On Sunday, April 14, at 7 p.m. ET, CNN will host a town hall with Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, former ambassador for global entrepreneurship under the Obama administration and 2020 presidential candidate. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
(CNN) I never thought I'd run for president. My parents were immigrants to this country -- and leader of the free world was not on the list of careers presented to me as a skinny Asian kid growing up in upstate New York.
Instead, I became a lawyer for five unhappy months and then an entrepreneur. In 2011, I started a nonprofit organization, Venture for America, to help bring talented young entrepreneurs to create thousands of jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, Baltimore and other cities around the country. I chose those cities because there I experienced the aftermath of automation and witnessed the devastating effect it had on people's lives.
And then Donald Trump became President.
For Americans who are still trying to figure out why Trump is President, the answer is simple -- we automated away millions of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, and Trump spoke directly to the fear and anger of those voters. He promised them that he would restore those jobs -- a promise on which he has notably failed to deliver. Here's the reality, though: The financial crisis of 2008 brought our 14 million manufacturing jobs (itself a low plateau from the 17 million in 2000) down to 11.4 million, and 10 years of expansion has only brought us back up to 12.8 million
But what happened to manufacturing workers will soon happen to retail workers, call center workers, fast food workers, truck drivers and others, as the next Industrial Revolution takes hold of our economy. Bain, a leading consulting firm, projects automation will disrupt jobs at about three times the rate of the Second Industrial Revolution, which sparked thousands of strikes and mass riots at the turn of the 20th century.
fatalikos on April 15th, 2019 at 08:35 UTC »
Anecdotal: I'm an Electrical Engineer that worked in Automation for a consultancy. I helped Duke Energy upgrade their substations, automating most of the switching, safety, and inspection processes. The IoT, SCADA, and RTU solutions we deployed that year across Ohio and Indiana allowed a previously manned substation to be almost entirely automated. Instead of having 6 electricians, 2 engineers (shift work) for each major substation, two dispatchers are able to service an area of 5 or 6 substations. The system was completely scalable. In 2015 alone, we permanently took out hundred plus high skilled jobs that have existed for 50+ years. Now I work in transport industry, and it is accelerating even faster here.
gking407 on April 15th, 2019 at 03:28 UTC »
You would think more self-righteous red-blooded capitalists would have talked about economic transformation long before Yang showed up. How will we keep up with the robots? They don’t care about you and will take as many jobs as they can. And there are plenty of jobs ready to be automated.
Yang is in a position to become one of the greatest strawmen of all time: people love to attack him and ignore the steady deathmarch of technology.
svetambara on April 14th, 2019 at 22:31 UTC »
For example, money is transforming itself from being mine to being my boss's, and his boss, and his boss