Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
"Why do you care?"
"It doesn't impact me."
Uh, not what I asked, except I guess it is.
|
That was a bit flippant. But you framed the question oddly. It's not about "caring" as much as it is about predicting certain dystopian outcomes we might seek to avoid.
It's kind of like climate change. We know it's accelerating and it's going to cause huge problems, and yet we do little about it, and will likely never do enough until it's a calamity. But we have spotted the issue. We've gotten past the denying stage. When we do not act to adequately address it now, we're making a decision to deal with the consequences.
Tech's unique displacement of labor without creation of new industries compatible with the skill sets of that disrupted labor such that they could absorb that labor (meaning the labor is in most instances permanently obsolete) is something some of us see coming. But then some of us argue, citing Adam Smith, or some archaic economic "law" (there are very few of those, btw) that new jobs will always be developed that will replace all of the old ones. We have to get past that argument, just as we had to get past climate denial.
So if I "care" about anything, it would be this: Seeing the debate move to the next phase, the more interesting one that comes after denial has ended. The one where we examine the possibility of Keynes' "leisure dividend," or "leisure lifestyle" becoming a real thing. Ian Bremmer, a very lucid thinker, seems to be on the same page with me in terms of retiring the old argument that tech will bring more than adequate replacement jobs if we just give it enough time.
