I don't see these two books as being at odds with each other. I think Pinker's book is a statement about two things: 1.) We need to take a step back and look a

I don't see these two books as being at odds with each other. I think Pinker's book is a statement about two things: 1.) We need to take a step back and look at what we have and really appreciate how departed our current luxuries are from the entire history of humanity. Many of the issues described in Yang's book are about how menial repetitive jobs are disappearing from the market. There is an obvious downside in that these are lost jobs that might not be replaceable to the people of those capabilities, but the upside of this is that we have removed the need for people to do menial repetitive jobs; by no means a minor upside. A human's whole life used to be consumed by the necessity to do this work, the problem we have to deal with now is simply going to be in terms of how we handle the surplus of time we've freed from the human workforce. This is a much better problem to have, strategies like UBI are generally well received even by the staunchest libertarian types in recognition of technological advancement. 2.) We need to acknowledge what got us to where we are. Enlightenment values; justice, science, rationality, and most importantly, liberty. There was an ideological battle last century that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, and I tend to agree with Pinker's ilk that the recognition of this being a consequence of deviating from Enlightenment values is extremely important, and not nearly as accepted only a few decades later is a cause for concern. I don't think that Yang's arguments for the need to consider UBI is something that Pinker would disagree with at all. I don't think that Pinker's assertion that rationality and liberty have gotten us to where we are now, and the last centuries of human innovation have objectively lifted humans worldwide across many dimensions is something incompatible with Yang's message.