Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Former President of Brazil
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
After decades of overflights, interdictions, spraying and raids on jungle drug factories, Latin America remains the world's largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana. It is producing more and more opium and heroin. It is developing the capacity to mass produce synthetic drugs. Continuing the drugs war with more of the same is ludicrous.
Jeff Sessions, United states senator from Alabama
disagrees
Legalise recreational drugs
It is false that marijuana use doesn’t lead people to more drug use. It is already causing a disturbance in the states that have made it legal.
Vince Cable,
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
I’m very anti-drugs. I’m very puritanical about it. But the simple truth is that by turning over the marijuana trade to the underworld, it’s creating opportunities for them and it’s making things worse.
Home Office,
disagrees
Legalise recreational drugs
The legalisation of cannabis would send the wrong message to the vast majority of people who do not take drugs, especially young and vulnerable people, with the potential grave risk of increased misuse of drugs. It would not eliminate the crime committed by the illicit trade, nor would it address the harms associated with drug dependence and the misery this can cause to families and society.
Theresa May, Prime minister of the United Kingdom
disagrees
Legalise recreational drugs
When I was Home Secretary, work was undertaken by the Home Office on the experience in a number of countries and the different ways they approached the issue of drugs, but I am afraid that I have a different opinion from my hon. Friend on drugs, as would those dealing with people affected by drugs. I think of my constituent Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, who set up DrugFAM after the suicide of her so...
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António Guterres,
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
I know from personal experience how an approach based on prevention and treatment can yield positive results. As Prime Minister of Portugal, I used the flexibility afforded by the three international drug-control conventions to introduce non-criminal responses to the possession of drugs for personal use. Greater resources were allocated to prevention, treatment and social reintegration programme...
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Jerome Adams,
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
45 yrs ago we began war on drugs that became war on people who use drugs. It stigmatized/penalized; didn't address root problem.
Russell Brand, British comedian, actor, and author
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
Nobody at all is helped by drugs being made illegal, unless of course there is a conspiracy to marginalise, condemn and persecute disenfranchised members of our global community.
I'd hate to think that was the situation - that certain countries didn't matter, that certain classes didn't matter, that certain races didn't matter.
So unless that's the situation, there's literally no reason to p...
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Larry Elder,
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
The war against drugs is wrong both tactically and morally. It assumes people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt.
John Hickenlooper, American politician
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
Let's face it, the War on Drugs was a disaster. It may be well intentioned ... but it sent millions of kids to prison, gave them felonies often times when they had no violent crimes ... I was against this, but I can see why so many people supported it.
Victor Mitchell, American businessman
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
The war on drugs has made government more powerful, citizens less free, and hasn’t helped users or addicts.
Rhys Ifans, Welsh actor
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
You look at any culture and prohibition has invariably been unmitigated failure. It is just idiotic to criminalise any substance, I think. It needs to be controlled, managed.
If you legalise something then you use the taxation from the sale of that drug top help people who become addicted to those substances. It is not going to go away. The way on drugs is being lost on a daily basis.
Jello Biafra, American singer
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
For every prohibition you create you also create an underground.
Elliott Abrams, American lawyer, diplomat
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
The war on drugs is not being won, and it continues to threaten stability and democracy not only in the Andes but throughout the Caribbean as well, where tiny police and military forces are outclassed by the sophisticated equipment in the hands of traffickers passing through the region on the way to their market in this country.
William F. Buckley Jr., American conservative commentator
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.
Caroline Lucas,
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
The war on drugs has been an abject failure, and the continued criminalisation of cannabis users is deeply counterproductive.
Paul Flynn,
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
The UK’s 45 years of harsh prohibition has multiplied use and harm.
Peter Lilley, British politician
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
Currently cannabis can only be obtained from illegal gangs who also push hard drugs. So we are driving soft drug users into the arms of hard drugs pushers.
United Nations,
Throughout history, technological innovations have enhanced the productivity of workers and created new products and markets, thereby generating new jobs in the economy. This will be no different for AI, 3D printing and robotics.
Jeff Bezos,
And then the jobless.... Is AI going to put everybody out of work? I am not worried about this. I find that people, all of us, I include myself, we are so unimaginative about what future jobs are going to look like and what they are going to be. Humans like to do things and we like to be productive and we will figure out things to do and we will use these tools to make ourselves more powerful. Wha... See More
Stephen Hawking, British physicist
the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.
Andy Stern, Author Raising the Floor; Richman Center, Columbia University; Former President SEIU
A universal basic income is essentially giving every single working-age American a check every month, much like we do with social security for elderly people. It’s an unconditional stipend, as it were. The reason it's necessary is we're now learning through lots of reputable research that technological change is accelerating, and that this process will continue to displace workers and terminate... See More
Kenneth Rogoff,
Since the dawn of the industrial age, a recurrent fear has been that technological change will spawn mass unemployment. Neoclassical economists predicted that this would not happen, because people would find other jobs, albeit possibly after a long period of painful adjustment. By and large, that prediction has proven to be correct.
Ray Kurzweil, Author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist
We are going to have new types of jobs creating new types of dollars that don’t exist yet and that has been the trend. We will be creating more profound music, literature, science, technology.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist
If all you think about are the jobs today and you project forward, there might be a day where robots take over every single job we have today. Is that the future that will come? No, because we have innovative people – well, I like to think we have innovative people in society – and we invent new things all the time, that require new jobs to manage them, to invent them, to conceive them, to enginee... See More
Bill Gates, Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort of at once. So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, there’s quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the next 20 years [will go away].
David Autor, Economist
It doesn’t really make sense to ask whether automation will affect jobs. Yes, 100 percent of jobs will be affected. Jobs change all of the time. The content of jobs will change. But it’s not as if there’s a fixed amount of work to do. The net number of jobs is rising. Job tasks are changing. In many cases that automation is complementary to the tasks that people do. For example, doctors’ work i... See More
Andrew McAfee,
As digital devices like computers and robots get more capable thanks to Moore’s Law (the proposition that the number of transistors on a semiconductor can be inexpensively doubled about every two years), they can do more of the work that people used to do. Digital labor, in short, substitutes for human labor.
Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli historian and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
[M]ost people tend to overestimate human beings. In order to replace most humans, the AI won't have to do very spectacular things. Most of the things the political and economic system needs from human beings are actually quite simple. We earlier talked about driving a taxi or diagnosing a disease. This is something that AI will soon be able to do better than humans even without consciousness, even... See More
Kevin Drum, American journalist
It’s possible, of course, that a few jobs will still be left for humans: legislators, CEOs, a few artists, who knows? But this is just nitpicking. If 1 percent of the jobs stay around—or even 10 percent or 20 percent—we still have mass unemployment on our hands.
Barack Obama, Former President of United States of America
The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good middle-class jobs obsolete.
Executive Office of the President of the United States,
less educated workers are more likely to be replaced by automation than highly educated ones... The skills in which humans have maintained a comparative advantage are likely to erode over time as AI and new technologies become more sophisticated.
Joel Mokyr,
I don’t see an easy way of solving it [mass unemployment]. It’s an inevitable consequence of technological progress.
Jeremy Corbyn, British labour party politician
We need urgently to face the challenge of automation, robotics that could make so much of contemporary work redundant.
Toby Walsh, Professor of artificial intelligence
Even if we have as many as 47% of jobs automated, this won’t translate into 47% unemployment. One reason is that we might just work a shorter week. That was the case in the Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, many worked 60 hours per week. After the Industrial Revolution, work reduced to around 40 hours per week. The same could happen with the unfolding AI Revolution.
Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
In the past, much power and responsibility over life and death was concentrated in the hands of doctors. Now, this ethical burden is increasingly shared by the builders of AI software
Moshe Vardi, AI and Automation Expert With 30 Yrs Experience
We are approaching the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. Society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? A typical answer is that we will be free to pursue leisure activities. [But] I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing. I believe that work i... See More
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman & former CEO, Google
We have to make them [workers] more productive through automation, through tools. So I'm convinced that there is in fact going to be a jobs shortage. There is going to be jobs that are unfulfilled, and that the way we'll fill them is to take people plus computers, and the computers will make people smarter. If you make the people smarter, their wages go up. They don't go down, and the number of jo... See More
Jeff Immelt,
There's 330,000 people that work for GE and none of them had a productive day yesterday, none of them had a completely productive day. So my own belief is that when it comes to digital tools and things like that, that first part of the revolution, is going to be to make your existing workforce productive.
Bart Selman, Computer scientist at Cornell University
A person complemented with an intelligent system can write maybe ten times as much code, maybe a hundred times as much code. The problem then becomes you need a hundred times fewer human programmers.
Jane Fraser,
We are expecting 500 billion objects to become connected to the Internet, and this automation is going to hollow out middle and working class jobs.
Jack Ma, Alibaba founder
AI, big data are a threat to human beings. AI and robots are going to kill a lot of jobs, because in the future, these will be done by machines.
Lawrence Summers, Economist and Harvard University Professor
It is widely feared that half the jobs in the economy might be eliminated by innovations such as self-driving vehicles, automatic checkout machines and expert systems that trade securities more effectively than humans can.
Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer
Historically, technology has created more jobs than it destroys and there is no reason to think otherwise in this case. Someone has to make and service all these advanced devices.
Jonathan Grudin, Computer science researcher
Technology will continue to disrupt jobs, but more jobs seem likely to be created. When the world population was a few hundred million people there were hundreds of millions of jobs. Although there have always been unemployed people, when we reached a few billion people there were billions of jobs. There is no shortage of things that need to be done and that will not change.
Fred Baker, Internet pioneer
My observation of advances in automation has been that they change jobs, but they don’t reduce them. A car that can guide itself on a striped street has more difficulty with an unstriped street, for example, and any automated system can handle events that it is designed for, but not events (such as a child chasing a ball into a street) for which it is not designed. Yes, I expect a lot of change. I... See More
Amy Webb,
There is a general concern that the robots are taking over. I disagree that our emerging technologies will permanently displace most of the workforce, though I’d argue that jobs will shift into other sectors. Now more than ever, an army of talented coders is needed to help our technology advance. But we will still need folks to do packaging, assembly, sales, and outreach. The collar of the future ... See More
Bruce Schneier,
disagrees
Electronic voting
Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers. We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to us...
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Ross Anderson, British computer scientist, cryptographer
disagrees
Electronic voting
When you move from voting in person to voting at home (whether by post, by phone or over the internet) it vastly expands the scope for vote buying and coercion, and we’ve seen this rising steadily in the UK since the 2001 election where postal votes first became a right. All the parties have been caught hustling up the vote in various ways.
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