The Week: Chairman Yang Is The Most Radical 2020 Candidate

You think?

Why do you think we love him? It is Yang and Tulsi who is good on foreign policy and a bunch of Boomer throwbacks and unlikable party hacks running in the Democratic field. He towers above Blompf and his competition who don’t have a clue about anything that is going on:

“Yang foresees that artificially intelligent software and robots will soon be better at a great many jobs that humans have traditionally done. The jobs that remain will either be beyond the cognitive capacity of most human beings or will be exceptionally non-remunerative. The economy, in the process of becoming more efficient at serving human desires, will drive an increasing proportion of humanity permanently off the road not merely to prosperity but even to subsistence. When he has finished laying out his case, Yang admits that a friend told him he should retitle his book, “We’re F—ed.”

And yet, surprisingly, Yang is relatively upbeat about our society’s ability to respond to the challenge — if we act quickly. The last third of the book focuses on solutions, the most important of which is a guaranteed Universal Basic Income. Paying everyone a minimal level of sustenance would prevent large numbers of people from falling into absolute penury, and facilitate their continued employment in jobs that would otherwise be insufficiently remunerative. He goes on to propose a host of further transformations to health care, education, and other sectors of society, all under the rubric of building “human capitalism.”

But there’s a disconnect between that term and the system Yang actually describes. If we are really on the verge of an era where machines will be able to replace a large proportion of humanity in any remunerative activity, then economics as we traditionally understand it will no longer be useful for modeling much of society. Yang recognizes this to a degree, inasmuch as he talks about the importance of social credits and time banks and other new means of exchange other than money to facilitate human interaction and cooperative activity in the new era. But these would exist alongside a market-driven process for deploying capital in ever more efficient ways. We won’t quite be in a Star Trek post-scarcity world. But we will be in a position where a large — and growing — segment of the citizenry will at best be consumers without ever being producers in an economic sense. And their ability to continue to be consumers will depend on the good will and sense of solidarity manifested by those who continue to produce.

What kind of politics would such a world engender? It’s not likely to be a democratic one — and between the lines of Yang’s book he seems to recognize that fact. Yang’s solutions involve a substantial restructuring of the American economy without massive central planning. …”

The near post-scarcity world that Yang is warning about and celebrating isn’t Star Trek. It is closer to Caprica which depicts virtual reality, automation and robotics.

How can you dislike this man?

This is already far better than the 2016 campaign. Yang is polarizing the electorate along smart/dumb lines. Elon Musk is right that we have to maintain human supremacy now.

Some pics from the Boston Yang Party tonight! Felt like a Revolution. Let’s make the case for an economy that works for US. Thank you and be back soon Beantown!! ???? pic.twitter.com/PDYHMlA81G

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) April 11, 2019

Me trying out being a hologram with hologram Tupac ? pic.twitter.com/IclQvAa27z

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) April 11, 2019

Yang is campaigning as a hologram!

An AI system defeated elite Chinese doctors in a two-round brain tumor diagnosis competition on both speed and accuracy. This could do incredible good but is another example of areas in which new technology is capable of beating humans. We have to evolve quickly. pic.twitter.com/1f2O8WZZHW

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) April 10, 2019

I hope a cybernetic interface is ready in time. Symbiosis, irrelevance (hopefully blissful) or doom seem to be the three most likely paths.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 10, 2019

Thanks Elon. Hoping to build a future that helps keep people relevant and fruitful even as more work gets done by AI. It’s a big challenge and we need to move fast. ?

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) April 10, 2019

We want Yang and Tulsi and Elon and Sophia to seize control of the White House and from Blompf and push all of these Boomers aside and start creating the Silicon Reich.*

*lighten up humorless progressive scolds

Note: The welfare carols during the Yang Dynasty are going to be EPIC. It cranks me up just thinking about where this is going.