Right-wing anti-immigrant conservatives are always warning that immigrants will take away our jobs (hint: when was the last time one of them actually picked vegetables in the fields?)
The real threat to jobs is not immigration but automation including artificial intelligence, but only in unregulated capital markets.
The increased productivity gains (wealth creation) from automation and artificial intelligence and the resulting increased leisure time could potentially be a tremendous social good that benefits everyone with greater wealth and more free time to enjoy it in, but only in an economic system structured for equitable distribution of those gains — possibly in the form of something like a guaranteed minimum income or a distribution of profits like Alaska does from the extraction costs it exacts from oil companies.
When the productive resources and the wealth they create are concentrated in the hands of a very few wealthy plutocrats in an unregulated capital market, automation further concentrates and cements their economic and political elitism, exponentially increasing wealth inequality.
Ultimately, this is where the struggle for greater income equality must receive greater attention.
Of course, those who own and control these wealth-creating machines will resist such policy proposals, as they seek a two tiered economy in which all wealth is in the hands of a very few wealthy elites while hundreds of millions live in squalid poverty.
Right-wing anti-immigrant conservatives are always warning that immigrants will take away our jobs (hint: when was the last time one of them actually picked vegetables in the fields?)
The real threat to jobs is not immigration but automation including artificial intelligence, but only in unregulated capital markets.
The increased productivity gains (wealth creation) from automation and artificial intelligence and the resulting increased leisure time could potentially be a tremendous social good that benefits everyone with greater wealth and more free time to enjoy it in, but only in an economic system structured for equitable distribution of those gains — possibly in the form of something like a guaranteed minimum income or a distribution of profits like Alaska does from the extraction costs it exacts from oil companies.
When the productive resources and the wealth they create are concentrated in the hands of a very few wealthy plutocrats in an unregulated capital market, automation further concentrates and cements their economic and political elitism, exponentially increasing wealth inequality.
Ultimately, this is where the struggle for greater income equality must receive greater attention.
Of course, those who own and control these wealth-creating machines will resist such policy proposals, as they seek a two tiered economy in which all wealth is in the hands of a very few wealthy elites while hundreds of millions live in squalid poverty.