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Google posted the video of my talk from their “Solve for X” brainspa retreat. It’s a subject I first spoke about in 2010, and I was asked to introduce a global problem to brainstorm better solutions. My talk was dedicated to income inequality.

What if the nature of technology leads to an accelerating rich-poor gap that is not self-rectifying?

What if technology raises the bottom of the pyramid for all, and democratizes upward mobility, yet at the same time, transforms it from a pyramid to a conical spike — where an ever shrinking percentage of the population controls an even-growing percentage of an information-economy embedded with winner-take-all network effects and power laws?

In short, I ask if the ironic byproduct of erasing the digital divide is a further acceleration of the rich-poor gap?

What happens to peoples who opt out of the vector of progress, as the sea change of destiny becomes the drumbeat of decades, instead of centuries? What is the nature of work in the future? And how can our culture and the very fabric of society co-evolve with our technologies during the transition?

17 responses to “The Shadow of Technology”

  1. nimosm Avatar
    nimosm

    The rich owning shares in successful companies is a good thing for reasonably obvious reasons. What is required for a vibrant economy is for them and everyone else to pay a good bit of tax on their income. What is spent on consumption should be taxed reasonably heavily.

    Basically money travels in one direction, upwards, from the poor the rich. This is a feature of central bank controlled capitalism. The return journey is via the government who taxes and spends. Of course it is also important that workers enjoy the benefits of successful businesses. Henry Ford figured that is he payed his workers enough they would be able to buy his cars. Elon Musk is relying on something like this so that he will not be alone on Mars.

    The ability of a wide swath of the population being able to afford to consume a large range of high quality goods and services should be the definition of a rich country with a vibrant economy.

    If all the money ends up in the hands of a few this will not happen.

    Reply
  2. scleroplex Avatar
    scleroplex

    great question

    Reply
  3. seatonsnet Avatar
    seatonsnet

    Great talk! Could you get some decent English subtitles on it, a la Khan Academy? (the automatic subtitles suck). There are some Spanish technological mavens I know who would benefit greatly from seeing it. Accompanied by correct, properly transcribed, English subtitles they would have no problem following it as their English is good and your exposition is wonderfully clear, however… you talk so damn fast, even I have trouble catching up.

    As to the subject itself, I really like your take on it, coming from someone up to his neck in technology and eating from it, the political sensitivity has real merit.

    I have been chewing over all of this for a long time, but being a sort of mathematically challenged anti-geek, I approach it differently. Right now I am "concerned" about a concentration of power, at the same time accompanied by a diffusion of ownership.

    One of the great paradoxes in all this for me is that who actually owns the great corporations of today is not very clear. For example a man named J.P. Morgan no longer owns JP Morgan, it is a publicly traded company and no one institution or individual owns more than 4.00% of this financial mastodon. A great bulk of its shares are changing hands on a daily, even on a moment to moment, basis. Ownership and with it accountability has become gaseous… This I believe was one of the fatal flaws of the soviet system.

    We have a great centralization of economic power of unclear ownership tied by lobbies to political power enabling the corporate managers to craft laws to the benefit of all concerned: lobbyists, their clients and the politicians, but not to the benefit of the public (sanitized name for “The People”). If we look at the control that is accumulated in this system, from this point of view, we see that we already have a “planned economy” that would rival the soviet version, but not exactly planned for our benefit. There is even a "nomenklatura" of the previously mentioned, highly paid managers, who run everything, and often move from corporation to corporation and even from industry to industry or from public "service" to the "private" sector. To compound the problem, much of what I call the nomenklatura of "really existing capitalism" appears to operate on the "By Then I’ll be Gone" principal.

    Actually instead of the capitalism we think we have, what it appears we do have now is a sort of socialism of managers.

    Reply
  4. Peter Atwood Avatar
    Peter Atwood

    It struck me, as I listened, that your description of the accelerating pace of technological advancement contains an answer to your question whether the wealth distribution pyramid might actually be more of a tall, narrow spike. If those higher up in the pyramid have better access to technology and better resources to exploit it, then technological advances will disproportionately raise them up compared to people lower down. So while technology is raising the floor of the pyramid–improving the living standard of all–it could also be the force that is shifting the wealth pyramid from a shallow broad-based triangle to the tall narrow spike of income disparity.

    If this is true, one optimist consideration is that technological advances are also reducing the resources (wealth) needed to take advantage of them–the tools needed to start a business are becoming less and less capital dependent and simply idea dependent–and so over time the extra leverage accruing to those higher up in the pyramid is diminishing (assuming access to education and information is distributed fairly, not a small if).

    On the pessimist side, the standard behavior of many large successful corporations is to use their dominant market position to deter and block new market entrants. I see this in aspects of the current copyright wars, where copyright is being used as a justification for more and tighter control over the "series of tubes" that enable disruption.

    Reply
  5. seatonsnet Avatar
    seatonsnet

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/peteratwood] Check this out: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/the-s...

    Reply
  6. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/peteratwood] and [http://www.flickr.com/photos/48331433@N05] — I you would like Larry Lessig’s books, from Code to Republic Lost respectively.

    P.S. TechCrunch just posted on the implications for employment :

    "The great tech revolution of the last 30 years is finally beginning to metastasize into every other human domain — in other words, software is eating the world, endangering almost every job there is. I argued a few weeks ago that this means America has now hit peak jobs."

    P.S.S. as covered by TechCrunchThe coming Tech Crunch

    Reply
  7. seatonsnet Avatar
    seatonsnet

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson]Thanks for the links!
    It is not hard to imagine a world now, where anyone with an IQ below 120 would be condemned to stoop labor, gardening, babysitting, care-giving, flipping burgers or prostitution. Pfui!

    Reply
  8. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    and Al Gore just did a blog post for Huff Po on Worsening Income Inequality with his trademark video presentation of the data.

    Reply
  9. Wonderlane Avatar
    Wonderlane

    is not are they?, it’s they are. they don’t want to be connected.

    Reply
  10. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    P.S. I presented this idea to a Silicon Valley audience, and by electronic voting, they agreed 70/30%.

    The votes
    Trend Total Results

    Reply
  11. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist, the server mill society with the info capitalist. So Marx would be pleased since ever fed by
    the irrepressible curiosity of the scientist and inventor, stimulated
    by the unfailing acquisitive passion-that passion which will
    outlive capitalism as we know it and all other systems now
    imagined by dreamers-technology marches in seven-league boots
    from one ruthless, revolutionary conquest to another, tearing
    down old factories and industries, flinging up new processes with
    terrifying rapidity – like Facebook.

    Reply
  12. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Yes, this is what it feels like to be subsumed by evolution, by a higher level process for which we are merely players. Much like the ant in the colony.

    Reply
  13. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    Therefore optimism is cowardice and just more opium with strong tech determinism leading to the natural evolution of global immiseration. Hmmm, seems like some people have thought of these issues in great detail before. We are all helpless when it comes to dealing not only with technology but those few who are masters of it as well as the old fashioned super wealthy elite and the nations they tenuously call home. Now of course the larger planet is similarly at the deterministic evolutionary mercy of these inexorable historical processes. Processes and agents who will structure everything in a beneficial manner with giving pledges and environmental ethical behaviours for the rest of all life on earth.

    Reply
  14. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    [https://www.flickr.com/photos/24270806@N06] Tech looking for love? In all the wrong places. Like tech guys ‘n gals a headed to the cheatin side of orbital motel launch town. They done it outta love – not fer money. But that shure helped some. When it wuz for them good time giving pledges, south a Brownsville, where the real work gets done..

    Reply
  15. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    [https://www.flickr.com/photos/24270806@N06] Sorry, but the idea of some of these California tech people at home in their new Bownsville TX SpaceX digs due to manifest tech destiny I found amusing. Don’t head over to Matamoros looking for luv with those cannibal cults of Satan runnin loose there boys – we didn’t quite round ’em all up last time they cut loose. That little madrina was a real bad one. Plus the idea of billionaire giving pledges in Country-Western context, like something out of Ray Price….
    Giving pledges …..for the good times….laaaaaaayyy yer head upon my pillow …. for the big check……

    Reply
  16. scleroplex Avatar
    scleroplex

    manifest destiny is always self-servingly hilarious :-))

    Reply
  17. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    So this entire presentation is looking at technology as if it has evolved and exists now independent of the financial and social systems making these vast and fast rewards possible. In reality, the financial structures – along with the corporate economic system, are the much more dominant primary driving factors than any technology for the gap problems and more. Technology is of course still just the means to the ends – which are obtained by and propagated by control of capital. That control then typically disposes of technology after obtaining it – or in the cases of hedge funds, traders, investment banks, …, never bothers with any tech creation, innovation, manufacturing or anything other than financial activity and growth or destruction if it is profitable or expedient. This is the gist of a big part of what T Piketty is trying to elaborate. And that is very much dependent on the social structure that allows it. The structure that inevitably chooses the inheritability of inequality. So like the Elizabeth Warren nobody gets rich on their own in the US, nobody independently tech innovates to riches either. Especially since the argument is being made that all tech innovation is based on combination of previous tech. Also, there seems to be an embrace of an iron law in tech determinist destiny terms that justifies all kinds of destructive labor practices and structures in the home nations – another interesting redux of Marx / Engels in global techno capitalist context.

    Reply

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