Jobs, Robots, Capitalism, Inequality, And You
25th August 2013
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everything will be fine. Maybe the “widening gap between rich and poor” is temporary. Maybe the steady growth in the proportion of jobs that are part-time and/or low-paid will soon reverse.
Or maybe the idea that all the homeless need are old laptops and a few JavaScript textbooks is not unlike the claim that new technologies automatically create new jobs for everyone. Maybe, unless something drastic changes, most people are totally screwed.
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen….
The strange present, we may conclude, is one in which the middle class is slowly being squeezed out of an economy that is gradually dividing into two camps, the few rich and the many poor.
Thereby reverting to the norm throughout human history. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
Henry Blodget says: “Hate To Say It, But If Companies Don’t Start Paying People Better, We May Need Unions.” But unions only matter if labor is valuable, and with every passing year, technology renders labor more irrelevant. When the 5.7 million licensed truck drivers in America are replaced by self-driving vehicles, they can go ahead and strike all they like. Nobody will care. Hardly anybody who matters — which is to say, the rich, the powerful, the technical — will even notice.
The classic definition of ‘proletariat’ is ‘those whose only contribution to society is children’. But what happens to the proletariat when their contribution is no longer needed?