4 ms·

The transition was pretty gruesome, so your analogy is not all that reassuring. Nobody thinks we will all die, just that a lot of us will be very poor.

zaroth 12y ago
I have the complete opposite interpretation. Life before was gruesome and today we live in a world of relative plenty if not obvious excess. Reduction of input costs makes us more wealthy not less. How many shirts do you own? How long do you work to afford a lavish bowl of berries and cream?
- sukilot 12y ago
  Not everyone lives your lifestyle. Most of the people who manufacturer your stuff are very poor and live in Asia.
  - tempestn 12y ago
    And yet even most of them are probably better off than the average middle-age peasant.
- facepalm 12y ago
  Of course - I meant the transition, not the final outcome. But we will live in the transition, not in the resulting paradise. For example, think about the native Americans in the US. Not to bash the US, just to illustrate. Millions of them died when settlers from Europe took over. Now living conditions in the US are great, but for the people who got killed in the process it was not so great.
snowwrestler 12y ago
Average global living standards have gone up, not down, during the time period covered by this article. In fact they have never been higher than they are now. Some might say that happened in spite of the economic disruptions caused by technology, but the truth is that it happened because of those disruptions.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  Average global standards may have gone up. The question is this: who really reaped the vast majority of the benefits from productivity improvements? Was it the worker who is doing the work, but doing it much more productively, or was it the few "entrepreneurs" who figured out a way to "monetize" the skyrocketed productivity of those workers? We have the exact same argument with regards to software developers today, who are quite underpaid relative to the actual value they are adding to their employers. Yes, they may be living quite comfortably, but is that all that matters?
  - zaroth 12y ago
    Average global standards have gone up, and not just a little. Orders of magnitude in just the last couple hundred years. Standards will continue to climb increasingly rapidly based on $1.6 trillion of annual R&D, and worth noting that private R&D investment is up to 75% of that (varies by country). I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The question is not, are there a few (0.01%) people who have gotten supremely rich. As long as there is any notion of private property, there are, and always will be, a 1 percent. And a 0.001%. Generally the same people who provide the capital to fund the R&D leading to these advances are the ones who most directly reap the benefit of that R&D. What we suspect is that providing these profit motives is the reason why people are willing to take the risk and make these wonderful things happen in the first place. To paraphrase, capitalism is the worst form of economic system, except for all the rest. It's what we have, and clearly it has worked wonders in just a few hundred years of human history. To your point about developers, what other industry is more open to individual contributors quitting their day job and going to work for themselves? If you're complaining that working for someone else means that you are working for someone else, I don't know what to tell you. You can choose the security of someone else signing your paychecks, or you can go it alone and reap the benefits. What other choice could you possibly hope for? If an employee (or group of employees) captured the entire value that they added, then by definition they would not be worth hiring! Obviously in order to take the risk of hiring an employee and committing to pay them a (substantial) fee a couple times a month for the foreseeable future, you would expect to earn a significant return on that capital when things work out! Besides the fact that the company is fully supporting and directing them in their efforts, and to the extent that is not true you would expect equity. Don't forget, in the vast majority of cases where these things don't work out spectacularly, while the stockholders lose their shirts, we don't ask the employees for a refund!

zaroth 12y ago

I have the complete opposite interpretation. Life before was gruesome and today we live in a world of relative plenty if not obvious excess. Reduction of input costs makes us more wealthy not less. How many shirts do you own? How long do you work to afford a lavish bowl of berries and cream?

sukilot 12y ago
Not everyone lives your lifestyle. Most of the people who manufacturer your stuff are very poor and live in Asia.
- tempestn 12y ago
  And yet even most of them are probably better off than the average middle-age peasant.
facepalm 12y ago
Of course - I meant the transition, not the final outcome. But we will live in the transition, not in the resulting paradise. For example, think about the native Americans in the US. Not to bash the US, just to illustrate. Millions of them died when settlers from Europe took over. Now living conditions in the US are great, but for the people who got killed in the process it was not so great.

snowwrestler 12y ago

Average global living standards have gone up, not down, during the time period covered by this article. In fact they have never been higher than they are now. Some might say that happened in spite of the economic disruptions caused by technology, but the truth is that it happened because of those disruptions.

enraged_camel 12y ago
Average global standards may have gone up. The question is this: who really reaped the vast majority of the benefits from productivity improvements? Was it the worker who is doing the work, but doing it much more productively, or was it the few "entrepreneurs" who figured out a way to "monetize" the skyrocketed productivity of those workers? We have the exact same argument with regards to software developers today, who are quite underpaid relative to the actual value they are adding to their employers. Yes, they may be living quite comfortably, but is that all that matters?
- zaroth 12y ago
  Average global standards have gone up, and not just a little. Orders of magnitude in just the last couple hundred years. Standards will continue to climb increasingly rapidly based on $1.6 trillion of annual R&D, and worth noting that private R&D investment is up to 75% of that (varies by country). I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The question is not, are there a few (0.01%) people who have gotten supremely rich. As long as there is any notion of private property, there are, and always will be, a 1 percent. And a 0.001%. Generally the same people who provide the capital to fund the R&D leading to these advances are the ones who most directly reap the benefit of that R&D. What we suspect is that providing these profit motives is the reason why people are willing to take the risk and make these wonderful things happen in the first place. To paraphrase, capitalism is the worst form of economic system, except for all the rest. It's what we have, and clearly it has worked wonders in just a few hundred years of human history. To your point about developers, what other industry is more open to individual contributors quitting their day job and going to work for themselves? If you're complaining that working for someone else means that you are working for someone else, I don't know what to tell you. You can choose the security of someone else signing your paychecks, or you can go it alone and reap the benefits. What other choice could you possibly hope for? If an employee (or group of employees) captured the entire value that they added, then by definition they would not be worth hiring! Obviously in order to take the risk of hiring an employee and committing to pay them a (substantial) fee a couple times a month for the foreseeable future, you would expect to earn a significant return on that capital when things work out! Besides the fact that the company is fully supporting and directing them in their efforts, and to the extent that is not true you would expect equity. Don't forget, in the vast majority of cases where these things don't work out spectacularly, while the stockholders lose their shirts, we don't ask the employees for a refund!