The beauty about being a liberal politician in a liberal state is one gets countless opportunities to be concerned about the negative consequences of previously-implemented policies.
For example, an inevitable outcome of California’s minimum wage law, under which the wage will rise to $15 and hour by 2022, is businesses dependent on manual labor will seek to automate those tasks as much as possible. However, because the memories of liberals are those of gnats, politicians can point to the symptom and call for ACTION against such a pernicious trend.
In the case of the minimum wage, Brietbart points to a Guardian article that reports Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom’s concern that the increased use of technology is killing jobs:
The graduating computer science students at the University of California at Berkeley had just finished chuckling at a joke about fleets of “Google buses, Facebook shuttles and Uber-copters” lining up to whisk them them to elite jobs in Silicon Valley. The commencement ceremony for a cohort of students who, one professor confided, were worth around $25bn was a feel-good affair.
Until, that is, Gavin Newsom took to the lectern and burst the bubble.
The smooth-talking Democrat, and frontrunner to win California’s gubernatorial race next year, warned the students that the “plumbing of the world is radically changing”. The tech industry that would make them rich, Newsom declared, was also rendering millions of other people’s jobs obsolete and fueling enormous disparities in wealth. “Your job is to exercise your moral authority,” he said. “It is to do the kinds of things in life that can’t be downloaded.”
No, Lieutenant Governor, their job is not to exercise moral authority; their job is to find a job.
Honestly, it takes a tremendous amount of guile for a grown man to whine to a bunch of smart kids that their career paths may lead to the next political crisis. That is especially the case because his party’s policies have created the very conditions for their future success!
Don’t believe me? One of the companies that irritates Newsom to no end designs robots … for the fast food industry.
[Newsom] frequently complains about Momentum Machines, a secretive San Francisco startup promising to transform the fast-food industry with robotic technology. The ambition, according to the company’s founder, is to “completely obviate” human workers.
“There’s an empathy gap,” Newsom said. “I really feel intensely that the tech community needs to begin not just to solve these business problems but to begin to solve societal problems with the same kind of disruptive energy that they put behind developing the latest app.”
So let me get this straight. Out of empathy, California passes a law that keeps more and more low-skilled people out of the work force. Businesses look to automating previously affordable manual work just to stay in business. So businesses lack empathy because they are trying to solve a problem government policy created.
If this is what it means to show empathy, keep it far, far, away from me!
So what is Newsom’s “solution” to the “empathy gap”?
Serious thinker that he is, he doesn’t know. However, one possibility is what socialists call “universal basic income”.
He is “not opposed” to universal basic income, an idea popular among Silicon Valley utopians that would see all citizens receive some kind of regular and unconditional payment, and is interested in a proposal from Bill Gates to tax companies when they replace humans with robots.
But Newsom said he was not ready to endorse either policy. Adopting politician-speak, he said his team was “starting to lean in to create the tenor of a policy approach” that will involve rethinking the education system and massive investment in apprenticeships.
Then he reverted to a more frank response. “I’m struggling to figure it out,” he said. “So I don’t have the damn answer.
May I offer a suggestion, Lieutenant Governor?
Perhaps you can look at the state’s minimum wage law for a clue about what to do next?
The post California Lieutenant Governor concerned about “job-killing robots” appeared first on A Simple Fool.
Source: A Simple Fool – California Lieutenant Governor concerned about “job-killing robots”