TYT Hour 2 March 24, 2016

In Membership, The Young Turks Hour 2 - On Demand by klingbeil2118 Comments

Ana joins Cenk for SCS. Wonder where Al Franken is and why he’s suddenly so silent and complacent. Fox News ran a piece hitting Hillary Clinton on multiple fronts, and used footage from TYT’s interview with Sanders to drive some points home. They didn’t realize that they were helping to spread Sanders’ message. Video of the FNC piece. An internet generated robot has conversations with real people and learns their thought processes. With the voice of a teenaged girl, the robot has learned that Trump is a deity from internet trolls. The Family values Gov of Alabama is in hot water after audio of a racy phone call with his mistress was released. Cenk is disappointed in the tame nature of his phone sex. North Carolina lawmakers passed a law overnight that would prohibit cities in the state from creating nondiscrimination laws that would grant equal rights to LGBT citizens.

A JetBlue flight attendant tried to smuggle 68 lbs of cocaine onto a flight. When she was pulled aside for a search, she freaked out and took off running. Video was released online of two off duty NYPD officers arresting a Black mailman that yelled at them when they almost hit his mail truck.

Comments

  1. Ana, thank you so much for not mixing up transgender with gay/lesbian/bisexual/etc. Not many people understand that gender identity answers a completely different question than sexual orientation. :-)

  2. Re Tae the Computer Teen Girl: The reason she calls everyone “daddy” is because of all the people that would have asked her “who’s your daddy”?

  4. HuffPost had an article recently about Al Franken responding to tweets complaining about his early and strong support for Hillary Clinton. It was pretty funny. I don’t use social media so sent him an email telling him he had lost his white hat in my eyes. Keith Ellison, representative from MN, has now joined Bernie as my co-progressive heroes. He is one of the only Muslims in Congress, cochair of the progressive caucus, and has supported Bernie from day 1. I understand sort of why Elizabeth Warren may not be endorsing Bernie, which makes me appreciate the brave members of Congress who have stepped up to the plate. It really bothers me though that she hasn’t.

  5. Ana – on automation – a long rant – my silly perspective

    So I went to Taco Bell and you can now order your food via an app, they were advertising it at the counter. The person who waited on me was a person who had a mild mental disability. And this is where my thought wandered.

    This software will replace easily one person per shift, there are three shifts a day. Not calculating for weekends or the part time nature of the job, Taco Bell has 6,500 restaurants and we can estimate that 15000 part time jobs will be lost for the app and maybe 50 jobs will be created around servicing the app.

    Those 50 jobs will not be jobs those 15000 part time shifts staff will be able to directly transition to. And on the argument to train up, some of the jobs we are losing to automation are the jobs that were the core of trying to create job opportunities for the mentally less able.

    I have been advocating for awhile that we need to begin to look at our morals and ethics around work. Working 40 hours a week is not going to be a normal thing in the future. And this could be a good thing for society. We have the option of letting automation generate wealth for elites who can train to manage the infrastructure of the automation or we can have the society where we collectively work in the space that automation leaves behind.

    Our science fiction authors saw this in their musing ages ago, and I think we have the choice of becoming like Blade Runner or Star Trek.

    It is starting to happen. So what is the Blade Runner world, the elites own the corporations live very wealthy luxurious lives, the middle class struggles maintaining that structure and the poor live in the streets with few resources and no benefit of the technology but no work in that structure.

    What is the Star Trek world, the technology provides for all and society works on culture, knowledge, exploration.

    This is my biggest argument against bringing back manufacturing jobs and job protectionism is we need to have this larger argument of what are we going to do when we more population than work. This is not an immediate thing we are at the beginning of this transition. But the structures that we have in place now will get amplified as we progress. So as a progressive liberal my argument isn’t we need more manufacturing jobs, we need more education across all classes so that all citizens can partake in the next age. Also the idea of a 40 our week being a living job length needs to be abandoned. We need to ease the concentration of wealth so that people can live comfortably and we need to pursue the betterment of our culture and knowledge as a fundamental duty as a citizen.

    One small fear I have in the transition is the etsy/uberization of jobs, akin to the cottage industries around the industrial age. As the job market shrinks people will micro lease their time to make extra money. In the process they will find their jobs become 12 to 18 hour days with all the risk on them as individuals.

    I do think technology has the promise to both better and harm mankind, but we have to manage that better. Looking at medical technology our solution has been to make the technological advancements of medicine available at a price. This lets elites live longer, control their wealth longer. It is a small effect but in aggregate it consolidates power. The same will happen with other automation tools if we don’t as a society demand that the benefit is shared more.

    All of us in society contribute to the maintenance of society. As we automate the functions we will need to change our moral belief that working 40 hours a week is a sign of living in this society. We will have to develop a moral that values people for their existence, a moral that rewards people for contributions to society that extend beyond economics. And we need those discussion now because this is happening and it could be a good thing as the automations could free people to find their better selves instead of living to subside, but the mechanism for that in our culture do not exist yet.

    A nice report as part of a reference because the last sentence sums it up for me and the article focuses on why the imbalance in the economy is what makes automation dangerous not the automation itself.

    http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/robots-jobocalypsejobseconomyunemployment.html

    1. You are right in some ways. I am an automation engineer. The machines I design took a manual task requiring at least one hour of manual labor with many risks of error to a 30 second job with very low risk of error.
      Automation will free humanity. A minimum salary has already been established in a few nations, but it is the inevitability of living in a high tech society.
      The next milestone for modern society is to pursue whatever skills or tasks we choose while having enough resources to support ourselves.

      1. i wholeheartedly support a universal basic income. otherwise it will be the tech plutocrats who have all the money vs everyone else who will be poor.

  7. On the AI Story, i think that Microsoft is developing the AI to improve the Cortana function on new Microsoft products. One of the main downfalls of the software is the deeply unemotional responses you get from “her”.

  8. Ana not only is your opposition to automation backward, but your problem with people in countries other than yours answering the phone to you is deeply questionable. Learn about the concept of a resource based economy and realise our enslavement to labour isn’t something we should be protecting.

    1. Yep! That’s never made a lick of sense to me; how the fuck am I charged with resisting arrest, but no charges explaining why I was arrested in the first place? I was resisting because they had no reason to arrest me!

  10. I never get to watch live…and I just became a member so now I get to watch the whole show and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside when I get to see Cenk and Ana go “Buh-bye” Thanks for all you do guys! I am a true fan of what you do and what you stand for! Keep it up!

  11. Of course, I’m all for not out-sourcing jobs and the person answering the phone should be a citizen, etc. Here’s the problem with Anna’s anger towards “Rajeev” as Cenk said, I have many university friends that came here when they were teens and finished high school here many of them have not “lost” their accent. So in other words, a person like Anna wouldn’t know whether the individual on the other line is actually from India or China because you can’t see them. One of my friends told me about how racist some callers are, and I joked that the person was probably a Trump supporter. But then I saw the second hour and saw how aggressive Anna was about the Tay story and realized that it’s not just Trump supporters. Everyone thinks foreigners are stealing jobs and even people that understand how corporations exploit immigrants for labor are still angry at the wrong people. Cenk then called Anna, “such a progressive”, it seems there’s a fine line between progressive ideology and nativism. I obviously know Anna doesn’t mean what she said in the tone that I just described but someone watching on youtube that sees TYT for the first time would be put off for life. I know immigrants are not your target market, so it wouldn’t hurt TYT in the least, but it’s just something to think about (my two cents for anyone that cares).

  13. my husband, who is a computer science major, says that they most likely left Tay up as long as they did because they KNEW what would happen and they wanted to collect enough data so that they could make sure nothing like this would happen when implementing this as an actual customer service AI.

    Also, the look on his face when i showed him this story was so amazing i was crying and couldn’t stop laughing. Thank you for breaking my husband.

    I love you guys.

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