hotel jobs within the decade, by helping homeowners rent out their apartments and houses to strangers on Airbnb? Or that the company behind the most popular search engine would design a self-driving car that could soon threaten driving, the most common job occupation among American men?" (The Atlantic, 7/2015)

A good example of computers vastly exceeding expectations made news just in the past few days. AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence system developed by a Google company called DeepMind, beat Lee Sedol, the world's best Go player, in three straight matches. This is bigger news than when a computer beat the world's best chess player in 1997, because Go is thousands of times more complex than chess, and the problem couldn't be solved through sheer processing power. Programmers had to devise an entirely new approach that they liken to teaching the computer how to have intuition or a hunch.



Even computer experts were astounded, since it was thought that teaching computers to play Go well enough to beat a world champion would take at least another decade. Furthermore, DeepMind won using moves that broke all conventions yet proved effective, showing that its strategies were something brand new and not just mimicry of what humans already did.(Vox, 3/10/2016, Wired, 3/11/2016)

Guy Suter, founder of the AI communications start-up Notion commented, "There's now a model we can take away from this and apply to so many different things." Google has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on DeepMind computing, which is not sentient but has the ability to teach itself new skills in a way no other computer ever has. And the DeepMind project to win at Go only began a year and a half ago. (Los Angeles Times, 3/12/2016)

WHAT ABOUT NEW JOBS REPLACING THE LOST ONES?

This is all very concerning, but for hundreds of years up until now, some new technologies have taken away some jobs, but general technological progress has created as many or more new jobs overall. Some experts believe there is no need to worry because this trend will continue indefinitely, like some kind of natural law. However, even if this turns out to be true, the loss of tens of millions of jobs in such a short time would cause an economic disruption never seen before in the history of the US, and many low-educated workers might not be able to gain the skills needed in the new high-tech world.

Furthermore, there is ample evidence that we are entering a completely new phase of human history. Computers and robots that can perform so many different tasks better and cheaper than people is simply unprecedented, and for almost any industry you can think of, it's not a matter of if machines will do it better, but when. Many new jobs may be created, but it's likely automation will perform those jobs as well!



AI author Carl Benedikt Frey has observed that technology is getting so advanced that fewer and fewer people have the necessary skills to work on the cutting edge. "In the 1980s, 8.2% of the US workforce were employed in new technologies introduced in that decade. By the 1990s, it was 4.2%. For the 2000s, our estimate is that it's just 0.5%. That tells me that, on the one hand, the potential for automation is expanding - but also that technology doesn't create that many new jobs now compared to the past." (The Guardian, 11/7/2015)

Unemployment in the US has dropped in recent years, but the pay of the new jobs are generally low. The share of US economic output that is paid out in wages has been falling since the 1980s. University of Chicago economists Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman have estimated that almost half of the decline is the result of businesses replacing workers with computers and software. For instance, in 1964, the country's most valuable company, AT&T, was worth $267 billion in today's dollars and employed 760,000 people. Today, telecommunications giant Google is worth $370 billion but has only 55,000 employees - less than a tenth the size of AT&T back then. (The Atlantic, 7/2015)

New technologies have made it easier to substitute capital in place of labor, which doesn't boost wages for the average worker. Instead, it helps to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few at the top. (CBS News, 2/10/2015)

For instance, WhatsApp was started with $250,000 in 2009. When it was bought by Facebook a mere five years later, its value was $19 billion. It had 55 employees at the time, for a value of $345 million per employee! By comparison, the retailer Gap was also valued at $19 billion at the time, and had 137,000 employees (which is a value of $124,000 per employee). (Citigroup, 2/2015)

And it's not just WhatsApp and a few other tech companies; this trend has been happening through the whole economy. The dominant US-listed non-financial companies generated earnings (before interest and tax) of $1.3 trillion in 2013, up from $600 billion made ten years earlier. These same US blue chip companies now employ 24 million workers, up from 18 million in ten years. That's a much bigger increase in earnings (+119%) than the number of employees (+31%). As a result, the profit productivity of the US stock market has risen sharply. Earnings per employee is up from $32,000 in 2004 to $53,000 in 2013. (Citigroup, 2/2015)

When companies had large numbers of workers, the profits were divided into lots of small pieces. But when companies have only a relatively small number of workers, there's nowhere for the profits to go but up - to the owners, upper management, and shareholders. One result of this is that chief executive salaries have skyrocketed. Incredibly, CEOs at top US firms have seen their salaries increase by more than half (54%) since 2009, while ordinary wages have barely moved. (Salon, 1/21/2016)

I don't think anybody can make the argument that CEOs have gotten 50% better or more productive in the last five years. It's just that they take more money because nobody is stopping them from doing so.

These trends worry AI author Calum Chace, who commented, "There will be people who own the AI, and therefore own everything else. Which means homo sapiens will be split into a handful of 'gods', and then the rest of us." (The Guardian, 11/7/2015) (Again, think of the "Elysium" movie.)

The people who think that new jobs will inevitably come in the nick of time to replace the lost jobs are either ignorant of the trend lines or are deluding themselves. As The Atlantic reported last year, "Nine out of ten workers today are in occupations that existed 100 years ago, and just 5 percent of the jobs generated between 1993 and 2013 came from 'high tech' sectors like computing, software, and telecommunications. Our newest industries tend to be the most labor-efficient: they just don't require many people." (The Atlantic, 7/2015)

It's telling that, as AI author Carl Benedikt Frey points out, "The fastest-growing occupations in the past five years are all related to services. The two biggest are Zumba instructor and personal trainer." (The Guardian, 11/7/2015) Note that both of those jobs involve performing personal services to the more wealthy. As automation continues to take away customer service jobs, for instance replacing coffee shop baristas with an advanced kiosk, or more self-serve check-out counters, there no doubt will still be a premium market for real human customer service catering to the rich. But that's not nearly enough employment to sustain an economy.



SANDERS VS. CLINTON ON AUTOMATION

In doing research for this essay, I searched the Internet to find what Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have said about automation. I was surprised to find almost no public comments for either of them, and their official campaign websites don't mention it at all.

I did find one occasion in May 2015 where Sanders was asked about it by a concerned citizen in an on-line question and answer session. He was asked, "What do you think will have to be done regarding massive unemployment due to automation permanently killing jobs with no fault on the people losing these jobs?"

This is the answer Sanders gave: "Very important question. There is no question but that automation and robotics reduce the number of workers needed to produce products. On the other hand, there is a massive amount of work that needs to be done in this country. Our infrastructure is crumbling and we can create millions of decent-paying jobs rebuilding our roads, bridges, rail system, airports, levees, dams, etc... Further, we have enormous shortages in terms of highly-qualified pre-school educators and teachers. We need more doctors, nurses, dentists, and medical personnel if we are going to provide high-quality care to all of our people. But, in direct response to the question, increased productivity should not punish the average worker, which is why we have to move toward universal health care, making higher education available to all, a social safety net which is strong, and a tax system which is progressive." (Vox, 5/20/2015)

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any instances when Clinton was even asked a question about automation. However, perhaps we can glean something from the opinions of Alec Ross. He is a technology policy expert who was Senior Advisor for Innovation to Clinton for the duration of her term as Secretary of State, a new position she specially created for him. He has just written a book called "The Industries of the Future," which looks at six of the biggest waves of change about to hit the world, including robotics. However, he says that "I'm not cyber-utopian or cyber-skeptic. I'm an idealistic realist." He disagrees that artificial intelligence will hollow out the middle class or devastate the economy. (The Guardian, 2/5/2016)

In my opinion, Ross's moderate, careful stance on this issue is a good match for Clinton's beliefs. After all, in September 2015, she said, "You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center. I plead guilty." (CNN, 9/10/2015)

I'm not sure if Sanders is fully aware or concerned yet about the grave dangers automation poses to the economy. He certainly hasn't publicly emphasized it, and in his one direct answer on the subject, he pivoted to mostly talking about his usual economic program.

However, he doesn't particularly need to be focused on the subject right now, because his economic platform is EXACTLY what's needed to combat the problem of job loss from automation. There's no realistic way to stop technological progress, because if it doesn't happen in the US it will happen in other countries. But universal health care, a strong social safety net, more progressive taxation, and so on would at least prevent millions of newly unemployed from starving in the streets. The key is combating income inequality, which is his number one priority issue anyway.



MARSHALL BRAIN'S TWO POSSIBLE FUTURES

I first became aware of how serious the automation problem is through the website of Marshall Brain (marshallbrain.com), a professor and author who has become a multimillionaire through his "How Stuff Works" books and other products. Way back in 2002, he began sounding the alarm in the mainstream media about this issue. (For instance, check out this 2003 Salon article that was many years ahead of its time: Salon, 9/18/2003)

At that time, he wrote a fascinating, thought-provoking novella called "Manna," which is still available for free on his website, along with other insightful essays about robotics and automation. In it, he predicted massive job losses due to automation, and then two very different futures as a result.

In one dystopian future, present trends continue and the rich get richer while everyone else gets poorer. Nearly all the benefit of new technologies go only to the rich, and most other people are maintained at the most frugal level of existence by government welfare, if the rich are generous and moral enough to even allow that much. The masses would lose all political powers and freedoms, and would be boxed into de facto prisons by robot guards and high-tech surveillance.

But Brain also imagined an alternative, utopian future where there is a massive redistribution of income to cope with the fact that there simply aren't enough jobs for people anymore. A universal basic income (UBI) would replace all previous welfare programs like food stamps and unemployment insurance, giving everyone enough money to live decently. Those who do work would still get the UBI (which means there's not an inventive against working).

As a result, the benefits of the new technologies would spread to everyone. Robots and other automation devices could become standard in the typical family home, eliminating nearly all forms of house work, gardening, and other "drudge" work. 3D printer-like devices could work similar to the replicators of Star Trek, essentially making everyone well off. People could live far better than ever before, with a great amount of free time to pursue creative and fulfilling things that they want to do, instead of what they have to do to pay the bills. It really could be something amazing!

I think Brain was spot on with his prediction of these two dramatically different futures. In recent years, more and more people are thinking in the same way, especially about the universal basic income (UBI) as the only logical solution to having many more people than good paying jobs. There have been many books written on automation and robots by AI experts in recent years, some of them more optimistic, some more pessimistic. (If you want to know a lot more, last year's "Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future" by Martin Ford is a particularly good one.) But ALL the books I've seen have proposed a UBI or something similar to it.

THE PATH TO A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

The UBI is a redistribution of income that goes far beyond anything even the democratic socialist Sanders has proposed so far. Surprisingly, Sanders actually was asked about the UBI concept last year. Journalist Ezra Klein prompted him in an interview, "Let me [ask you] a question about a policy that is getting, seems to be, some momentum but it’s not often talked about in Washington, which is a universal basic income. You’ve begun to have people go back to both Milton Friedman and Martin Luther King Jr., saying we should really have a fundamentally guaranteed standard of living in this country."

Sanders responded, "I am absolutely sympathetic to that approach. That’s why I’m fighting for a $15 minimum wage, why I’m fighting to make sure that everybody in this country gets the nutrition they need, why I’m fighting to expand Social Security benefits and not cut them, making sure that every kid in this country regardless of income can go to college. That’s what a civilized nation does. ... In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, the top one-tenth of one percent should not own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Everybody in this country should in fact have at least a minimum and dignified standard of living." (Vox, 7/28/2015)

Probably, the time for a UBI to be implemented across the US has not come yet. Most Americans aren't even aware yet of what it is or why it would be a good idea. Right now, welfare is seen only as a last resort for economic "losers," and the UBI goes against the stereotypical American individualist, entrepreneurial spirit. Republicans in particular will be outraged by the very idea, and will fight it tooth and nail.

But I believe that once many millions of talented, capable people begin losing their jobs due to automation and are unable to find new ones, the public opinion will shift dramatically. Job losses will hit rich and poor and everyone in between, making most people feel vulnerable and wanting some protection from the risk of total destitution. We have seen with some issues like gay marriage and marijuana legalization that mainstream opinion can shift dramatically in a few years.

Until the idea reaches a critical mass of approval, Sanders' economic program is essential to prevent the rich and powerful from getting so much more rich and powerful that the democratic system is completely corrupted and there is no chance to implement the massive wealth redistribution needed for the new "world without work," unless maybe through a terrible, violent revolution.

And if Sanders is president when automation throws many millions out of work, there is no one better than him to deal with this crisis. It makes perfect sense that he would say he is "absolutely sympathetic" to the UBI concept, because it is a logical extension of his democratic socialist beliefs.

Luckily, some other more progressive countries are already beginning to experiment with a UBI and related ideas, like a shorter work week. For instance:

- The Swedish government has begun testing a six-hour work day in limited locations. Some private companies have voluntarily switched to a six-hour day, and are happy with the results, citing greater worker happiness, productivity, and retention. (The Guardian, 9/17/2015)

- The Finnish government is experimenting with a basic income in limited areas, due to start next year. (Basicincome.org, 12/9/2015)

- In the Netherlands, this year will see a UBI paid to residents of Utrecht and 19 other municipalities. Everyone will get about $215 a week, whether they're working or not. (The Guardian, 1/7/2016)

- In Switzerland, there is a growing movement to pass a referendum establishing a UBI for the entire country. A 2015 poll showed that 49% were in favor and 43% were against. However, all political parties are against the idea, even the Green and Socialist parties, and in late 2015 the lower house of parliament voted against it by overwhelming numbers. But supporters collected enough signatures for a national referendum on the issue anyway, which will be voted on in late 2016. (Basicincome.org, 10/3/2015)

- Just a couple of weeks ago, the province of Ontario, Canada, passed a budget that includes money for a UBI pilot project. The text of the budget states: "The pilot project will test a growing view at home and abroad that a basic income could build on the success of minimum wage policies and increases in child benefits by providing more consistent and predictable support in the context of today’s dynamic labor market. ... The government will work with communities, researchers, and other stakeholders in 2016 to determine how best to design and implement [it]." (Basicincome.org, 2/28/2016)

TOGETHER, WE CAN MAKE OUR OWN BETTER FUTURE

Right now, the future is looking very distressing. Ironically, the combined effect of many incredible technological breakthroughs could actually destroy the economy by putting tens of millions of people out of work. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak commented last year, "Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently." (Financial Review, 3/23/2015)

However, it doesn't have to be that way! As Marshall Brain and otheres have suggested, there actually are two possible futures, a dystopian one where current policies continue until the rich and powerful get almost everything and everyone else is left in starvation and misery, OR a utopian one where massive wealth redistribution in the form of a UPI or something similar would allow everyone to benefit from technological progress.

Until recently, I felt very pessimistic about the future. It seemed that the necessary drastic progressive change in the US was simply politically impossible, and we would be lucky not to elect a Republican in 2016 who would give big tax cuts to the rich and make income inequality and other problems even worse. Then Sanders came out of nowhere to seriously challenge Clinton for the presidential nomination. Already, thanks to him (and the Occupy movement), the issue of income inequality has gone from being a taboo "class warfare" topic to something that everyone is talking about.



If Clinton were to win the presidency, that at least would be much better than a Republican like Donald Trump. (Trump sometimes talks like a populist about trade deals and such, but his regressive tax plan would give even more money to the very wealthy than most other Republican tax plans.) But I don't believe Clinton's moderate, centrist policies and inclinations are what's needed for the automation job crisis that will really start to hit the economy hard in the next few years.

Sanders' policies are exactly what I would propose if I were in his shoes right now. The US is not ready for a UPI yet, and it probably won't be until a severe crisis starts to hit home. But having Sanders as president would be a dramatic shift in the right direction, a real political revolution that seemed impossible just a year ago.

It's true that he might not be able to actually pass much legislation to implement his agenda, especially with at least one house of Congress likely to stay in Republican hands after the election. But if he were president, he at least would be able to prevent things from getting much worse.

Clinton has many positive qualities and good progressive policies, but unfortunately I don't believe she would put much of a break on income inequality getting worse. She and her husband Bill are among the elite of the elite, worth over $150 million combined, and they've never shown any inclination to dramatically change the status quo. It is out of the scope of this essay to go into detail on the issue, but Hillary generally has been in favor of trade agreements like NAFTA and the TPP that shift even more money and power to the wealthy and to big corporations. In the next four years, other even worse trade agreements are on the horizon, such as TIPP and TISA.

Currently, President Obama, other mainstream Democrats, and the Republicans are quietly planning on passing a tax break to big corporations worth hundreds of billions of dollars (in return for sending some of their overseas profits back the US to be taxed, which they're required to do already). It's generally agreed that a deal is going to happen soon; it's just a matter of how much of a break the corporations will get. Not surprisingly, the Republicans want to give them even more of a break than the Democrats do, but it would be a huge giveaway either way. Virtually the only prominent politicians to come out against the very idea of the tax break are Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren. So far, it appears Clinton hasn't publicly taken a position, or even been asked about it. (The Nation, 3/4/2016)

The rich and powerful have co-opted our democracy to the point that such outrageous bills can pass with wide bipartisan support and almost no media mention (since some of the corporations that stand to benefit greatly own the major media outlets). We're likely to see more such generous deals proposed for big corporations and the rich, including more bad trade bills, in the years to come. With Clinton as president, we will continue to see inequality increase, because she is a moderate, and drastic action is needed to combat drastic problems. Even if Sanders were unable to pass a single bill, his mere position as president would prevent the top 1% from using the government to increase their wealth and power even more, and he would use his position and authority as a bully pulpit to continue to shift public opinion on income inequality.



For the first time in a long time, I'm hopeful about our nation's future, thanks to Sanders and his growing movement. It's crazy if 99% of Americans let an ideological animosity to socialist ideas prevent us from moving to the only rational way to deal with an economy where having a job will be a kind of luxury instead of a necessity, and willingly give almost all economic gains to just the top one percent. Luckily, it seems that tens of millions of people are alreadly fed up with our current political elite and want to see drastic income redistribution so they can live better lives.

I have not considered myself a socialist (at least until very recently!), but socialist policies like the UBI are the only way to combat the trends that are making the rich richer and everyone else poorer, especially due to the unstoppable technological advances. Any rational person should adjust their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence.

I truly feel that the election of Bernie Sanders as president is our best and maybe only chance of redirecting our country away from a dystopian future and towards a utopian one. This is no ordinary election. The fate of this country, and maybe even the world, hangs in the balance.

Perhaps someone else with polices like Sanders' might come along four or eight years from now and run for president. But by that time, income inequality may be so extreme and political power so concentrated that it'll be too late to change course, or at least the economic and social costs will be much greater, with many millions already out of work. In years to come, as the economic trends become more obvious, it's likely that some countries will move towards a UPI and other policies allowing the benefits of automation and other new technologies to be shared with everyone. But it's also likely that some other countries, especially those that already are oligarchies and dictatorships, will not.

Which way will the US go?! Which future do YOU want to live in? Are you willing to fight to elect leaders like Bernie Sanders to help us get there?

There are many other important issues in this year's presidential election, such as racism, climate change, health care, the Supreme Court, and so on, and Sanders and Clinton have similar policies on many of them. But when it comes to combating income inequality, there are clear ideological and policy differences between the democratic socialist Sanders and the moderate Clinton.

If Sanders isn't elected to do all he can to reduce income inequality, then thanks to automation, in a few years the US could enter a great jobless depression that has no end in sight, ruining progressive progress in all other areas. Sanders correctly and repeatedly links many other issues back to income inequality because it has gotten so far out of hand, making it the one obvious underlying problem connected to those other issues.

Let me end this essay with the conclusion from the Oxfam study on inequality published in January, which I heartily agree with:

"Our world is not short of wealth. It simply makes no economic sense - or indeed moral sense - to have so much in the hands of so few. Oxfam believes humanity can do better than this, that we have the talent, the technology, and the imagination to build a much better world. We have the chance to build a more humane economy, where the interests of the majority are put first. A world where there is decent work for all, where women and men are equal, where tax havens are something people read about in history books, and where the richest pay their fair share to support a society that benefits everyone." (Salon, 1/21/2016)