Reflections on the new Machine Age — technology, inequality and the economy

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The jobs of scribes… at the future of work gathering that I hosted at work. (background below)

Opening: “Technology is driving an economic transformation. The effects on wealth and income are already significant, and emerging technologies promise greater effects in the coming decade. While the economic pie is bigger than ever, wages for the median worker in America and other advanced nations have stagnated, increasing inequality. Not everyone is participating in our economy’s bounty, and many of those left behind are becoming angry or disillusioned. With more powerful technologies available than ever before, the challenge before us is to create a better society than ever before.”

Some comments, without attribution:
“We have an aging society. Mature people and societies want to get rid of risk. There are huge economic costs to decreasing risk.”

On the risk of AI: “If current trends continue, people are going to rise up before the machines.”

“When thinking about education for all, you want your competitors and the people you fight wars against to be educated. The alternative is ISIS.”

Something that occurred to me midway: many of the new jobs in the new economy (like Uber drivers and Mechanical Turkers) are at the edge of automation, and thus, are ever so ephemeral against the march of Moore’s Law.

We hope to pull a lot of it together into an open letter. On the whiteboard, we started with the 200-year endgame and pondered utopian and dystopian futures, long past the debates on transition times (e.g., robots can do anything physical better than a human by then). And we tried to come up with business/gov’t/social movement ideas to address the path dependence of where we are today and were we hope we can go.

We explored democratizing vectors in the near term (education, broadband, fluidity (lifelong credentialing, immigration, etc.) and for the longer term, distribution vectors (basic wage, taxes) since, in the endgame, global democratization within an information economy will ironically further accelerate the rich-poor gap. Everyone will have access to the American Dream, writ large, but it will feel like the lottery. And, within many countries, like the U.S., the prior winners of the lottery run the lottery. This does not sound like a firm foundation for trust in the system.

11 responses to “Reflections on the new Machine Age — technology, inequality and the economy”

jurvetson

Mar 14, 2015 at 4:36 am

Mitch Kapor holding court with Vinod with and surprise guest, Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom.

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jurvetson

Mar 14, 2015 at 5:37 pm

Most of the whiteboard is readable at full size. Here are the parts hidden by the people:

Government/Policy change ideas from the center of the board:The boxes tagged ideas for democratization, and the circles for redistribution.

Next steps in blue, starting on the far left:

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sbove

Mar 15, 2015 at 5:07 am

Incredible group.

Fascinating observations:

"many of the new jobs in the new economy (like Uber drivers and Mechanical Turkers) are at the edge of automation, and thus, are ever so ephemeral against the march of Moore’s Law."

"Everyone will have access to the American Dream, writ large, but it will feel like the lottery. And, within many countries, like the U.S., the prior winners of the lottery run the lottery. This does not sound like a firm foundation for trust in the system."

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jurvetson

Mar 16, 2015 at 2:12 pm

Thanks. Life thrives at the edge. At phase boundaries. And at the edge of automation in this case. This edge inexorably marches uphill, as do the new employment opportunities. But what is the slope? Will it be exponential, as yet another refraction of humanity’s compounding capacity to compute?

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aeroculus

Mar 17, 2015 at 1:03 am

Sounds like a great & timely discussion.

Evolutionary metaphors abound.

"Technology is driving an economic transformation. The effects on wealth and income are already significant, and emerging technologies promise greater effects in the coming decade. While the economic pie is bigger than ever, wages for the median worker in America and other advanced nations have stagnated, increasing inequality. Not everyone is participating in our economy’s bounty, and many of those left behind are becoming angry or disillusioned."

Punctuated equilibrium, rather than gradualism, immediately comes to mind. Technology manifests as a selective pressure; the ‘prize’ is reproductive fitness via better wages & quality of life. Bottlenecks restrict marginalized communities (and others) without access to resources needed to thrive. When large technology transfer ‘events’ occur via access to resources, tools, education, and the like, global dynamics shift, rather rapidly (ie. evolution by ‘jerks’). Such rapid shifts, place those at the margins in a vulnerable position. Evolutionary tipping points (see George Sugihara & Lord Robert May) may be more appropriate.

“We have an aging society. Mature people and societies want to get rid of risk. There are huge economic costs to decreasing risk.”

Accepting, and preparing for, risk may be a better approach for society writ large. Robustness wins.

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Josh Thompson

Mar 24, 2015 at 2:40 am

Glad to see you’re still deliberating on these grand problems and looking for the next steps. Keep it up.

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jgury

Jun 5, 2015 at 9:33 pm

I think we can safely assume none of these points originated in the Noam Chomsky lounge at MIT – or appear in an article by Evgeny Morozov.
A more whitepaper-like whitepaper from Brookings…
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/02/1...

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jurvetson

Jun 6, 2015 at 12:11 am

Here’s the Open Letter and WSJ summary.

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jgury

Jun 7, 2015 at 2:08 pm

So let’s see. This is rejecting strict technological determinism but obviously does not tie in capitalism like Marx. Marx of course viewed capitalism as well as the technology in terms of the historical progression from the feudal era. With the famous: The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. They are historical and transitory products. Updating that would be: The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist, the cloud server mill the society with giving pledge technologists on missions to Mars. That is technological existentialism in absurdist form. Meaning, clinging to technology as a general solution is as absurd as clinging to immortality. Plus, there is no exit from the fact that the combination of capitalism, technology and the social structure of nation states is completely unsustainable on multiple levels – either destroying the planet or producing global immiseration and dystopias as best case dismal science outcomes. So the ‘Rational Optimist’ makes as much sense as his logic of climate science denial.

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jurvetson

Aug 17, 2019 at 7:37 pm

Followup meetings, at Stanford HAI and a recent dinner

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jurvetson

Aug 17, 2019 at 7:43 pm

and going back, I first starting questioning the role of technology in growing inequality at SIEPR in 2010 and then made my first talk on it at Google Solve for Xwhere I ask if the ironic byproduct of erasing the digital divide is a further acceleration of the rich-poor gap?

And presented this idea to a Silicon Valley audience (debating other VCs), and by electronic voting, they agreed 70/30%. The votes
And brainstormed solutions, like free healthcare for all at X-Prize Visioneering 2014 and Google’s i4j Summit in 2015and then contributed a chapter to a 2016 bookwith the provocative opening: "Let’s go far enough in the future where no one will debate the sweeping transition of time. There are infinite possible paths to this distant future, but we can imagine reasonable endpoints. This future will look like much of human history prior to the industrial and agricultural revolutions, where serfs and slaves did most of the labor-intensive work in the city-state economies. But while we hope the arc of the moral universe continues to bend towards justice, there will be a new paradigm in master and slave relationship between man and machine. The slaves of the future will be our machines."

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