Presidential elections are decided by many things: media exposure, financial backing, personal chemistry, timing and luck. Policy positions often are just a way of signaling where a candidate stands on the political spectrum. But 2020 is shaping up to be different, the most ideas-driven election in recent American history. On the Democratic side, a robust debate about inequality has given rise to ambitious proposals to redress the imbalance in Americans’ economic situations.
Artificial general intelligence — a program that could replicate consciousness — may be far off, but the technology in its current form may already be outpacing the legal and ethical frameworks for its safe and responsible deployment. Important debates about how AI automation will affect data privacy, civil rights and national security have crept out of the confines of academia onto the national political stage.
On the campaign trail, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang frequently talks about the 3.5 million truckers in the U.S. who he says stand to lose their jobs in the next five to seven years due to self-driving trucks. According to the second annual AI Index report, subsets of AI called “computer vision” and “object segmentation” that are used in self-driving vehicles have seen dramatic gains in the last three years in precision and speed, so Yang’s prediction may not be far off.
The first 2020 presidential candidates to make AI an explicit part of their platforms were former Rep. John Delaney and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who in separate interviews with Yahoo News agreed that Washington generally lacks the knowledge about developments in technology to properly legislate. His one outside-the-box idea is that society should make up for job losses by converting unpaid family care to paid work. The idea is an extension of a theory among academics, such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, who say that unpaid work done by family caregivers should be considered in a country’s GDP. Delaney goes even further by proposing that people who are caring for aging parents or children, for example, should be compensated.
Yang’s plan, which he calls “the Freedom Dividend,” calls for giving every American over the age of 18 $1,000 a month with no strings attached — meaning no work requirements or means testing. To pay for the plan, which could cost upwards of $3.8 trillion, Yang would impose a value-added tax of 10 percent, as well as a carbon-emissions tax that would also encourage energy efficiency.