Let's debate about the future of Canada. (LONG READ)

[Kobe]

Read these questions and ask yourself while reading this.

Have you considered the future for Canada?

Where is this world/country heading in the next 10-30 years?

Do you want kids? Why or why not?
Do you think AI is good?

Intro

I’ve always been a strong believer of technology and always supported it 100%, Hell I’ve made a living playing poker for the last 10 years online. But in the least year I’ve really been focusing my attention on stocks/crypto and reading/learning a lot about the economy.

When I was growing up my parents would always ask me “So when are you going to get married and have kids” this is just what the always assumed was the norm and how life should be, I’ve always been a slightly out of the box thinker and like to analyze situations.

I’m going to make this post as brief as possible but it’s still going to be long but I could actually write a 500 page paper on my thoughts on everything regarding this topic but I’m curious to if other beyond members have considered this, I really didn’t consider any of this till speaking to a friend who has been helping me with stocks and crypto trading learning for the last year, really smart guy and has taught me a lot.

We were talking about the economy and Trump and the low employment numbers for the US and how we both believe this isn’t great for the economy (I’m not getting into this but go to tradingview.com and view any stock this year and the numbers to economy do not add up)

Anyways let’s begin.

LIFE EXPECTENCY
We were talking how people now a days are having LESS kids than they used to and I was like what? No? There is more people in the world now then there was 10 or 20 years ago.

Which is true, I made a chart with 6 countries and the population differences between 2000 and 2018 but I also wanted to compare the Fertility rates between 1955, 1990 and 2018.

All the countries can be found here
http://www.worldometers.info/world-p...us-population/

Here is a screenshot of my findings


It’s actually interesting most countries are having a larger population but the fertility rate has dropped rapidly from 1955.

If you look at countries that are not as developed you will see that the yearly change on fertility has increased in a lot of them. (Coincidence? Naa)



So it’s safe to say from the numbers people in developed countries are having less kids for most likely a few reasons.

1. Protection (Condoms/Birth Control)

2. Work makes it more difficult for them to raise a family.

I’m sure there are other reasons. (Question at the top)

So lets break this down a little bit.

Here is a chart.



Here is some maths I did.



So the government will have to spend a few bucks more for CPP after we retire, sure it’s a fair bit of money but I’m sure taxes can be increased for the next generation (Or ours) to pay for us when we retire at the age of 65.

It’s not that big of a deal right? Naa they will just print some more of that money and it will be good.

Artificial Intelligence / Technology

There is so many positives we see such as easier to communicate with others, uber slashing prices for taxis, the internet so we can research what we want, faster orders online for food/groceries, cures and increasing life expectancy etc etc. We could name hundreds of advantages to technology if we wanted.

We also now have the first Amazon store where you go in we don’t need a cashier just grab what you want and walk out. Oh the money saved BUT IT’S SOO COOL!

I remember when I had 56KB internet waiting 3minutes for a page to load and it was the coolest thing ever.

So let’s get into some interesting facts.

BBC reported that by the year 2030 there will be up to 800MILLION jobs lost to robots which will effect most of the richer nations such as Germany and US.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42170100

However Canada is now trying to become a force in the AI world, and it seems they will continue to do so. Sweet we want to be a leader in AI.

https://qz.com/1264673/ai-is-the-new...ies-are-doing/

I can’t exactly wrap my mind around why this is such positive news for Canadians currently.

1. JOBS WILL BE LOST
2. LIFE EXPECTENCY WILL CONTINUE TO GROW (I'M ASSUMING)
3. UNEMPLYOMENT WILL INCREASE.

If we get self-driving cars can you think about how many jobs will be lost, taxis, uber, buses, transport trucks, etc etc.

This is of course only one of the AI, losing chiefs, telemarkets, accountants all being done by computer software.

Really interesting article “Heads-up LIMIT HOLDEM” was Solved by the University of Alberta

http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about
Also for No Limit (A much more complex game with lots of Game Theory Optimal Strategy now)

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/myster...players-poker/ - it’s only solved 1 on 1 and it did cost them thousands of dollars to run the software to play the pros, but he did crush them playing a very weird style and adapting every hand. Very interesting actually how it was done. (First time the pros

beat the old AI computer)

WHAT WILL HAPPEN?

So we know unemployment HAS to go up in Canada/USA and other countries of course as we can’t just continue to build human jobs and think this is sustainable long-term especially with so much new AI and companies/organizations able to cut costs everywhere, why wouldn’t they?

What will happen to the people, are we going to all be broke and creating chaos in the world to try and feed our families and survive?

Is the Government going to have to give us Basic income? (This is why the retirement sums will be so low, this would cost way more)

Is the government just going to keep printing money to pay everyone so we don’t destroy the cities?

Will there be much more Police officers hired?

Will there be more prisons built?

What will the next generation do?

This is one of the reasons I’m a fan of Bitcoin and blockchain technology even though I believe it could have been created by the US to pay off debts in the future (This is really a post for another day), even though I do feel it’s unlikely but knowing something can’t be made as many of as they want.
What are you going to do in the future to keep income and support yourself and family members?

I’m really curious about what people think about this topic and I do feel it’s a very important topic to cover and be aware of in case it creeps up on us in the future years.

Edit: 3am sorry wanted to finish this before I head to bed or I'd lose sleep over it, hoping to hear from some people when I wake up!

[16hypen3sp]

I envision a future where it's us vs them. Like Total Recall or Elysium.

Or maybe something like current Venezuela, but everywhere.

[ZenOps]

Healthwise Canada is doing well.

The US basically nuked itself, taking 2 years off the life expectancy of its 350 million citizens, even though they pay 3x more in healthcare than other first world nations. People finally are connecting the dots on that one. I guess its was one of those things that US media wanted to sweep under the rug, and the US media is a very strong entity with massive influence that is never to be underestimated.

As hollywoods grip wanes on "reality", so too will people wake up to all the other propogandist lies (about everything) Which could actually end up being a problem. You can get more out of slave labour if you dangle a "freedom carrot" But if that carrot is an illusion made in Hollywood - then what incentive do people have? People only pay the illusionist to have some giggles if they don't know how the trick is done.

Canada was never under a whole lot of illusion. The Queen owns everything, if you break the rules the Crown will throw your ass in jail, no illusion there.

I do find that I can convert more people to my line of thought as time passes... Which in itself is scary to me. Bidoof is the new god.

[rage2]

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So let’s get into some interesting facts.

BBC reported that by the year 2030 there will be up to 800MILLION jobs lost to robots which will effect most of the richer nations such as Germany and US.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42170100

However Canada is now trying to become a force in the AI world, and it seems they will continue to do so. Sweet we want to be a leader in AI.

I enjoy talking about this topic because my job is mainly automation these days to remove human intervention and human error out of our everyday processes. Job loss due to automation and technological advances have been around since the invention of the wheel. Life goes on. Low skilled jobs get lost, there will be new low skilled jobs created out of new technological advances to take its place. Good example is with AI and ML, these are really fields still in its infancy. Machines aren't really learning per se, they're refining their decision trees but at the end of the day exceptions are still the norm today and each exception makes the machine look absolutely stupid compared to a human's decision making process. Behind the scenes there's a lot of human training involved to help refine that data, and that has opened up a whole new world of low skilled cheap labour. Take self driving cars for example. Are cars really learning on their own as miles rack up? Yes, but the exceptions are still exceptions which break the entire model. They need humans to remove the exceptions, and that can be done with cheap labour: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46055595

[rx7boi]

Speaking of automatons, just saw a video where they're now making stunt robots for movies. I forget how to embed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ950ywJy0M

[rage2]

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Speaking of automatons, just saw a video where they're now making stunt robots for movies. I forget how to embed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ950ywJy0M

Pretty sure that's not for movies, but for shows at theme parks and such. CGI is so advanced and cheap these days it makes zero sense to build a robot to do a movie.

[tonytiger55]

I think Canada has to increase its population. In terms of its landmass, the population base is too low. This allows big corporate businesses to have a monopoly due to lack of population density, competition and knowledge diversity. Food and banking sectors are prime examples.

It has to change how educated immigrants are integrated into its society in terms of work and knowledge transfer. Its no good having a mid 30's educated immigrant be supervised by a 25 year old with daddy or anger issues.

I sat with my MP and MLA recently and I had to explain the barriers I faced as a educated English immigrant. Trying to immigrate here with all the paperwork requirements, move into the workforce and the barriers trying to study and get a qualification. There are too many barriers. There are quite a few English people I know that ended up moving back to the UK. How does a lot of my experience and education knowledge get transferred to the Canadian work place? As a Londoner, I see many practices are outdated here yet I can't transfer my knowledge base. Yet its easy for someone in a village in rural Punjab move here, not speak English. Not a problem, but where is the knowledge transfer and critical thinking skills? That has a bigger problem for Canadian society in the long term.

A lot of these challenges are not faced by people moving to the UK. I mean.. I doubt if Mark Carney was ever asked to prove his qualifications were done in English or if he could undertake a English test when he became the governor for the Bank of England. A lot of foreign knowledge is accepted in the UK.
In Canada we like to think it is. But its not. That leads to a problem of idea generation, wealth creation, and innovation. Canada seems to be fixing problems in its infrastructure that have already been solved by other countries. It does not need to re-invent the wheel per say.

AI is a problem if we don't allow innovation and ideas into the marketplace to work with the problems AI brings. I see AI creating different jobs, opportunities.
Take automated cars. Its too inefficient to have cars move on their own. Having them connected to a city infrastructure with other AI cars, traffic lights etc is way more efficient. That how I see it going. That itself creates a whole new sector of jobs.

In the long term there will be universal basic income. They will have to be. Its being trialed in Liverpool/UK I think. In Scotland too, I think in areas of long standing poverty.

That being said, Canada is in a good place. With its resources, skills and untapped knowledge has a massive potential to be in a better place.

[rx7boi]

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Pretty sure that's not for movies, but for shows at theme parks and such. CGI is so advanced and cheap these days it makes zero sense to build a robot to do a movie.

That would be more accurate. They mentioned it started as a way to support and enhance the live attractions and that if they're going to be used in a movie production capacity, they'll be to test out preliminary stunts.

[HiTempguy1]

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Low skilled jobs get lost, there will be new low skilled jobs created out of new technological advances to take its place.

You can not build an economy on nothing. When something can be replicated for free (electronic bits), there is inherently no actual value.

At the end of the day, there needs to be a source of wealth somewhere in the world generated due to scarcity in order to pay for the other parts of the economy. I'm no economist, but you can't have everyone work as Starbucks baristas. Or be artists.

At some point, the humans get replaced. There aren't "more" jobs to be discovered. We have made all the "jobs" categories there can be, or can really envision. Sure, other areas will grow, some will shrink, but overall there is a fundamental difference this time. There was lots of potential left in the system that humans could move onto when their labour was freed up with prior technological advances. It wasn't that jobs were magically created out of thin air, its that there was not enough slack to be able to allocate resources to their jobs. You don't build nukes when you can't feed your people (North Korea hasn't built nukes, they've basically reverse engineered them). The point of the current technology is to outright replace people. People require resources that are difficult to produce. Automatons require virtually nothing besides electricity.

If you build a mechanical body that can do the work of a human, why hire a human? If you can design a human brain, but with more processing power, why would you hire a human? There is zero logical reason to use an inferior tool.

In addition to all of this, humanity's current period of peace is unprecedented. It will not last. I don't know if that story takes place on earth. 100-200 years from now, people will be in space. New (destructive) technologies will have been developed, and slowly work their way down the chain/in the black market to people we don't want having the weapons. Look at North Korea. It only takes one crazy person (and Kim is crazy).

People have to have their "needs" met. Lots of technological advances have zero to do with needs (facebook? google? Uber?), these could disappear tomorrow and what changes would it have on the ability of companies/economies to earn money? None, because they don't serve a need, they serve a want.

The unemployment rate in Canada is a lie, as it is in most of the western world.

https://business.financialpost.com/o...d-worry-us-all

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I envision a future where it's us vs them. Like Total Recall or Elysium.

Or maybe something like current Venezuela, but everywhere.

This is what I assume will happen eventually.

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Trying to immigrate here with all the paperwork requirements, move into the workforce and the barriers trying to study and get a qualification.

Well I don't know how this can possibly be, because the amount of useless "foreign" engineers I meet on sites up north that come from asian countries is staggering. Or the "engineers" from Pakistan that seem like they barely passed high school and then got the equivalent of a tech diploma and call themselves engineers somehow.

The rules are there for a reason, and in this case, I 100% support them.

That being said, Canada is in a good place. With its resources, skills and untapped knowledge has a massive potential to be in a better place.

Canada is literally one of the best places in the world to live. I fundamentally disagree with your viewpoint. Change isn't what we need, if anything, we need to revert back a decade to sound fiscal policies and getting rid of some of the insane leftist ideology that has started to plague this country. Including the need for less immigrants. As the article I posted said, unemployment is actually a lot higher than the government claims. If we had a proper retraining system that met the needs of employers, companies and workers would be in a great spot.

We are currently coasting on the backs of previous government policy and economics. We need to get back to those roots.

[tonytiger55]

Well I don't know how this can possibly be, because the amount of useless "foreign" engineers I meet on sites up north that come from asian countries is staggering. Or the "engineers" from Pakistan that seem like they barely passed high school and then got the equivalent of a tech diploma and call themselves engineers somehow.

The rules are there for a reason, and in this case, I 100% support them.

Me neither. I don't get it. But its true, I go so fucked off I went to see my parliamentary representatives.
It is actually a issue of immigration policy. This leads in turn to those rules being there.

Then there is a other demographic of immigrants where such rules are a hinderance and more of a money grab by educational institutions.

Your spot on, it is s a proper retraining system that is needed. Im retraining right now for a different industry and part of it is online. But the online learning is so shite. Literally one of the main problems I am having is the online course material. Funny enough I solved the same problem for an organisation in 2005 back in the UK. Why is Canada not solving this problem in 2018? Again how would they? comes back to the same issue of knowledge sharing and transfer.
How do you get new ideas and ways of thinking into the system..? A lot of the work places have the same kind of people hence you get the same kind of ideas and no innovation. Thats the part immigration comes into play. Its the type of immigration.

[max_boost]

Have you considered the future for Canada? Yes

Where is this world/country heading in the next 10-30 years? Not a clue

Do you want kids? Why or why not? Depends

Do you think AI is good? Yes

[HiTempguy1]

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How do you get new ideas and ways of thinking into the system..?

By removing government from it. Private industry innovates, public sector stagnates. By its very nature, government actively does not want improvement.

[Sugarphreak]

...

[J-hop]

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My life will either end before this becomes an issue, or some sort of merger of man and machine will drastically extend my life and I will become one of the OG's of a new super race. That probably comes with some great perks.

Either way, I don't care that much about the future. As long as I get to live my life without people trying to interfere, or dictate the terms, I will be happy.

I also don't see the point of having kids, even from a species survival perspective it isn't needed. They are a costly nuisance, and I'd rather spend my short time on earth doing other things. If the new super race of human-machines comes along, I am very much looking forward to a world without kids.

I often wonder what the real driver is in developed countries for decreased birth rates.

People often claim it’s that the younger generation wants to focus more and more on their careers etc and don’t necessarily want a family that may get in the way of this goal.

But also I see the data showing that as countries get more and more developed they move away from things like religion and personal freedoms generally increase.

Is the real reason people that don’t want kids no longer feel the societal pressures to have kids? To me this seems like a great thing, eventually only people that really want kids and know they can invest fully in them will have them.

I see a fair number of people from my parents generation who talk like they didn’t really want kids or talk like they aren’t fully committed to their kids. My personal guess is the number of people that don’t want kids hasn’t changed much over the generations, just the perceived ability to act on that desire (or rather not act) has drastically changed

[Xtrema]

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Either way, I don't care that much about the future. As long as I get to live my life without people trying to interfere, or dictate the terms, I will be happy.

The fact that the 3 Japanese cities I visited are mostly trilingual (Japanese, Mandarin and English) with all public infrastructures, I really doubt that will be the case as China keep projecting their power onto the rest of world.

[BavarianBeast]

In two years I'm moving to Switzerland, the way this country is heading does not align with my lifestyle.

Great place for average people to continue being average. We no longer value hard work or reward it, damn socialists.

[msommers]

[J-hop]

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In two years I'm moving to Switzerland, the way this country is heading does not align with my lifestyle.

Great place for average people to continue being average. We no longer value hard work or reward it, damn socialists.

I’d be interested to hear you elaborate a bit. How so? In my experience here mediocrity is rewarded in kind as are above average individuals

Do you feel you work harder than everyone around you yet those around you who are “average” are rewarded just as well or near as well as you with your above average work ethic (and as a result you’re stuck being average with everyone else and nowhere to move)? If so do you think the problem is the country? Or do you believe in taking responsibility for your outcome in life?

[ZenOps]

Kids were previously needed to sustain productivity. Arguably nowadays they will be replaced by far more efficient machines and AI.

Hard work should not be overly rewarded because inefficient humans will always lose out to the AI. Would you rather pay a NASA rocket scientist $200,000 per year and get the moon calculations, or pay the AI $2 worth of electricity and have the same calculations in 15 minutes. Be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true. In reality, a NASA rocket scientist might be worth $15 per year - in actual comparative productivity. By my calculations: A US president is worth -$915 million at least.

As for physical hard work, I'm a little surprised that wheat is still above $100 per ton - given the advances in machine technology.

Not to rag too much, but I find that people that complain about not being compensated for "hard work" have no clue what their actual worth is.

Start painting and singing, because that's the last hurdle AI will have to completely surpass the extremely slow chemical based human brain.

[ZenOps]

As for the potential dangers of USA radioactive milk:

Caesium-137 is basically what is the most deadly. It will literally attach to bones in the body as a calcium substitute. However, its half life is 30 years, and most of the USA open air above ground testing is done. Its also no longer in the first inch of soil of the USA, it has had plenty of time to dilute many feet deep, and some even washed into the ocean by rainfall.

I would say that radioactive exposure to maybe 40 million Canadians reliant on the US food supply starting year 2018, would take no more than one month of life off a citizen, instead of two years of "direct contact" like 350 million US citizens. That's not to suggest its an even two years across all americans. Anyone in California is surprisingly safe, because they were all upwind from nuclear fallout and probably has near zero impact on their lifespan. Someone in the Central USA probably had four years taken off their life if they were east of the Nevada test site, maybe as much as a decade for adjacent downwind states.


Am I crazy? Who knows. I'm not entirely sure America cares all that much about it anymore. FBI hasn't knocked in my door yet.

Believe it or not, I'm actually OK with the USA blaming their two year shortened lifespan on "Fried chicken". Heaven knows the rest of the world needs food and could greatly benefit from a few less 350 pound Americans. The only reason to be slightly honest about it now, is because the restrictions on USA dairy will probably be lifted.