Medical Ethicist Calls Trump Approved Medicaid Work Requirements Cruel

Jason Turesky
www.wgbh.org
Originally posted November 26, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Medical ethicist Art Caplan called the idea of Medicaid work requirements “cruel” on Boston Public Radio Monday, and believes there are no clear benefits to these new rules. “It’s not really something that I think is going to instill good habits or get people off Medicaid,” Caplan said.

Caplan pointed out that many of the people on Medicaid in Kentucky may not be physically able to fulfill the 80 hour requirement.

“Remember, the overwhelming majority of people on Medicaid in Kentucky, and every state, are disabled or children or single head of household females, so getting them out 80 hours per month to do anything is very difficult, unless we are going to re-institute child labor,” he said.

The info is here.

Can we collaborate with robots or will they take our place at work?

TU/e Research Project
ethicsandtechnology.eu

Here is an excerpt:

Finding ways to collaborate with robots

In this project, the aim is to understand how robotisation in logistics can be advanced whilst maintaining workers’ sense of meaning in work and general well-being, thereby preventing or undoing resilience towards robotisation. Sven Nyholm says: “People typically find work meaningful if they work within a well-functioning team or if they view their work as serving some larger purpose beyond themselves. Could human-robot collaborations be experienced as team-work? Would it be any kind of mistake to view a robot as a colleague? The thought of having a robot as a collaborator can seem a little weird. And yes, the increasingly robotized work environment is scary, but it is exciting at the same time. The further robotisation at work could give workers new important responsibilities and skills, which can in turn strengthen the feeling of doing meaningful work”.

The information in here.

Can we please discuss ethics in the future of work?

Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith
Forbes
Originally published

Here is an excerpt:

Our brains have a very distinct and subliminal way of normalizing just about anything we are exposed to if we experience it long enough – even if we don’t like it. Look at how social norms have evolved over the past fifty years: back then a teenager would instinctively forego a seat on a bus for the elderly, men in suits wore ties, women never touched up their makeup in public and no one swore at policemen. Today, these aspects of social etiquette have changed significantly. Some for better, some for worse. New norms apply.

Equally, the workplace is a very different environment to what it used to be. Much of it better – safer, more engaging, more stimulating, more collaborative. But there have been trade-offs. Our working days are longer, technology has dissolved many of the boundaries between home and work and we are expected to be more self-sufficient and productive than ever before. And that’s before the next wave of innovations.

The information is here.

Will life be worth living in a world without work? Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life

John Danaher
forthcoming in Science and Engineering Ethics

Abstract

Suppose we are about to enter an era of increasing technological unemployment. What implications does this have for society? Two distinct ethical/social issues would seem to arise. The first is one of distributive justice: how will the (presumed) efficiency gains from automated labour be distributed through society? The second is one of personal fulfillment and meaning: if  people no longer have to work, what will they do with their lives? In this article, I set aside the first issue and focus on the second. In doing so, I make three arguments. First, I argue that there are good reasons to embrace non-work and that these reasons become more compelling in an era of technological unemployment. Second, I argue that the technological advances that make widespread technological unemployment possible could still threaten or undermine human flourishing and meaning, especially if (as is to be expected) they do not remain confined to the economic sphere. And third, I argue that this threat could be contained if we adopt an integrative  approach to our relationship with technology. In advancing these arguments, I draw on three distinct literatures: (i) the literature on technological unemployment and workplace automation; (ii) the antiwork critique — which I argue gives reasons to embrace technological unemployment; and (iii) the philosophical debate about the conditions for meaning in life — which I argue gives reasons for concern.

The article is here.
 

You Don’t Find Your Purpose — You Build It

John Coleman
Harvard Business Review
Originally published October 20, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

In achieving professional purpose, most of us have to focus as much on making our work meaningful as in taking meaning from it. Put differently, purpose is a thing you build, not a thing you find. Almost any work can possess remarkable purpose. School bus drivers bear enormous responsibility — caring for and keeping safe dozens of children — and are an essential part of assuring our children receive the education they need and deserve. Nurses play an essential role not simply in treating people’s medical conditions but also in guiding them through some of life’s most difficult times. Cashiers can be a friendly, uplifting interaction in someone’s day — often desperately needed — or a forgettable or regrettable one. But in each of these instances, purpose is often primarily derived from focusing on what’s so meaningful and purposeful about the job and on doing it in such a way that that meaning is enhanced and takes center stage. Sure, some jobs more naturally lend themselves to senses of meaning, but many require at least some deliberate effort to invest them with the purpose we seek.

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Most of us will have multiple sources of purpose in our lives. For me, I find purpose in my children, my marriage, my faith, my writing, my work, and my community. For almost everyone, there’s no one thing we can find. It’s not purpose but purposes we are looking for — the multiple sources of meaning that help us find value in our work and lives. Professional commitments are only one component of this meaning, and often our work isn’t central to our purpose but a means to helping others, including our families and communities. Acknowledging these multiple sources of purpose takes the pressure off of finding a single thing to give our lives meaning.

The article is here.

The meaning of life in a world without work

Yuval Noah Harari
The Guardian
Originally posted May 8, 2017

Most jobs that exist today might disappear within decades. As artificial intelligence outperforms humans in more and more tasks, it will replace humans in more and more jobs. Many new professions are likely to appear: virtual-world designers, for example. But such professions will probably require more creativity and flexibility, and it is unclear whether 40-year-old unemployed taxi drivers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if the ex-insurance agent somehow makes the transition into a virtual-world designer, the pace of progress is such that within another decade he might have to reinvent himself yet again.

The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

The article is here.

Yuval Harari on why humans won’t dominate Earth in 300 years

Interview by Ezra Klein
Vox.com
Originally posted March 27, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

I totally agree that for success, cooperation is usually more important than just raw intelligence. But the thing is that AI will be far more cooperative, at least potentially, than humans. To take a famous example, everybody is now talking about self-driving cars. The huge advantage of a self-driving car over a human driver is not just that, as an individual vehicle, the self-driving car is likely to be safer, cheaper, and more efficient than a human-driven car. The really big advantage is that self-driving cars can all be connected to one another to form a single network in a way you cannot do with human drivers.

It's the same with many other fields. If you think about medicine, today you have millions of human doctors and very often you have miscommunication between different doctors, but if you switch to AI doctors, you don't really have millions of different doctors. You have a single medical network that monitors the health of everybody in the world.

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I think the other problem with AI taking over is not the economic problem, but really the problem of meaning — if you don't have a job anymore and, say, the government provides you with universal basic income or something, the big problem is how do you find meaning in life? What do you do all day?

Here, the best answers so far we've got is drugs and computer games. People will regulate more and more their moods with all kinds of biochemicals, and they will engage more and more with three-dimensional virtual realities.

The entire interview is here.

A Bright Robot Future Awaits, Once This Downer Election Is Over

By Andrew Mayeda
Bloomberg
Originally published October 24, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

‘Singularity Is Near’

An hour’s drive away, in San Francisco, the influx of tech workers has helped push the median single-family home price to $1.26 million. Private buses carry them to jobs at Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, or Facebook. Meanwhile, one former mayor has proposed using a decommissioned aircraft carrier to house the city’s homeless, who throng the sidewalks along Market Street, home to Uber and Twitter Inc.

How much will the “second machine age” deepen such divisions? Last month, a trio of International Monetary Fund economists came up with some chilling answers. Even if humans retain their creative edge over robots, they found, it will likely take two decades before productivity gains outweigh the downward pressure on wages from automation; meanwhile, “inequality will be worse, possibly dramatically so.”

And if the robots become perfect substitutes, the paper envisages an extreme scenario in which labor becomes wholly redundant as “capital takes over the entire economy.” The IMF economists even invoke futurist Ray Kurzweil’s 2006 bestseller, “The Singularity Is Near.”

Silicon Valley executives say alarm bells have been ringing for decades about job-killing technology, and they’re usually false alarms.

The article is here.

When Deliberation Isn’t Smart

By Adam Bear and David Rand
Evonomics
Originally published January 25, 2016

Cooperation is essential for successful organizations. But cooperating often requires people to put others’ welfare ahead of their own. In this post, we discuss recent research on cooperation that applies the “Thinking, fast and slow” logic of intuition versus deliberation. We explain why people sometimes (but not always) cooperate in situations where it’s not in their self-interest to do so, and show how properly designed policies can build “habits of virtue” that create a culture of cooperation. TL;DR summary: intuition favors behaviors that are typically optimal, so institutions that make cooperation typically advantageous lead people to adopt cooperation as their intuitive default; this default then “spills over” into settings where it’s not actually individually advantageous to cooperate.

Life is full of opportunities to make personal sacrifices on behalf others, and we often rise to the occasion. We do favors for co-workers and friends, give money to charity, donate blood, and engage in a host of other cooperative endeavors. Sometimes, these nice deeds are reciprocated (like when we help out a friend, and she helps us with something in return). Other times, however, we pay a cost and get little in return (like when we give money to a homeless person whom we’ll never encounter again).

Although you might not realize it, nowhere is the importance of cooperation more apparent than in the workplace. If your boss is watching you, you’d probably be wise to be a team player and cooperate with your co-workers, since doing so will enhance your reputation and might even get you a promotion down the road. In other instances, though, you might get no recognition from, say, helping out a fellow employee who needs assistance meeting a deadline, or who calls out sick.

The article is here.

Men at Work

By Allison J. Pugh
Aeon
Originally posted December 4, 2015

Here are two excerpts:

One option is to get angry. When I interviewed laid-off men for my recent book on job insecurity, their anger, or more often a wry bitterness, was impossible to forget. By and large, like Gary the laid-off tradesman, they were not angry at their employers. At home, however, they sounded a different note. ‘I have a very set opinion of relationships and how females handle them,’ Gary told me, rather flatly. ‘It’s what I’ve seen consistently throughout my life.’ On his third serious relationship, Gary talked about the ‘hurt that’s been caused to me by a lack of commitment on the part of other people’, and he complained that ‘marriage can be tossed out like a Pepsi can’. In the winds of uncertainty, Gary’s anger at women keeps him grounded.

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Nonetheless, most working‑class men such as Gary are trapped by a changing economy and an intransigent masculinity. Faced with changes that reduce the options for less-educated men, they have essentially three choices, none of them very likely. They can pursue more education than their family background or their school success has prepared them for. They can find a low-wage job in a high-growth sector, positions that are often considered women’s work, such as a certified nurse practitioner or retail cashier. Or they can take on more of the domestic labour at home, enabling their partners to take on more work to provide for the household. These are ‘choices’ that either force them to be class pioneers or gender insurgents in their quest for a sustainable heroism; while both are laudable, we can hardly expect them of most men, and yet this is precisely the dilemma that faces men today.

The article is here.

Note from me: This article not about the standard issues in ethics. However, it does bring up the issue of competence. Do we, as psychologists, understand the culture of males in a changing economic system? And, is the changing economic picture a factor in the increase in white, male suicides?