Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Geoghehan's point is that there's a serious honesty to the current message ("Go to college like us") that is being heard loud and clear, and that's the problem. But anyway...
There are places that had better prospects than they ever will again, and neither the government nor cooperation can change that. Detroit is never going to make cars for the world like it once did. Rural Iowa is losing farm jobs, because rural communities all over the industrialized world have been losing farm jobs for decades and it's not changing. My grandfather grew up in a town in Wyoming that doesn't exist anymore. It's not coming back.
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College will not save you. Grad school will not save you. The algorithms are terminators. If you’ve a mix of skills that require high education plus physical work with a great clientele (plastic surgeon), you’re safe. The rest of us are not. Even lawyers who go to court are going to be eliminated in the near future. The algorithms can’t get them directly, but the cost of court is so insane, nobody goes to trial anymore.
Society is splintering in many ways. I can’t point to all of them, but one I can see is rural poor folks being left behind. They can leave, as my immigrants forebears left Eastern Europe. Or they can stay and have limited but perhaps happy lives. I am advocating telling them, “We can’t help you. But we won’t hurt you. And your debts are cancelled, and we don’t expect taxes from you. Have a nice run in your off the grid lives. Or move and join us. But we’re not your enemies. We don’t want to tell you how to live. And we don’t want you to try to tell us how to live. We want to coexist and, if it’s best, leave you alone. You make the call.”
Allow the people who want to live outside the modern economy to do so. That seems to be what they desire. Let them have it. But if they want to move, welcome their effort to take a chance on bettering their lot.
Telling them to all go to college, and worse to get a STEM degree, which will land them in a glut, is a terrible idea. Better they go to trade schools. We’ll need plumbers. We won’t need people made obsolete by algorithms.
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