Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang — On the Impact of Automation on the Future

Andrew Yang is a serial tech entrepreneur, founder of Venture for America and Democratic presidential candidate for 2020. He’s passionate about helping workers adapt to structural changes in the economy. Venture for America was his way of training recent college grads and young professionals to join startups to help revitalize American cities. The focus of his presidential campaign is to address the threat of new technologies, such as robots and automation, on American workers. Yang spoke with Steve Sims on, “The Art of Making Things Happen Podcast” about how automation is taking away jobs and how it is affecting communications.

Why Tech Matters to the Presidency

A common agenda item for many presidential candidates is how they intend on creating or keeping jobs. Yang is no different although his views may be. Although unemployment is quite low across much of the country right now, there is a secular shift going on in technology that will affect millions of jobs. This shift is automating away millions of American jobs in retail, truck driving, call centers, fast food, accountants, radiologist, lawyers — anyone whose job consists mainly of repeatable tasks. When journalists and pundits comment that the “robots are coming”, it’s not too far from the truth.

Yang went to mainstream political figures to see what the plan was to address these job losses. When the political leadership class essentially told him there is no plan, no one’s going to do anything, Yang took matters into his own hands and decided to run for President as a Democrat in 2020. He’s running on a platform of Universal Basic Income, aka the freedom dividend, where every American adult between 18 and 64 gets $1,000 a month free and clear as part of the effort to transition to a new economy.

As a serial entrepreneur, Yang is used to setting out to solve particular problems. In this case, he’s realized he needs to run for President if he’s going to be able to solve the problem of automation taking away many of the jobs that Americans rely on for their day to day survival and paying their bills.

Additional Impacts of Automation

Besides changing the employment landscape, automation and other technological developments such as AI (artificial intelligence) are having other impacts on the world. In particular, how individuals communicate has fundamentally changed in recent years. Consider the case of phones, both landlines (if they still exist) and mobile phones. In the last five years, people don’t want to pick up their phone because of all the Robo calls that are going around. The next generation where people grew up on smart phones, they prefer not to interact with a person for a lot of day to day interactions.

Although this trend shows no sign of changing, human interaction is still important, especially when it comes to building a genuine connection. Getting in front of someone personally is still the best way to reach someone or to get someone to do something significant.

To hear more from Andrew Yang:

Website: yang2020.com
How you can help: Donate
To listen to this podcast: Andrew Yang

To subscribe to Steve Sims, “The Art of Making Things Happen — Podcast”