Thoughts on WEF Guff...

I've been struck down with ManFlu since the middle of last week. Most of Social media was awash with the World Economic Forum and the Donald wanting his slice of Greenland. 

But in the dim dark corners, were a few talks by CEOs of technology companies. Including surprisingly, Elon Musk. I thought he was no friend of the WEF.

I was interested in what the various "experts" had to say about A.I. and robotics. 

Now, I know what my thoughts on the two are, but I was interested to see what they were predicting. 

Nothing but sunny uplands. Even if the A.I. and robots did all the jobs, all it would do is free us from the drudgery of everyday work.  

Except, there was no discussion of the mechanism of how that would come about. If there was any discussion, it seemed uneasy, stilted and very careful. 

You could see the WEF-class see the use of A.I. and robotics as a utopia, where robots would supply their every need. Unwavering, unchallenging, unquestioning, loyal, protective, servile robots. I imagine It's something like a Romanesque idyl, with robot slaves feeding the elites with grapes, whilst they recline on chaise lounges.

But if you have an A.I. and robot workforce, how do you feed the peasants that have been displaced from the job market? All those inconvenient, unworthy, unproductive, people.

Well, the real, stark answer that guests on the various panels avoided saying out loud is: you don't. 

Those of us that understand what's coming is that every A.I. and every Humanoid Robot introduced needs to be treated as a human worker from a Social Welfare aspect. So every company and every individual using these tools needs to pay as if they are employing an actual human. Thus the government should impose a tax similar to national insurance for each unit in use.

But then the fear is that will impose a drag on development. Any tax imposed on this new technology would reduce the ability of corporations to use it, and we all know that corporations get their way, so you can see that there is a very high chance that the scenario isn't Sunny uplands and huge benefits of cheap robotic labour for those of us at the bottom of the pile. The future is redundancy in the starkest meaning of the word. Not just from the job market, but from society.

I mean, the experts did say that some form of universal credit scheme should be introduced, with no detail on how that should be financed. I'm sure in the minds of the CEOs, the idea would be that someone else finances the payments to the plebs.

But this is where the intellectual pygmies of the WEF always falter: very lofty ambitions, without doing the deep dive into the implications and eventual outcomes. 

I for one am appalled every year by the WEF and what I hear coming out of it. 

Their original idea was to have a global workforce. Which then depressed wages across the globe as corporations moved work to the cheapest workforce.

Then there have been various cover stories like climate change in order to smokescreen what is actually going on, which is the de-industrialisation of the West. 

Than they had the great idea of bringing the cheap workforce into the West to depress wages for jobs that couldn't be offshored. Which has led to mass immigration and with it the societal change of the West. 

Now, the great idea is to scrap all that and go for a digital workforce. With the unsaid outcome that the majority of people without independent wealth starve to death.

Such nice people, the WEF people.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of the WEF, what was with all the old ladies in leather? Lots of power dressing going on by the ladies. Looks to me as a sign of insecurity. 

The Challenge and the Opportunity of Artificial Intelligence

There's no doubt that Artificial Intelligence poses a great challenge to Governments across the globe.

Not only directly, as corporations like Google and Facebook use A.I. algorithms to manipulate information as they do at the moment, but in the future as A.I. rolls out and affects the employment market.

The last challenge like this was during the Thatcher years when mining and heavy industry in the UK became uncompetitive and suffered badly. I well remember the nightly lists of companies closing and job losses incurred on the Ten O'clock News.

Those communities heavily reliant on those industries have still not recovered 3 and 4 decades later.

I've blogged before that this new wave, the A.I. wave of redundancies and job losses won't be confined to the working class. It will be a predominantly middle-class problem. The working class jobs have all been automated. The middle class, the thinkers have been more or less unaffected. Not any more. A.I. is a direct threat to the sort of thinking jobs that were historically safe.

Being a middle-class phenomenon, it's a greater threat to middle-class political parties. How they manage the revolution and support the middle class determines if they stay in power or suffer the same fate as the Labour party.

Brexit produces an  exciting opportunity for an enlightened UK government - if it choses to be enlightened.

Free from the shackles of sclerotic EU legislation, a UK government could (much in the way that the Thatcher era government championed IT) start to champion cutting edge technologies like A.I.

A good start would be to start to move education system away from it's current blurred focus on vast quantities of graduates. The QUALITY of the graduates has to change. There has to be a laser-like focus on producing the brightest and the best and bringing them on. Education has to change from merely providing mediocre education for all, to focussing on identifying the brightest and the best from ALL walks of life and providing the streams to suit them that allows them to attain.

This is my biggest frustration with education at the moment. The leftist ideology says that everyone gets the same education. But.... what happens to those bright and talented in a "one-size-fits-all" education system? They fail to attain. They become bored, they are never challenged by a grey, bland just-for-the-sake-of-it education system.

Education I've said before is a strategic resource. It cannot be allowed to be just for the sake of it. It has to provide talent the country can use. An education system that provides a university graduate that eventually ends up sweeping floors is not fit for purpose. All that money, all that time, the resources, the teachers, lecturers, the talent of the graduate, are all wasted. If you are a teacher or a lecturer that is happy to churn out graduates that eventually end up wasting your time, you shouldn't be in the job.

A primary focus has to be on changing early education to identify talent.  Once that's in place, secondary education has to then focus on growing talent, providing multiple streams. Stem, Creative, Historical, Vocational and Caring subjects (to cater for an increasing elderly population) streams should be available.

How these specialist subjects are provided needs some work. But several specialist streams could be provided by a single school.

Further education then works to make experts out of those specialists. Not just in STEM subjects, but in Care, in Vocational subjects like Building, Plumbing. We need people that can manage whole projects as well as wire a plug or plumb in a boiler. But those managers also need to have practical experience of how a plug is wired or a boiler is plumbed and how long it takes.

Anyway, I've digressed. Back to A.I.

Hopefully, with an education system producing the brightest and the best in specialist subjects, we can then tailor that system to produce A.I. experts. Or graduates ready to exploit any emerging technology. I'm sure A.I. will become a feature in the lucrative market of weapons technology.

Britain can then exploit this boom, rather than be exploited. If necessary Government can invest in innovation, although the best would be private investment. Possibly government can kick-start innovation and then hand it over to private business for a price, with a decent and almost immediate return on the investment.

Eventually after we become the world expert on emerging technologies, the UK can go on to export its intellectual property and it's experts across the globe. Just like we did with Scottish shipwrights and Boiler makers, Cornish and Welsh miners back at the start of the industrial revolution.

Or we could do things the Leftist way and tax every A.I. or every company using A.I. to offset the cost of providing benefits to people made redundant by new technology thereby making the UK the most uncompetitive country to use A.I...….. in the world.