The Software Revolution

This elevator didn't need an operator. Especially considering it was one elevator among several other operator-less elevators.

There are useless jobs everywhere though, including San Francisco. Was this an older building with a manually operated elevator? That would make more sense.

I find this point interesting and wonder about it sometimes: does making a movie count as "stuff?" An operating system? A novel? I can see good arguments for both sides and am not asking the question antagonistically. Even among things that unambiguously "stuff"—like cars—much of their value now comes in the form of software.

The real issue may be Baumol's Cost Disease. Stuff is cheaper because of efficiency but services (teaching, doctoring) is very expensive because it isn't. Tyler Cowen discusses extensively the hard-to-automate areas in The Great Stagnation, which is worth reading.

There is a case for skipping over the technological changes that shifted the slave societies of Greece and Rome to the feudal societies of medieval Europe.

You can't really make one for an important shift 40,000 years before the agricultural revolution. We went from a world without cave paintings to one with them. From a world without venus figurines and other carvings to one with one. With sweeping technological changes in hunting and fishing instruments and so forth. It's the second most important technological revolution ever, if not the first. If fishing is wrapped up with the human brain modifying into its modern form, wouldn't it be the most important?

Note that each revolution had a corresponding revolutionary change to political systems, family structures and society. With the agricultural revolution we had the end of primitive communism and hunter-gatherer societies and the rise of surplus, class systems and slave societies. Much of the earliest literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh is on how to catch and keep slaves.

With the rise of capitalism we saw the fading of Catholicism and the rise of Protestantism and the "Protestant work ethic". We also saw the end of monarchies and the rise of liberal democracies. The bourgeoisie and proletariat of the time united to overthrow these old systems, but soon began facing off against one another, which is pretty much the history of the 20th century, or if we look at the election of old euro-communists in Greece last month, perhaps the 21st.

The famous old definition of economics in our capitalist economy by Robbins is "Economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses". Scarcity is the bedrock of modern economic analyses - of utility, of supply and demand, of price.

What scarcity is there when someone films a movie, or writes a book or magazine article, or records an audio track, and with the press of a button can fly off to billions of Android and iPhone devices? Or writes an app and flings it across the world as soon as it hits the App Store or Google Play? Or sends code to Github, which someone in Bulgaria patches, which someone in Brazil patches, which someone in Japan then uses in a product they're putting out, glued together to some other framework on Github?

This is the end of scarcity. The most well-paid modern workers are those who produce commodities which are not scarce. That is if we can call these products commodities - a non-scarce commodity is something of a contradiction.

These revolutionary technological changes in production, at the base, will reverberate through the superstructure of political systems, families and societies. The old superstructure is still trying to keep down or even kill the new one - NSA spying. DMCA letters. David Cameron's great firewall for porn in England. IP and patent lawsuits. The recent New York Times article with investors questioning why Google is building self-driving cars. Aaron Swartz's suicide, when trying to open up taxpayer-funded research which is locked down and privatized by now irrelevant Elsevier. Telcos using their government granted monopolies to try to harm budding businesses.

Revolutions in production lead to revolutions in the relations of production. In the twentieth century, blue collar workers like railroad engineers and factory mechanics had their hands on the engines running the economy. As technology and AI causes more and more unemployment for people who can't find the derivative of 5x, de facto, if not de jure, power of production goes to those who are rack mounting cloud servers, or rolling out new web site builds.