‘Brexit’ Revolt Casts a Shadow Over Hillary Clinton’s Cautious Path

‘Brexit’ Revolt Casts a Shadow Over Hillary Clinton’s Cautious Path

By PATRICK HEALY JUNE 25, 2016

For Hillary Clinton, Britain’s emotionally charged uprising against the European Union is the sort of populist victory over establishment politics that she fears in the coming presidential election.

Mrs. Clinton shares more with the defeated “Remain” campaign than just their common slogan, “Stronger Together.” Her fundamental argument, much akin to Prime Minister David Cameron’s against British withdrawal from the European Union, is that Americans should value stability and incremental change over the risks entailed in radical change and the possibility of chaos if Donald J. Trump wins the presidency.

She offers reasonableness instead of resentment, urging voters to see the big picture and promising to manage economic and immigration upheaval, just as Mr. Cameron did. She, too, is a pragmatic internationalist battling against nationalist anger, cautioning that the turmoil after the so­-called Brexit vote underscores a need for “calm, steady, experienced leadership in the White House.”

But prudence is cold comfort to people fed up with more-­of-­the-­same. According to their friends and advisers, Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton have worried for months that she was out of sync with the mood of the electorate, and that her politically safe messages — like “I’m a progressive who gets results” — were far less compelling to frustrated voters than the “political revolution” of Senator Bernie Sanders or Mr. Trump’s grievance-­driven promise to “Make America Great Again.”

 Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump won a combined 25 million votes during the primary season, compared with 16 million for Mrs. Clinton. And while many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters are expected to support her in November, she has not recalibrated her message to try to tap into the anger that he and Mr. Trump channeled. Nor does Mrs. Clinton have any plans, advisers say, to take cues from the Brexit campaign and start soft­pedaling her support for globalized markets, or denouncing porous borders, illegal immigrants and the lack of job protections in free­trade agreements. Much distinguishes the presidential contest from the British fight, of course, including a head-­to­-head matchup between well­-known candidates, a sharply different economic context, and a long and proud history of immigration.

Yet in addition to worrying that she is out of step, Mrs. Clinton is somewhat hemmed in by her record: She supported her husband’s North American Free Trade Agreement, which caused significant economic pain in the industrial Midwest after it went into effect in 1994. And her nuanced views about free trade are a harder sell to many voters than Mr. Trump’s fire­-breathing vows to trash bad trade deals and use tariffs as economic weapons of national defense.

While Mrs. Clinton is counting on Mr. Trump’s history of racist and sexist remarks to doom his candidacy, Thursday’s Brexit referendum was an unnerving reminder that voter anger is deeper and broader than many elite politicians and veteran pollsters realize.

In swing states like Ohio, many Democrats and Republicans yearn for an economic comeback and are not confident that Mrs. Clinton understands their frustrations or has the ideas and wherewithal to deliver the sort of change that could satisfy them.

“Brexit is clearly a cautionary tale for the Clinton campaign not to get too complacent with a potential victory,” said David B. Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Akron. “Trump, Sanders and those in Great Britain who ran the Leave campaign are tapping into an anger and anxiety that is clearly festering. Working­-class folks in the United States are similar to working­-class folks in Europe. And a lot of those working­-class people feel as if the international economic system is not working for them and strangling the middle class.”

Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist, said the British vote was the clearest sign yet that “the intensity against the status quo is far more real than many are still willing to acknowledge.” “If the Trump victory in the primary wasn’t enough of one, the Brexit vote serves as a major wake­up call indicating just how frustrated average voters are with those in power,” Mr. DuHaime said.

Several Democrats cautioned against drawing too many lessons from the Brexit vote, saying mass immigration and economic malaise were bigger problems in Britain and the European Union than in the United States. They also said many British voters were revolting against a bureaucracy in Brussels that they regarded as bloated, overpaid and prone to interfering in the affairs of sovereign countries.

Yet the Democrats acknowledged that the worldview held by Mrs. Clinton and many of the party’s elites was not as attractive to many voters as it once was. “Liberal internationalism seems to have been dying for a while,” said Mark S. Mellman, a Democratic pollster who is not involved with the Clinton campaign. “But while that may be the animating philosophy of foreign policy intellectuals the world over, it is not the animating philosophy of America, nor of our domestic politics.”

For Sean Harrington, a husband and father of three who owns the Town Pump Tavern in downtown Detroit, the support for free-­trade deals and international markets cannot die fast enough. Taking a break from his bookkeeping duties on Friday, he said President Clinton’s economic policies were still “ruining the economy” by giving benefits to large corporations that move jobs overseas, while in states like Michigan, “the average work force loses.” “If my fellow Americans were doing better, there would be more money around and traded in and out of my pockets,” said Mr. Harrington, a registered independent who is undecided between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump.

On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton regularly pledges to “make sure our economy works for everyone, not just those at the top,” as she put it on Wednesday in Raleigh, N.C., where she also promised to reject “bad trade deals and unfair trade practices.” She also argued in favor of Britain’s remaining in the European Union.

But she was not surprised that the “Leave” campaign won, her advisers said Friday, because she understands the extent of voter anger. Her advisers said they were confident the referendum in Britain did not mirror the presidential election in the United States. “These are two different countries, with very different circumstances and demographics, facing different choices,” said Jennifer Palmieri, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director. “We believe American voters are looking for concrete solutions to address their economic frustrations and unlikely to find the turmoil, economic uncertainty and roiling of markets caused by the Brexit vote particularly appealing.”

Frank Luntz, a Republican expert on political messaging, said Mr. Cameron and the “Remain” camp had failed to “personalize, individualize or humanize their campaign.” The “Stronger Together” slogan shared by the “Remain” campaign and Mrs. Clinton feels bloodless and overly intellectual compared with the more emotional, country­-first appeals of Mr. Trump and the “Leave” movement, he said. “The problem with the concept of ‘together’ is that it promotes groupthink rather than individual pursuits,” Mr. Luntz said. “We are in an age of individual action, not collective responsibility.”

Mrs. Clinton’s arguments against Mr. Trump often require a great deal of explanation to voters, which can sometimes turn them off. While Mr. Trump thrills his audiences with big promises — without saying much about how he would fulfill them — Mrs. Clinton can get caught in the gears of policy. One recent exception was a foreign policy speech in early June, when she hit a rhythm and ripped into Mr. Trump with memorable lines like “He says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Russia.” But when Mrs. Clinton takes pains to explain why Mr. Trump’s promises and policies do not add up, or are too risky, she runs a risk of her own: that she will sound as though she is instructing or talking down to her audience.

Not many voters want a lecturer as president. “A slogan and a message must be aspirational — either give people hope things will get better or that the bad stuff will stop — both,” said Ruth Sherman, a political communications analyst who is not affiliated with any campaign. Referring to one of Mrs. Clinton’s taglines, she said: “Hillary’s ‘I’m with her’ — I remember thinking when I first saw it, ‘Really?’ It’s not my job to be with her. She should be with me.”

If Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is resonant — “by far the best slogan of all the candidates,” Ms. Sherman said — Mrs. Clinton is counting on voters to appreciate policy ideas that are more strategic than feel­-good. She argued in Raleigh, for instance, that markets like the European Union “work best when all the stakeholders share in the benefits.” While that statement was hardly in the aspirational vein that Ms. Sherman recommends, it set a clear goal and was less divisive than Mr. Trump’s comments on the British referendum.

The American electorate has tilted this year toward presidential candidates who make them feel as much as think, but Mrs. Clinton and her allies hope that voters will reflect on the vote in Britain and opt for the steadiness and predictability that she promises. “I don’t think the average American who has a retirement account right now is thrilled about Donald Trump’s support of Brexit,” said Thomas R. Nides, who was a deputy secretary of state under Mrs. Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton understands we always need to change — but change that doesn’t cause unintended consequences for the average American.” 

Brexit and Europe’s Angry Old Men

Brexit and Europe’s Angry Old Men

Jochen Bittner JUNE 24, 2016 Hamburg, Germany —

I WAS born in 1973, the year Britain entered the European Economic Community. And like Britain, I have always been skeptical about the quasi­religious, ever­closer­union ideology that gripped so many proponents of the European Union, especially the anxious old men of my parents’ generation, who swore that the only alternative to unification was a relapse into nationalism.

And now this. Just as Europeans of my generation were being relieved of those anxious old men, another type stepped onstage: the angry old men.

These politicians — men and women, to be sure — are young enough not to have experienced world war, but they are old enough to idealize the pre­1989 era and a simpler, pre­globalization world. At the same time, they are obviously too sclerotic to imagine how democratic institutions can adjust to the new realities. With their aggressive posturing, these Nigel Farages, Marine Le Pens, Geert Wilderses and Donald J. Trumps are driving the debate — and possibly driving the West off a cliff. “It’s a victory for ordinary, decent people who have taken on the establishment,” declared Nigel Farage, the head of the U.K. Independence Party.

Rubbish. It was a victory for people who have neither the guts nor the imagination to take on the downsides of globalization. Yes, globalization and Europeanization have taken their tolls, both on traditional forms of democracy and on traditional job security. But instead of tackling these problems, the Farages of the world have started the next ideological war. There was a time when I thought the pro­European ideologues were the ones who were out of touch.

I remember, not too long ago, watching one of them in full flight. It was Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, giving a speech at a German university. He started by asking the students in the lecture hall to imagine how many of them would actually be sitting there if this were the year 1945. About half of you would be dead, Mr. Schulz said, as his index finger drew a line across our heads, and many others would be crippled and wounded. Wow, I thought, what a splendid opening for a debate on the shortcomings of the European Union.

Even though Europeans of my age do believe in Europe, the righteous theatrics of the integrationists were hard to endure. But now our future is in danger of being taken away by the other extreme, by the maniacs of disintegration.

A YouGov poll conducted in the run­up to the British referendum showed that the vote for Brexit was very much one of the old against the young. The older the voter, the more he or she was inclined to leave. Some 64 percent of the age group from 18 to 24 said they would vote for Remain; just 35 percent of those between 50 and 64 wanted to stay.

We — the young, optimistic millions across Europe — cannot lose the West to Mr. Farage and his ilk, to demagogues who have actually much more in common with the scapegoating culture of the Arab world they so despise than with the enlightened, rational tradition of Europe.

 We can still repair the damage done to democracy in our rush to move beyond national borders by admitting to the problems. If, for instance, European internal migrants really have lowered the wages in Britain, this is a serious problem. But it can be dealt with through, say, stricter control of the labor market — not abandonment of the entire framework for European cooperation. Instead, migrants and refugees have become the vessel for the charge that the mighty at the top have unleashed a form of uncontrolled globalization whose effects will hit the people at the bottom hardest.

Predictably, the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcome­mat policy to refugees, and her insistence that Europe follow her lead, will be blamed for much of the momentum behind the Leave vote. And that’s fair. As principally right as her message was, the chancellor did little to correct the impression that Europe was suddenly welcoming everyone, and that elites like her didn’t understand the consequences of their actions.

Yet it is dangerously foolish to believe that, with or without Ms. Merkel’s policies, Europe can somehow shut its doors and ignore the pressing weight of the developing world on its borders — or that European countries are better positioned to respond individually, rather than as a unified whole. The British vote feels momentous, but we will most likely look back at it as merely the first in a series of fights for the soul of Europe.

The outpouring of anger and anti­establishment aggression in Europe has only begun. The next countries where the political bulldozers see their chances to act out their long-kept lust for demolition are the Netherlands and France. We can no longer think of reconciliation between the opposing views of destruction and progress. The angry old men will not be mollified, their xenophobia cannot be controlled or channeled into constructive cooperation. We, the young, the future of Europe, must push back. Too much time has been lost already.

Should Your Driverless Car Hit a Pedestrian to Save Your Life?

Should Your Driverless Car Hit a Pedestrian to Save Your Life?

By JOHN MARKOFF JUNE 23, 2016

People say that one day, perhaps in the not­-so-­distant future, they’d like to be passengers in self­driving cars that are mindful machines doing their best for the common good. Merge politely. Watch for pedestrians in the crosswalk. Keep a safe space.

A new research study, however, indicates that what people really want to ride in is an autonomous vehicle that puts its passengers first. If its machine brain has to choose between slamming into a wall or running someone over, well, sorry, pedestrian.

In this week’s Science magazine, a group of computer scientists and psychologists explain how they conducted six online surveys of United States residents last year between June and November that asked people how they believed autonomous vehicles should behave.

The researchers found that respondents generally thought self­-driving cars should be programmed to make decisions for the greatest good. Sort of. Through a series of quizzes that present unpalatable options that amount to saving or sacrificing yourself — and the lives of fellow passengers who may be family members — to spare others, the researchers, not surprisingly, found that people would rather stay alive.

This particular dilemma of robotic morality has long been chewed on in science fiction books and movies. But in recent years it has become a serious question for researchers working on autonomous vehicles who must, in essence, program moral decisions into a machine.

As autonomous vehicles edge closer to reality, it has also become a philosophical question with business implications. Should manufacturers create vehicles with various degrees of morality programmed into them, depending on what a consumer wants? Should the government mandate that all self­-driving cars share the same value of protecting the greatest good, even if that’s not so good for a car’s passengers? And what exactly is the greatest good?

“Is it acceptable for an A.V. (autonomous vehicle) to avoid a motorcycle by swerving into a wall, considering that the probability of survival is greater for the passenger of the A.V., than for the rider of the motorcycle? Should A.V.s take the ages of the passengers and pedestrians into account?” wrote Jean­François Bonnefon, of the Toulouse School of Economics in France; Azim Shariff, of the University of Oregon; and Iyad Rahwan, of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At the heart of this discussion is the “trolley problem.” First introduced in 1967 by Philippa Foot, a British philosopher, the trolley problem is a simple if unpleasant ethical thought puzzle. Imagine a runaway trolley is barreling toward five workmen on the tracks. Their lives can be saved by a lever that would switch the trolley to another line. But there is one worker on those tracks as well. What is the correct thing to do? The research published in Science tries to quantify that philosophical quandary.

“One missing component has been the empirical component: What do people actually want?” said Dr. Rahwan, who is a computational social scientist. Each survey presented different situations, like varying the number of pedestrian lives that could be saved or adding a family member to the problem. In one survey they discovered that participants were generally reluctant to accept government regulation of artificial intelligence algorithms, even if that would be one way to solve or at least settle on an answer to this trolley problem. The number of respondents on the six surveys varied from 182 to 451.

The new research could take autonomous vehicle manufacturers down a philosophical and legal rabbit hole. And since the autonomous vehicle concept is so new, it could take years to find answers. For example, the authors write, “If a manufacturer offers different versions of its moral algorithm, and a buyer knowingly chose one of them, is the buyer to blame for the harmful consequences of the algorithm’s decisions?” The United States military is also trying to come to terms with the fact that advanced technology is on the cusp of making it possible for machines like armed drones to make killing decisions.

In 2012, the Pentagon released a directive that tried to draw a line between semiautonomous and completely autonomous weapons. They are not outlawed, but they must be designed to allow “appropriate levels” of human judgment over their use. In a companion article in Science magazine, the Harvard psychologist Joshua D. Greene suggested that the thorniest challenges in machine decision­-making may be “more philosophical than technical. Before we can put our values into machines, we have to figure out how to make our values clear and consistent.”

Some researchers argue that teaching machines ethics may not be the right approach. “If you assume that the purpose of A.I. is to replace people, then you will need to teach the car ethics,” said Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University. “It should rather be a partnership between the human and the tool, and the person should be the one who provides ethical guidance.”

全民基本所得豈是無理取鬧

全民基本所得豈是無理取鬧

2016­06­19

聯合報 陳冲（東吳大學法商講座教授）

一如原先預期，瑞士公投是否提供公民每月二千五百瑞郎（約台幣八萬元）的全民基本所得（ＵＢＩ），因七成八票數的反對並未通過。這個新聞有兩層意義：前者為全世界最酷愛公投的瑞士，又再出手，也又再表現超乎想像的理性。後者則為全民基本所得的觀念，乍聽之下，所有公民，不論有無工作，國家每月發給台幣八萬？會不會造成全民怠於工作、遊手好閒？有媒體甚至認係無理取鬧，其實這問題並不似表面單純。

首先是貧窮陷阱（poverty trap）問題。在國際社會中，國家有所謂「富者愈富，

貧者愈貧」現象，尤其許多低度開發國家，因無力投資於基本建設，改善經濟，故陷入「貧窮陷阱」，不得翻身。而人類社會中，民眾也有貧者愈貧的貧窮陷阱，原因不外是貧窮家庭生存已不易，根本無餘力追求良好教育，或進行任何脫貧的努力。

長期以來，為解決特定階層可能的「貧窮陷阱」，特別是經濟快速成長時，整體ＧＤＰ成長與基層勞工收入間，所出現的嚴重缺口，經濟學家開始思考各種不同方式。尤其在近代，包括台灣在內，許多國家都存有一種抱怨，即經濟成長卻薪資停滯，換言之，經濟成長果實，眾人無法雨露均霑，雖然這是勞力密集產業轉向資本密集或技術密集的自然結果，但各界仍期待對國家的成長，能分派「國家紅利」。

四十四年前美國總統大選，當時民主黨候選人麥高文，在政見中提出「人口津

貼」，每人發給一千元美金，不過這不是隨興喊出的口號，背後操刀人是重量級經濟學家托賓（James Tobin）。麥高文雖然慘敗，但所提出消減貧窮動力仍在，一九七五年美國國會通過著名的ＥＩＴＣ（earned income tax credit, 勤勞所得租稅減免）法律，不少國家仿效，馬英九二○○八年競選政見也曾納入，俗稱「負所得稅」，也就是對工作所得不高的就業家庭，予以補助。

這個ＥＩＴＣ策劃者，更非等閒之輩，是被譽為「廿世紀下半世紀最偉大經濟學

家」也是人口津貼原創者傅利曼（Milton Friedman）。但不論是人口津貼（demogrant）或ＥＩＴＣ，其實都與全民基本所得目的相同，希望經濟成長的

果實，全民均能共享，也是一種財富重分配的努力。其中ＥＩＴＣ因支出較少又能同時鼓勵就業，被認為較可行，但有一好沒兩好，ＥＩＴＣ的受補助者由於薪資成長至某一水準，必須由此機制「畢業」，因此影響基層勞工自我提升或追求較佳工作的意願，尤其在此「顛覆性科技」快速成長年代，許多底層或不需複雜技能的工作漸被機器人取代，民眾欲覓工作無門，削減適用ＥＩＴＣ的機會，因此托賓式全民基本所得又再崛起。

綜上說明，全民基本所得有長遠的發展歷史（甚至三百年前已有類似想法），不是直覺反應所顯示的「無理取鬧」，其原意在對抗貧窮，而不是鼓勵好吃懶做，這也是整體經濟成長後，應思考有無必要發給國家紅利（national dividend）？這也類似一般公司在薪水外另給紅利的道理。

支持全民基本所得的言論認為，這種措施不僅是薪資偏低的基層勞工受惠，許多在家庭工作卻無收入者（例如家庭主婦）、許多默默奉獻社會卻無薪水者（例如志工），就這些對社會付出有價值的勞力卻未獲得財務的報償，社會仍應提供「購買力」，以示公平。當然全民基本所得倡議者的理由不止於此，民眾有基本所得後，因為後有退路，就會勇於創業、勇於追求理想生活方式、自由學習，有助於經濟發展及生活品質，只是應如何訂出適當金額，既能有重分配的脫貧效果，也不會誤導一般民眾怠於工作，才是重點。

在瑞士公投新聞世人看熱鬧之餘，為避免貧富差距擴大，促進社會和諧，台灣應再思考本身的方向。有人主張再提高基本工資，但這種政客邀宴、企業埋單的方式，終將影響就業機會（尤其是機器人／自助機器當紅時代），而且基本工資決策所依據的統計資料，也應該提升其精確度。人人有獎的全民基本所得，雖非無據，但從媒體對瑞士公投評價可知，尚不易取得共識。看來台灣可能比較適合採用ＥＩＴＣ，成本相對較低，又較能鼓勵就業，而對收入較低的的受薪家庭言，也有掙脫貧窮陷阱的機會。

（作者為東吳大學法商講座教授）

貧富不均的怒火已到達臨界點

貧富不均的怒火已到達臨界點

作者：朱雲漢 2016-04-26 天下雜誌596期

貧富懸殊的嚴重扭曲，超越了十九世紀的紀錄，「一比九九」的憤怒，已到達臨界點，隨時將掀起更大規模、更激烈的社會衝突。

最近幾年，樂施會都在世界經濟論壇（WEF）年會前夕，發布有關貧富差距問題的研究報告──提醒雲集於瑞士達沃斯參與會議的各國財經及政界領袖，要採取積極政策，來扭轉全球貧富懸殊日益惡化的趨勢。

像是今年一月，樂施會以「一％人的經濟」為題的報告指出，在二○一五年全世界最富裕一％人口的財富，已超過其餘九九％人口的財富。貧富懸殊的嚴重扭曲，已經超過十九世紀的紀錄。

報告也指出，五年前，世界上最富有的三八八名超級富翁的資產，相當於世界較貧窮的一半人口所擁有的財富。到了今日，財富差距更見嚴峻。

自二○一○年以來，全球最富有的六十二人的資產，增加超過五千億美元，總財富達一．八兆美元，相當於世界最貧困的三十六億人之財富總和。

從柴契爾與雷根推行新自由主義經濟政策以來，資本家在主導各國公共政策與全球經濟遊戲規則上，取得前所未有的支配地位，所有國家都被迫採行對資本友善的政策。

短短三十年裡，新自由主義革命讓西方國家廣大勞工與中產階級，陸續喪失了他們過去靠流血抗爭才爭取到的各項社會與經濟權利，也侵蝕了戰後四十年來，西方國家在改善所得分配上取得的成果。極端貧富差距的急速惡化，也抵銷了過去三十年來開發中國家在消滅貧窮方面所取得的成果。

當前大多數西方社會，長年累積引爆社會全面危機的能量，已達臨界點。

面對日益惡化的經濟與社會情勢，西方國家的政府領袖早已束手無策──既無法扭轉稅基流失與財政資源枯竭的頹勢，也無力擺脫中產階級萎縮，以及年輕世代工作機會消失的困境；各種非常措施，如量化寬鬆與負利率等，這些飲鴆止渴的手段也都用到了盡頭。

一百多年前，西方國家也因資本主義的強取豪奪，引爆一系列動盪血腥的歷史事件，從一次大戰、俄國共產革命、經濟大恐慌、法西斯主義興起到二戰，人類經歷長達三十多年全球秩序動盪。

三月底開始，法國工人與大學生發起「夜之起義」的抗議，正從巴黎蔓延到歐洲各大城市。雖然這次行動也可能如「佔領華爾街」，一時間難成氣候，但這些挑戰資本主義不公不義的火苗，不會真正熄滅，更大規模與更激烈的社會矛盾衝突，隨時可能形成燎原之勢。

Where Computers Defeat Humans, and Where They Can’t

Where Computers Defeat Humans, and Where They Can’t

By ANDREW McAFEE and ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON MARCH 16, 2016

ALPHAGO, the artificial intelligence system built by the Google subsidiary DeepMind, has just defeated the human champion, Lee Se­dol, four games to one in the tournament of the strategy game of Go.

Why does this matter? After all, computers surpassed humans in chess in 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. So why is AlphaGo’s victory significant?

Like chess, Go is a hugely complex strategy game in which chance and luck play no role. Two players take turns placing white or black stones on a 19­by­19 grid; when stones are surrounded on all four sides by those of the other color they are removed from the board, and the player with more surrounded territory and captured stone at the game’s end wins.

Unlike the case with chess, however, no human can explain how to play Go at the highest levels. The top players, it turns out, can’t fully access their own knowledge about how they’re able to perform so well.

This self-ignorance is common to many human abilities, from driving a car in traffic to recognizing a face. This strange state of affairs was beautifully summarized by the philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi, who said, “We know more than we can tell.”

It’s a phenomenon that has come to be known as “Polanyi’s Paradox.” Polanyi’s Paradox hasn’t prevented us from using computers to accomplish complicated tasks, like processing payrolls, optimizing flight schedules, routing telephone calls and calculating taxes.

But as anyone who’s written a traditional computer program can tell you, automating these activities has required painstaking precision to explain exactly what the computer is supposed to do. This approach to programming computers is severely limited; it can’t be used in the many domains, like Go, where we know more than we can tell, or other tasks like recognizing common objects in photos, translating between human languages and diagnosing diseases — all tasks where the rules-­based approach to programming has failed badly over the years.

Deep Blue achieved its superhuman performance almost by sheer computing power: It sifted through millions of possible chess moves to determine the optimal move. The problem is that there are many more possible Go games than there are atoms in the universe, so even the fastest computers can’t simulate a meaningful fraction of them. To make matters worse, it’s usually far from clear which possible moves to even start exploring. What changed?

The AlphaGo victories vividly illustrate the power of a new approach in which instead of trying to program smart strategies into a computer, we instead build systems that can learn winning strategies almost entirely on their own, by seeing examples of successes and failures. Since these systems don’t rely on human knowledge about the task at hand, they’re not limited by the fact that we know more than we can tell.

AlphaGo does use simulations and traditional search algorithms to help it decide on some moves, but its real breakthrough is its ability to overcome Polanyi’s Paradox. It did this by figuring out winning strategies for itself, both by example and from experience. The examples came from huge libraries of Go matches between top players amassed over the game’s 2,500­year history. To understand the strategies that led to victory in these games, the system made use of an approach known as deep learning, which has demonstrated remarkable abilities to tease out patterns and understand what’s important in large pools of information.

Learning in our brains is a process of forming and strengthening connections among neurons. Deep learning systems take an analogous approach, so much so that they used to be called “neural nets.” They set up billions of nodes and connections in software, use “training sets” of examples to strengthen connections among stimuli (a Go game in process) and responses (the next move), then expose the system to a new stimulus and see what its response is.

AlphaGo also played millions of games against itself, using another technique called reinforcement learning to remember the moves and strategies that worked well. Deep learning and reinforcement learning have both been around for a while, but until recently it was not at all clear how powerful they were, and how far they could be extended. In fact, it’s still not, but applications are improving at a gallop, with no end in sight.

And the applications are broad, including speech recognition, credit card fraud detection, and radiology and pathology. Machines can now recognize faces and drive cars, two of the examples that Polanyi himself noted as areas where we know more than we can tell. We still have a long way to go, but the implications are profound.

As when James Watt introduced his steam engine 240 years ago, technology-fueled changes will ripple throughout our economy in the years ahead, but there is no guarantee that everyone will benefit equally. Understanding and addressing the societal challenges brought on by rapid technological progress remain tasks that no machine can do for us.

Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at M.I.T., where Erik Brynjolfsson is a professor of management. They are the co­founders of the M.I.T. Initiative on the Digital Economy and the authors of “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.” Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. A version of this op­ed appears in print on March 16, 2016, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: A Computer Wins by Learning Like Humans.

A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck

A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck

Farhad Manjoo STATE OF THE ART MARCH 2, 2016

Let’s say computers come for most of our jobs. This may not seem likely at the moment; computer scientists and economists offer wildly varying ideas for how deeply automation will affect future employment. But for the sake of argument, imagine that within two or three decades we’ll have morphed into the Robotic States of America.

In Robot America, most manual laborers will have been replaced by herculean bots. Truck drivers, cabbies, delivery workers and airline pilots will have been superseded by vehicles that do it all. Doctors, lawyers, business executives and even technology columnists for The New York Times will have seen their ranks thinned by charming, attractive, all-knowing algorithms.

How will society function after humanity has been made redundant? Technologists and economists have been grappling with this fear for decades, but in the last few years, one idea has gained widespread interest — including from some of the very technologists who are now building the bot­-ruled future. Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck?

Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans. U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that. While U.B.I. has been associated with left-­leaning academics, feminists and other progressive activists, it has lately been adopted by a wider range of thinkers, including some libertarians and conservatives. It has also gained support among a cadre of venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley, the people most familiar with the potential for technology to alter modern work.

Rather than a job­-killing catastrophe, tech supporters of U.B.I. consider machine intelligence to be something like a natural bounty for society: The country has struck oil, and now it can hand out checks to each of its citizens. These supporters argue machine intelligence will produce so much economic surplus that we could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from both labor and suffering. The most idealistic thinkers see the plan as a way to foster the sort of quasi-­utopian future we’ve only encountered in science fiction universes like that of “Star Trek.”

As computers perform more of our work, we’d all be free to become artists, scholars, entrepreneurs or otherwise engage our passions in a society no longer centered on the drudgery of daily labor.

“We’re talking about divorcing your basic needs from the need to work,” said Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, a proponent who is working on a book about U.B.I. “For a couple hundred years, we’ve constructed our entire world around the need to work. Now we’re talking about more than just a tweak to the economy — it’s as foundational a departure as when we went from an agrarian society to an industrial one.”

Sam Altman, president of the tech incubator Y Combinator, recently proposed to fund research into U.B.I. The firm has received thousands of applications for research funding, Mr. Altman said; it plans to select winning recipients within a few weeks, and ultimately Y Combinator plans to spend “tens of millions” of dollars on research to answer some of the most basic questions about life under U.B.I. Mr. Altman said these questions range from the most practical — how much U.B.I. would cost the country, and whether we could afford it — to deeper issues concerning people’s motivation and purpose in what you might call a “post-work” age.

When you give everyone free money, what do people do with their time? Do they goof off, or do they try to pursue more meaningful pursuits? Do they become more entrepreneurial? How would U.B.I. affect economic inequality? How would it alter people’s psychology and mood? Do we, as a species, need to be employed to feel fulfilled, or is that merely a legacy of postindustrial capitalism?

There is an urgency to the techies’ interest in U.B.I. They argue that machine intelligence reached an inflection point in the last couple of years, and that technological progress now looks destined to change how most of the world works. “People have been predicting that jobs would go away for a long time, and usually what happens is they just change,” Mr. Altman said.

But even so, “during those periods of change, things can be quite disruptive,” and at the very least, U.B.I. may be able to smooth out the transition period. We may already be seeing the disruptions. Though the macroeconomic statistics suggest the United States has recovered from the last recession — job growth in 2015 reached levels not seen since the 1990s — surveys show that many Americans feel vulnerable and anxious about their jobs and finances. Wage growth is sluggish, job security is nonexistent, inequality looks inexorable, and the ideas that once seemed like a sure path to a better future (like taking on debt for college) are in doubt.

Even where technology has created more jobs, like the so­-called gig economy work created by services like Uber, it has only added to our collective uncertainty about the future of work. “All of a sudden people are looking at these trends and realizing these questions about the future of work are more real and immediate than they guessed,” said Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg Beta, the venture capital firm funded by Bloomberg L.P.

A cynic might see the interest of venture capitalists in U.B.I. as a way for them to atone for their complicity in the tech that might lead to permanent changes in the global economy. After all, here are rich people who both actively fund and benefit from creating highly profitable companies that employ very few people. It doesn’t help that you have some investors who’ve been terrifically tin­-eared about the perils of globalization and the modern economy (see musings from Paul Graham on inequality, Marc Andreessen on colonialism and Thomas J. Perkins on class resentment.)

But my conversations with techies interested in U.B.I. revealed a sincerity and sophistication about the idea. They aren’t ashamed or afraid of automation, and they don’t see U.B.I. merely as a defense of the current social order. Instead they see automation and U.B.I. as the most optimistic path toward wider social progress.

“I think it’s a bad use of a human to spend 20 years of their life driving a truck back and forth across the United States,” Mr. Wenger said. “That’s not what we aspire to do as humans — it’s a bad use of a human brain — and automation and basic income is a development that will free us to do lots of incredible things that are more aligned with what it means to be human.”

Like much of what venture capital firms work on, basic income is a pie­ in-­the-­sky notion. Though it has enjoyed recognition among wonks and some political momentum in Europe, not a single American presidential candidate has expressed even passing interest in the idea.

It has also been hampered by some very basic practical questions: How much should we give out in monthly income? Can the country afford that? Proponents say these questions will be answered by research, which in turn will prompt political change. For now, they argue the proposal is affordable if we alter tax and welfare policies to pay for it, and if we account for the ways technological progress in health care and energy will reduce the amount necessary to provide a basic cost of living. They also note that increasing economic urgency will push widespread political acceptance of the idea.

“There’s a sense that growing inequality is intractable, and that we need to do something about it,” said Natalie Foster, the co­founder of Peers, an organization that supports sharing­-economy workers.

Andrew L. Stern, a former president of the Service Employees International Union, who is working on a book about U.B.I., compared the feeling of the current anxiety around jobs to a time of war. “I grew up during the Vietnam War, and my parents were antiwar for one reason: I could be drafted,” he said. Today, as people across all income levels become increasingly worried about how they and their children will survive in tech-­infatuated America, “we are back to the Vietnam War when it comes to jobs,” Mr. Stern said. “We’re entering a universal, white­-collar, middle­class anxiety, which drives political change faster than poor people tend to drive change.”