The Software Revolution

This doesn't really make sense. The industrial revolution more or less replaced lots of relatively unproductive jobs with a smaller amount of much more productive jobs. There might have been more work, but individual people were doing more work as well.

> Technology provides leverage on ability and luck, and in the process concentrates wealth and drives inequality. I think that drastic wealth inequality is likely to be one of the biggest social problems of the next 20 years.

Wealth inequality is already a huge problem, and has been for a long time. I don't see how it's going to be worse in the next 20 years, given in a lot of countries (China, India, etc.) we're seeing wealth flow to, or be created by, a growing middle class. A lot of the 'Occupy' movement was somewhat misguided - the percentage of people in the United States or Australia or the UK who are in the 1% worldwide is perhaps as high as 20% or 30%.

Software, rather than hindering, may very well help people in rapidly developing nations generate wealth because the economic barrier to entry for software businesses is comparatively low compared to other types of businesses.

I'm also a little concerned that it seems as though many people believe wealth redistribution is the only way to make it more equal. Why can't we create wealth in some places? As far as I understand, wealth is not finite.

Once we get to the point of widespread AI-driven automation, then we'll have a real economic problem. It won't be just because people can't generate wealth - people may very well begin to lose wealth. But this is a 50-year problem, not a 20-year one.

To support this claim, once I was in an AI group at the IBM Watson lab in Yorktown Heights, NY. We published a stack of papers; I was one of three of us that gave a paper at an AAAI IAAI conference at Stanford. My view of the good papers at that conference was that they were just good computer-aided problem solving as in applied math, applied science, and engineering and owed essentially nothing to AI. Later I took one of our major problems we were trying to solve with AI, stirred up some new stuff in mathematical statistics, got a much better solution (and did publish the paper in Information Sciences). That experience and observation since is the support for my claim. Sure, this support is just my opinion, and YMMV.

Instead of AI with a lot of economic value, I would suggest that closer in is a scenario of people managing computers managing computers ... managing computers doing the work.

And what work will those computers do? Sure, first cut, the usual -- food, clothing, shelter, transportation, education, medical care.

So, maybe John Deere will have a worker computer on a tractor doing the spring plowing, the summer cultivating, and the fall harvesting. Then food can get cheaper. Maybe before the plowing a tractor will traverse the ground, take an analyze soil samples for each, say, square yard, and apply appropriate chemicals.

Maybe GM will have car factories with robots driven by computers doing essentially all the work. Then cars can get cheaper.

Maybe Weyerhaeuser or Toll Brothers will have pre-fab house factories with robots driven by computers doing essentially all the work, self-driving trucks delivering the big boxes, computer driven earth movers doing the site preparation, computer driven robots putting up the forms for the concrete basement walls, computer driven concrete pumpers inserting the concrete from self-driving concrete trucks, and houses will get a lot cheaper.

And the computers get cheaper.

So, right, we're talking deflation. So, have the government print some money and spend it on K-12 and college education, guaranteed annual income, parks, beautiful highways, etc. Print enough money to reverse the deflation and hire a lot of people. Those people buy the cheap food, cars, and houses, have children, and fill the classrooms of the additional education.

What education? Sure: How the heck to develop all those robots, managing computers, worker computers, computer driven farm machinery, car factories, pre-fab house factories, etc.

Or, as computers eliminate jobs, basically the result is deflation, and that's the easiest thing in the world to stop, and the solution is the nicest thing in the world -- just print money to get us out of deflation.

We already know what people want from the famous one word answer "More".

Computers should be a blessing, not a curse.

I think we're already seeing it form today and it's infancy doesn't detract from it's long-term danger.

Why not both? We certainly have all kinds of societies on earth today. What makes you think we won't have areas that are highly progressive but also areas that are extremely sadistic in the treatment of their people?