As the media and other candidates awaited the results of the New Hampshire primary, candidate Andrew Yang announced he was calling it quits.
Tucker Carlson interviewed Yang last March about automation, and remarked on Tuesday that he was a “good guy personally and a serious person talking about things that actually matter and will matter 20 years from now.”
Yang is a tech guy who tried to bring attention to the coming problem of extensive automation which he mentioned during his remarks about ending the campaign:
ANDREW YANG: We highlighted the real problems in our communities as our economy is being transformed before our very eyes by technology and automation. Americans know now that when you go to a factory in Michigan, you do not find wall-to-wall immigrants doing work. You find wall-to-wall robot arms and machines doing the work that people used to do. We stood on the debate stage and shifted our national conversation to include the fourth industrial revolution, a topic no one wanted to touch until we made it happen here with this campaign.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Yang emphasized his free money cure for automation-caused job loss rather than alerting the public to the coming employment downturn. He calls it the “Freedom Dividend” aka Universal Basic Income on his website Yang2020.
One of Yang’s worst enemies in his political campaign was America’s excellent economy, so any warnings about robots taking jobs from humans must have seemed a distant threat to many voters.
But at least he brought the issue to a wider public. President Trump should hire him as the Under Secretary of Commerce in charge of American preparations for the automated future.
Trump can also severely decrease foreign entrants to this country, because
Automation makes immigration obsolete.