Dem 2020 Hopeful Warns Driverless Trucks Will Lead to ‘Outbreak Of Violence’
The implementation of driverless trucks will lead to suicides and “an outbreak of violence,” according to Democratic presidential long shot Andrew Yang.
Yang said he thinks it’s inevitable that some of America’s 3.5 million truck drivers will react violently to being replaced by driverless trucks.
“There’s going to be a lot of passion, a lot of resistance to this. Anyone who thinks truck drivers are just going to shrug and say ‘all right I had a good run, I’ll just go home and figure it out’ — that’s not going to be their response,” Yang said Tuesday in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan.
“It’s going to be much more likely that they say ‘you need to make these trucks illegal,’ or they’re just gonna park their trucks across the highway, get their guns out, because a lot of these guys are ex-military, and just be like ‘hey, I’m not going to move my truck until I get my job back,’ and there are going to be a lot of truckers in the same situation,” said Yang.
Yang, 43, is a venture capitalist who’s on the Democrat Party’s leftist fringe, advocating a universal basic income, for instance of $1,000 a month in cash payments to Americans between 18 and 64, according to CNBC.
Here he is in an appearance last week on Fox Business Channel’s “Varney & Co.”
Some confuse Universal Basic Income with socialism. Socialism is when you nationalize the means of production. UBI is capitalism where income does not start at zero. Rather than spend tax income on bureaucracy it is given directly to people. pic.twitter.com/Hw1fNI4hNj
— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYangVFA) February 14, 2019
And on his website, he says that $1,0000 monthly payment — what he calls the “freedom dividend” — is just the beginning.
“I’m not a career politician—I’m an entrepreneur who understands the economy. It’s clear to me, and to many of the nation’s best job creators, that we need to make an unprecedented change, and we need to make it now,” his website states.
“But the establishment isn’t willing to take the necessary bold steps.
“As president, my first priority will be to implement Universal Basic Income for every American adult between the ages of 18 and 64: $1,000 a month, no strings attached, paid for by a new tax on the companies benefiting most from automation. UBI is just the beginning.
“A crisis is underway—we have to work together to stop it, or risk losing the heart of our country. The stakes have never been higher. “
In the Rogan interview, Yang said he expects automated trucks to start taking shifts away from human drivers within six to 10 years.
He cited his dark predictions as reason to support universal basic income, which is a major plank of his 2020 campaign.
“According to the estimates, this is what’s called the fourth industrial revolution and we’re going to displace jobs at three to four times the rate of industrial revolution and that industrial revolution included mass riots, so thinking that this one will not strikes me as really, really optimistic, and perhaps unrealistic,” Yang said.
The gradual takeover of automated trucks will mean a “massive depletion of truck driving opportunities,” Yang added.
“And then, in my mind, a lot of suicides, a lot of self destruction — and I don’t say that lightly, I say that based upon the fact that that’s what happened to manufacturing workers, where if you unpack what happened to the manufacturing workers of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, suicide rates spiked, to where our life expectancy as a country has declined for the last three years because of suicides and drug overdoses.
“It’s the first time that’s happened since the great flu pandemic of 1918, like we are actually coming apart as a country by the numbers.
“So what happened to the manufacturing workers will happen to the truckers but at an even more dramatic scale,” he continued.
“So you’ll see truckers going home and drinking themselves to death, or doing drugs and overdosing, or killing themselves, and then eventually there will be an outbreak of violence because some truckers will say instead of killing myself how about I bust up a robot truck?” (RELATED: More Than 70,000 Americans Died Of Drug Overdoses In 2017. That’s A New Record)
Yang knows he’s a long shot contender for the presidency. According to CNBC, he gave himself only a 200-to-1 chance of winning the White House.
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