Smart Cities and Automated Labor.

Curbed Los Angeles - City Council votes to dedicate $27M to Vision Zero, its plan to end traffic deaths.  Vision Zero, ever hear of it? Nope, you probably have not. It is a multinational plan, not a Los Angeles plan, not a state plan and not a national plan. It's avowed purpose is to make streets safer; but, it's real intent is to make the streets friendly to self-driving vehicles and keep personal vehicles out of the major cities. They don't tell you that. Here is a couple of lines from the article.

"Buscaino said he wants to prepare LA for driverless cars with a “smart streets” strategy, which could employ sensors, kiosks, and other tech designed for automated vehicles.

(It should be noted that if the streets were truly smart, they would also be dramatically reduced in size, as autonomous vehicles will not need as much on-street parking and the ability to share them would mean far fewer cars on the road.)" Yep, your tax money at work to stop you from using the roads."

Smart Cities Dive - Pump the brakes: Cities aim to eliminate traffic fatalities with Vision Zero goals. Some general information about which cities are instituting Vision Zero.

Los Angeles Daily News - Botts’ Dots, after a half-century, will disappear from freeways, highways. You know the little bumps that are used to separate lanes and remind you that you are crossing into another lane, they are going to get rid of them and thereby make it safer for self-driving cars and more dangerous for human controlled cars. Do you see the pattern to all of this yet?

FOX - Stan the robotic parking valet gets to work at Paris airport.

Yahoo - AFP - First robotic cop joins Dubai police.  Robotic cops do what they are told. Do you think repressive governments will use them to control people? Just think how many people Stalin, Hitler and Mau could have killed with no regrets and no push back from the police or soldiers.

MSN - Marketwatch - When Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg sound the same dire warning about jobs, it’s time to listen.  They ask a simple question, how will people find a sense of purpose when their labor is no longer needed. As the article points out, the issue of a laborless future is being looked at today by CEOs. For me the problem is that the majority people can't see it coming or be involved in the discussion until they do.

Reuters - Waymo working on self-driving trucks.  Waymo is part of Google.

The Kansas City Star - About half of all U.S. retail jobs could vanish due to computerization, analysis finds. The real issue of the future will not be a minimum wage, it will be any wage.

Daily Mail - Artificial intelligence will outperform humans in all tasks in just 45 years and could take over EVERY job in the next century, experts claim.  This is what is driving all of the changes you are seeing and you don't know it.

Geek.com - Elon Musk: Automation Will Force Universal Basic Income. Must is one of the good guys; but, "conservatives" hate his idea. The money won't come from your taxes because you won't have a job.

The big question remains. What do we do as a society when we no longer need people's labor. It is a moral question and a structural one and if you don't think about it, you will not have a say in it.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/workplace/article153864894.html#storylink=cpy