A Technologist’s Perspective on Supporting Bernie Sanders

The future is nigh.

I spend my days thinking about how Technology will evolve, as well as how it will impact the future. As I gaze over landscapes and watch delivery drones transiting along the skyline, I open my hand to see an augmented smartphone screen materialize in my palm. I glance at a farm automated completely by robots providing us with an abundance of food. Ah, the future is bright. Right?

Maybe not. Technology promises us the utopia the fathers of our civilization dreamed of. A society where all difficult, displeasing, or demeaning labor is given to machines. A society where we can pursue work we find meaningful and creative, where we no longer have to toil in drudgery. This may be Technology’s promise, but she promises it to us as a bargain. Technology’s bargain is that we must be willing to see the potential in Her that she sees in us. And right now, we’re failing Her.

Mankind follows a pretty regular pattern when it comes to technological advancement and scientific achievement. No one believes a goal can be accomplished, so no one thinks about what reality would be like if that goal were accomplished. Suddenly, a dreamer comes along, tells everyone it can be done, and the other people who are inspired by the possibility and sick of business as usual hop on board. JFK says “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” and boom, an entire nation gets together and lands our species on the moon.

These days, we always expect technology to get better. Better iPhones, better entertainment systems, better graphics. And somehow every time a new paradigm comes out such as virtual reality, our first interaction with it is still totally shocking. ‘The future is here.’ we think to ourselves. ‘This is going to change everything.’ We’re surprised. We knew technology was advancing, but we didn’t expect it to advance this quickly.

We didn’t think jetpacks would be real. “It is the year 2000 and I have no jetpack!” many a forum-commenter could be found saying. But lo-and-behold, it is 2016 and the jetpack is real; and rather dazzling, even if slightly unaffordable:

That’s a real jetpack. Flying at around 200 miles per hour. “But where’s my hoverboard?” Your hoverboard is also here, and while clearly not ready for consumer usage, the technology is clearly proven:

Our traditionally understood milestones of the future have arrived, and yet we still behave as though the next advancement just isn’t possible, or just won’t be done.

All around us, Technology is advancing at an exponentially faster rate. Self-driving cars are driving on roads in California. George Hotz built a self-driving car with just $1,000 dollars in parts in his garage in only a month. Daimler is even testing a self-driving truck.

While these advancements are so glaringly imminent, we seem to still be in denial about our own future. We even go through phases of denial. We see a early self-driving car and think ‘okay, this car can drive, but it will never drive as well as a human’. Then the cars improve and have lower accident rates than us, at which point we say ‘okay, this car can drive better than me, but they’ll never have self driving trucks’. Then the self driving trucks come along, to which we say “Okay, you have self-driving trucks, but my job will never be automated.” Repeat ad naseum.

We are still a very primitive civilization in comparison to what we’re capable of through technological advancement. It is a mistake to believe that job X is impossible to automate because Y. Any job that can be done through training and learning can be automated. Certain jobs will take longer to develop proper artificial intelligence for, but nothing is off limits. Let’s start from that premise.

Self-driving cars are coming. If Google, Apple, Toyota, Lyft, or Tesla don’t make them ubiquitous by buying their cars, then George Hotz will make them ubiquitous at a much cheaper rate. Why does this matter? It’s not just because there are over 400,000 taxi or Uber drivers who will be made unemployed in America. Cars spend 95% of their time parked. If you could plug your vehicle in to a Uber-platform so you could make commission off of the time that you aren’t using your car, you make a profit, and the rest of society needs 95% less cars.

Of course, most cars are needed at rush hour, so it won’t be a one-to-one correlation of time utilization to cars saved, but with algorithmically-directed carpooling, the correlation will be close. So bear with me. Let’s say we see that 95% reduction in demand for cars. There are roughly 2.44 million jobs involved in the manufacturing of cars. We can say goodbye to a lot of those jobs. Then there are an additional 3.16 million jobs dedicated to supplying parts and materials to the auto-industry, and another 1.65 million jobs from working in dealerships. In fact, the Center for Automotive Research estimates that for every job in auto-manufacturing, nearly seven other jobs are created across the economy due to automakers being the largest purchasers of metals, plastics, and computer chips.

Can you imagine the impact of seeing even a 90% reduction in those jobs? Using CAR’s math, we’d be seeing job losses of up to 17 million. And that it doesn’t stop at cars. As this article about self-driving trucks points out, truck-driving is the most common occupation throughout 31 states. There are 3.5 million truck drivers, and there are towns throughout the U.S. whose economies revolve around servicing those drivers. As a result, there are an additional 5.2 million jobs that come directly from trucks requiring drivers. So taking away an additional 8 million jobs from the 17 million we just took away, we are down 25 million jobs. Even if there is a large overlap in the jobs that could be taken away, we likely would still be down at least 20 million.

Yikes. That’s a lot of jobs that come from driving alone. In fact, the U.S. economy relies so much on driving, that one might think that the public transportation system is intentionally left in poor and barely-accessible condition just to keep the economy going. But this too shall pass, as it cannot last. If Hotz can train a neural network to drive a car in a few hours, porting that same methodology to a truck is not far off.

Which brings me to the 2016 election. When it comes to raising the minimum wage, I hear many Trump supporters say “If the minimum wage is raised, my boss will replace me with my robot.” I don’t really see how this is an argument against minimum wage, because such jobs are destined to be replaced by robots anyway. Progress can be slowed, but it can’t be stopped.

What we should instead be advocating for is a basic income for most citizens. The main barrier I currently see is that many Americans are trapped by the dogma that they need to work to have money. Everything is viewed firstly through the lens that money has to come from somewhere. But here’s the issue: If a society is able to provide for the basic needs of all of its members, and yet somehow the basic needs for many are not being met, then there’s something wrong with economic system, not with those who are struggling.

We can already meet basic needs though. There are six empty homes for every homeless person in America. There are 46.7 million Americans (14.8%) living in food-insecure homes, and yet we throw out or waste one third of all food. Food and shelter are human rights, and are clearly perfectly accessible, but we won’t provide that because we are blinded by the almighty dogma of the dollar, however poorly distributed.

With mass automation, we will absolutely be able to go beyond meeting those needs. And in the face of this, we continue with the dogma that work is necessary, and that those who don’t work, don’t deserve life. Anyone who tells you that money should come before the principles of human life, respect, and dignity has something to gain in having you believe that.

In a world where Trump wants to bring back jobs that will no longer exist, in a world where Clinton keeps preaching “realism” when the principles that govern this reality provide no oil to the lanterns of human dignity, I have to go with someone whose heart is in the right place. I have to go with someone who — in the face of a social dynamic that will slowly come to understand the irrelevance of work––will do the right thing. I have to go with someone who — when faced with a great ethical choice during a time of rapid change––will not first consult corporations who have the most to gain from keeping the paradigms of the new world the same as the old one; A candidate who will not owe favors to the aforementioned corporations if they received money from them during elections.

That is why I have to go with Bernie Sanders.

These advancements and massive displacements will become pervasive during the next presidency. As it becomes appallingly apparent that menial labor serves us no good and will cease to exist, the call for reform will grow louder. Technology’s bargain will beckon to us, and we will see in Her promise a world where we can freely educate ourselves; a world where we can follow our passions; a world where suffering is eradicated. But her promise will only be fulfilled if we make the right choice. This is why we must choose a candidate who sees as much potential in the human race as Technology sees in us, lest we take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.