As it happens I'm reading this piece from Savannakhet, Laos PDR. No disrespect to Tim but when you spend time in places like Savannakhet, it's easy to see just

As it happens I'm reading this piece from Savannakhet, Laos PDR. No disrespect to Tim but when you spend time in places like Savannakhet, it's easy to see just how detached from the reality of the world population some of these self-proclaimed "alpha geek" futurists really are. A few points I take issue with: 1) Like Keynes before him, O'Reilly misses the point that the majority of the world's population doesn't participate in open, free, or global markets. They are permitted limited access to local markets by oligarchs, who rarely grant that access out of benevolence, and maintain enough military and police power to revoke it if necessary. This is probably the single biggest reason that poor countries stay poor. Technology hasn't solved this problem because it's political. The article doesn't consider it. 2) Tim thinks that more automation is going to change the world. And of course it has already changed the developed world and will change it even more. But in much of the world, the labor of many people can be had for very very cheap. When you can hire an unlimited number of people for a few dollars a day, which in many developing economies is easy, there is little incentive to automate. In fact there is a disincentive -- you would rather keep everyone working because unemployment leads to unrest. So subsistence economies, developing countries with big rural and agricultural economies plus a big workforce -- they are not automating and have no interest in doing so. The pace at which these places change will remain slow. 3) The article touches on our great struggle ahead to overcome climate change -- as these articles written by humanity's great thinkers always do nowadays. But as the economies under these oligarchs develop, how will we convince them to do climate-friendly things when it would increase the price they pay for energy and slow their rate of growth? Climate studies alone won't do it -- some combination of political pressure and the direct economic impact of climate change might, but they will fight it hard. All this is not really a refutation of the article, which makes plenty of valid points -- but it also makes these rosy predictions about the whole world being rich and automated in two generations' time, which makes sense if you're talking to tech heads all day, but totally ignores the non-tech realities that dictate the lives of most of humanity. The future is not evenly distributed, and the future future will probably be even more uneven.