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His last comment on the Internet is relevant to Hacker News.. someone asked him about unemployment due to automation and the rise of technology[1]: "If machine

• tim333 9y ago
  We have rising inequality and also about 137,000 less people miserably poor each day. It's complicated. https://www.cato.org/blog/what-newspapers-reported-real-news-about-human-progress https://www.cato.org/blog/what-newspapers-reported-real-news...
  • cft 9y ago
    As Thatcher has famously said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t37Oy8dD-U4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t37Oy8dD-U4
    • knuththetruth 9y ago
      Let’s please honor the man and not link to her wretchedness. Steven Hawking hated Thatcher and regretted never having the chance to run over her toes[0] [0] “Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind,” page 91.
      • jwdunne 9y ago
        It seems his spent his final days fighting her legacy - a backdoor attempt at privatisation in the NHS by her party. Thatcher should never be mentioned in a thread dedicated to his legacy. He wouldn't have got this far if she had her way.
        • DanBC 9y ago
          There's nothing back door about it. It's an open and transparent defunding of the NHS to push a privatisation agenda. Privatisation already exists within the NHS, and the programme is already well under way.
          • jwdunne 9y ago
            I meant with regards to ACOs. The public have no idea what they are. They sound public. Stephen Hawking was fighting the government on this in court when he died. I'm guessing you know that. As for the past 8 years, it's obvious what the Tories are trying to do. Privatisation is the 'perfect solution' when public approval for the NHS hits the floor. No other way for them to do it. Political suicide. Bastards.
        • fiftyacorn 9y ago
          Stephen Hawkings stance on the NHS is an important part of his legacy. Any time there has been moves to further privatise he has always came out against it, and it has been hard for the government to argue against him
  • ekianjo 9y ago
    Inequality is not that bad when everyone is getting richer even at the very bottom. Inequality speech is the tree hiding the forest.
    • coldtea 9y ago
      Only people have not been getting richer for a long while in some places, including the US. If anything the opposite. https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america That's difficult for those in upper middle class jobs to comprehend though, but in less fortunate areas and slices of the population, it's everyday life.
      • ekianjo 9y ago
        The world is not limited to the US.
  • Bud 9y ago
    Cato Institute is about as trustable for facts about poverty as my cat is for facts about quantum mechanics. Here's a rebuttal. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/12/what-steven-pinker-gets-wrong-about-economic-inequality-and-the-enlightenment/?utm_term=.004c960f9ead https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/1...
    • sigil 9y ago
      This “rebuttal” itself contains no facts, and more specifically, none that refute the 137,000/day figure in the parent.
• coldtea 9y ago
  >* "If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."* Which coincidentally was a basic insight behind Karl Marx's communism -- not referring to the regimes it inspired, but to the idea that with the advancements in capitalistic production, distribution will be key to ensure a fair society. In the end, a powerful 0.1% that can produce anything they want with robots, can use a small number of humans, say 0.9%, for service and such necessary jobs, and will have no use for the rest 99% of humanity -- which could be let to sort it out in slums. Also the idea behind lots of dystopian fiction -- from Soylent Green to Elysium, and the reality in many places in the third/developing world, where there are more people than jobs needed. Suggested reading: https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Slums-Mike-Davis/dp/1784786616 https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Slums-Mike-Davis/dp/1784786616
  • sake 9y ago
    Piketty also did good job in providing proof that the discourse Marx's capital started is still relevant today: wealth keeps concentrating and that will undermine the whole premise of democracy. “When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” ― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century This outcome is probably clear to anyone who has been paying attention, but the power of Piketty's book is in the way it lays out mathematical proof using pile of historical data as evidence. The response to Piketty's book from ideological opposition have ranged from "So what?" to more valid attempts at asking theoretical questions about the validity of r > g, but nothing exactly that comes close to debunking the core thesis.
    • coldtea 9y ago
      It's difficult to get people to appreciate Piketty's book when their jobs depend on not appreciating it...
• deleted 9y ago
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