The Software Revolution

Disagreements on implementation are real (some on the right want this implemented only as Friedman's negative income tax, which is not a true GBI, and some on the left want a GBI in addition to the current welfare state), but there is still significant agreement, especially over the past few years.

It's more dignifying to give someone a living wage, freeing their time so they can pursue useful work, than it is to waste their time by assigning them a dirt-shoveling make-work job that, in the end, grinds everything around them to a halt.

The size of the world changes - and gets broader - but the mechanism at play, that the concentrated powers of the world fuel each others innovations and those innovations catapult advancement but also introduce huge power vacuums between those nations adopting the new and those nations outside the sphere of influence - something I would not say was missing in the computer revolution, since the adoption of computer technology happened first and is still only pervasive in first world nations. The third world is still late to the party and comes in with fractured infrastructure and access, where systemic access and ubiquity enabled the Internet and a lot of the current revolutions in the first place.

In previous instances, the cost savings made the nations that had them superpowers in their times. The cotton gin is a huge part of why America went from an English vassal to a world power - between the innovations and the raw resources of the Americas, it could propagate empire.

But those profits just made men rich. The cotton, tobacco, industrial, automotive, oil, etc barons were the kings of their times through the innovations and automations of their industries. That has never really changed, those ruling over the industries being modernized always reap unfathomable wealth and power from the enterprise. Their wealth made their country rich, but the laborers still had to find something else to do every time, and up until now we have always had some unskilled menial and physical thing to have most people do. In actuality, we ran into that wall probably seventy years ago in the aftermath of World War 2 - as the US at least rapidly adopted women and minorities into the whole workforce the huge surge of productive labor combined with the green revolution, the reforms of the late industrial giving workers reasonable hours, unions, and power over their lives, plus the fledgling technological revolution that had already produced a lot of wonders (consumer refrigeration, microwaves, clothes washers and dryers, etc) had already crippled the low skill labor market and we collectively adapted by organically injecting superfluous bureaucracy in almost every business and part of life to make up for the work shortage.

Problem is that we did that, became a "service" economy, and are now faced with the obsolescence of busy office work. I can just remember CGPGrey talking about it in Humans Need Not Apply, in how the prime target for automation is not the McDonalds burger flipper but every middle income office worker who can be replaced by software. After bureaucracy, where do we inject the overflow labor of humanity? Or do we finally admit we don't need everyone laboring?

This essay more or less boils down to "technology is awesome, except for the part where it makes the proles restless, someone really ought to figure out some way to fix that." Which is pretty bog-standard 21st century Davos-über-alles capitalist thinking.