In Defense of Prosperous Inequality
1st June 2013
Self-driving cars will save roughly 32,000 lives lost every year to auto fatalities, reduce pollution and save us countless hours wasted in traffic. It will also obliterate the taxi industry — like it did the steamboat industry.
Bringing to the masses services, which were once considered luxuries (personal assistants, cutting-edge medicine, and world-class education), means automating some jobs out of existence.
Unfortunately, while everybody sees it coming, nobody has any ideas about how to cope with it. My prediction is that it will give us an ever-increasing Lower Crust of unemployable proles who can only survive off of government benefits and therefore will perennially vote for the Party of Free Stuff, the Democrats or whatever even-more-socialist group eventually replaces the Democrats.