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from the how-many-robots-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-lightbulb dept.
Digital technology has been a fantastic creator of economic wealth, particularly in the twenty years since the Internet and World Wide Web were unveiled to the masses. And with non-trivial applications of artificial intelligence (such as Apple's Siri) finally reaching the mainstream consumer market, one is tempted to agree with pundits asserting that the Second Machine Age is just getting underway.
But Yale ethicist Wendell Wallach argues that growth in wealth has been accompanied by an equally dramatic rise in income inequality; for example, stock ownership is now concentrated in the hands of a relative few (though greater than 1 percent). The increase in GDP has not led to an increase in wages, nor in median inflation-adjusted income. Furthermore, Wallach says technology is a leading cause of this shift, as it displaces workers in occupation after occupation more quickly than new career opportunities arise.
This piece led to the latest iteration of the 'will robots take all of our jobs' debate, this time on Business Insider, with Jim Edwards arguing that the jobs lost tended to be of the mindless and repetitive variety, while the increase in productive capacity has led to the creation of many new positions. This repeated earlier cycles of the industrial revolution and will be accelerated in the decades ahead. Edwards illustrated his point with a chart of UK unemployment with a trend line (note: drawn by Edwards) in a pronounced downward direction over the past 30 years. John Tamny made a similar point in Forbes last month.
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 09 2015, @04:23AM
"Thexalon's broad assertion is wrong because I can redirect the conversation into the tiny point I want to make!!!!11"
It's wrong because it's just wrong. There wasn't a sea of "successful" farms getting put out of work by evil developed world agriculture. It was a sea of farmers who barely could grow enough food and had nothing better to do with their labor. Now, they can work with well paying multinational corporations and their supply chains (the euphemistically named "sweat shops") and have far better futures (and food security BTW) than they would have had otherwise. The same thing happen in the US over the 20th Century as it transitioned from a relatively unproductive agrarian society to the largest industrial society in the world.
No one can really dispute my broad assertion, that the world has been getting better for a long time and continues to do so. You ignore powerful evidence to the contrary.
Thank you, Thexalon, for proving that the people arguing minutia against VLM's broad assertions can't even do that correctly.
VLM has yet to provide any evidence for his assertions. The world, trade, and various other concepts which he or she bring up, simply don't work the way the "broad assertions" assert they do. Trade is a huge positive sum activity. People are getting wealthier and living longer. Income inequality is getting better. It's just not getting better as fast in the sliver that is the developed world.
Further, my supposed "minutia" includes the observation that two thirds of the world did a lot better over the past twenty years and that trade is usually beneficial to all parties involved - which should be common economics 101 knowledge.
Finally, what's supposed to be the end game here. If trade is supposed to be bad, then what's going to replace it? How much of our societies are we going to deface and how many people will have to die just because a few people got this idiotic notion that trade was bad or employing people was bad?