When Technology Sets Off a Populist Revolt

If you think globalization, immigration, trade and demographic change have contributed to displacement and political anger, wait until robots take away millions and millions of jobs, including those requiring the use of a well-trained brain.

.. “It seems likely that the top 10 to 20 percent of any profession — be they computer programmers, civil engineers, musicians, athletes or artists — will continue to do well,” he told me. “What happens to the bottom 20 percent or even 80 percent, if that is the delineation? Will the bottom 80 percent be able to compete effectively against computer systems that are superior to human intelligence?”

Others in Silicon Valley, most notably the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have dismissed this concern as Luddism, assuring people that new jobs always replace the ones that vanish.

.. And it is hardly surprising for stalwarts of an industry to claim it won’t harm anyone. What is more notable is what sometimes is called “argument against interest” — people criticizing a thing from which they stand to benefit.

.. The only answer, he believes, is massive economic redistribution via something like a guaranteed minimum income. The idea has been gaining ground.

“Does capitalism need to be reinvented for modern technology? I’m absolutely convinced it does,” he said.

.. To be plain, Mr. Khosla and others of like mind in the valley are not radicals. They are speaking of a new social contract, in which an undisrupted few assume new obligations to the disrupted many, in order to be freed to go back to their disruptive works.

Eleven Reasons To Be Excited About The Future of Technology

In the year 1820, a person could expect to live less than 35 years, 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty, and less that 20% of the population was literate. Today, human life expectancy is over 70 years, less that 10% of the global population lives in extreme poverty, and over 80% of people are literate. These improvements are due mainly to advances in technology, beginning in the industrial age and continuing today in the information age.

There are many exciting new technologies that will continue to transform the world and improve human welfare. Here are eleven of them.

  1. Self-Driving Cars
  2. Clean Energy
  3. Virtual and Augmented Reality
  4. Drones and Flying Cars
  5. Artificial Intelligence
  6. Pocket Supercomputers for Everyone
  7. Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
  8. High-Quality Online Education
  9. Better Food through Science
  10. Computerized Medicine
  11. A New Space Age

 

Against Edenism

In the absence of technological progress, we end up with a zero-sum world, in which there must be a loser for every winner. It is not clear whether a capitalistic economic system could function without growth; and it is unlikely that a representative democracy, which requires the give-and-take of win–win compromise, would continue to function.

..  The Green Revolution in food production has decelerated tremendously since 1980, and so the average calorie consumption in rural India is lower today than it was in 1970.

.. the distrust of that utopia is the hallmark of the post-Enlightenment, postmodern West. The widespread nature of that distrust is a good measure of the degree to which postmodernity has displaced modernity.

.. Just about every science-fiction movie of the past quarter century portrays science and technology as a trap that humanity is building for itself. One may choose from a menu of dystopias, from The Terminator to The Matrix to Elysium to Avatar.

.. The history of the twentieth century is a history of this loss of hope in the future. With the benefit of hindsight, the dawn of the nuclear age and the Manhattan Project may appear to have been a key turning point, a great achievement that led to tremendous disillusionment. This disillusionment hit with full force in the 1970s, when the successor Apollo program collapsed and the baby boomers redirected their energies toward interminable cultural wars.

..  If atheist optimism meant an escape from nature, then today’s atheist pessimism means an acceptance of nature, and of the many gruesome accidents and the terrible rule of chance that that entails.

.. I badly miss the misguided optimism of a Faust—at least he was motivated to try to do something about everything that was wrong with the world.

.. if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.