re: #50 goddamnedfrank

P.S. If you aren’t risk averse and are looking for individual stocks to invest in my only advice right now is that you should do some serious research into how the advances in deep learning software & AI are going to disrupt all kinds of jobs and industries over the next two decades. Not gonna give any specific recommendations, just saying that I predict that we’re looking at another fairly massive reshaping of the economy and as a result there are going to be a few inevitable big winners and a significant number of losers. The key difference is this time around the people who lose their livelihoods & nest eggs aren’t going to be able to blame immigrants and foreigners for their misfortunes.

1. They’ll still blame their misfortune on immigrants and foreigners. They blamed job losses caused by automation on foreigners and immigrants, so there’s no reason they wouldn’t accept immigrants and foreigners as scapegoats for the pain caused by what essentially amounts to another round of automation.

2. My assumption has always been that in the context of the US system, deep learning and AI of sufficient sophistication leads to complete economic collapse. The current paradigm can’t survive in a situation where there is essentially zero demand for labor outside of a handful of highly compensated positions and a larger pool of lowly compensated labor where the nature of the work is so diverse that automation remains cost prohibitive.

3. I’d be more confident on the expert predictions regarding AI and deep learning, if the first jobs on their lists to be replaced weren’t always food service workers. The factors driving automation are A. The cost to automate and B. The value from automating. It always seems like even the experts make the mistake of assuming that easy for humans to do = easy and cheap for machines/AI to do and vice versa, so it’s always low wage service jobs that are going to get replaced first as opposed to say fighter pilots or actuaries where there’s lots of money to be saved, enormous potential to boost performance and the functions almost seem custom built for machine intelligence.