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The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality.
most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.
I believe liberal democracy is uniquely problematic but rather because I think it is the most successful and most versatile political model humans have so far developed for dealing with the challenges of the modern world.
it might not be appropriate for every society in every stage of development, it has proven its worth in more societies
where "it" refers to liberal democracy
The fascist story explained history as a struggle among different nations, and envisioned a world dominated by one human group
The communist story explained history as a struggle among different classes, and envisioned a world in which all groups are united by a centralized social system that ensures equality even at the price of freedom.
Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.
For example, the replacement of human pilots by drones has eliminated some jobs but created many new opportunities in maintenance, remote control, data analysis, and cybersecurity.
In 2015 the U.S. Air Force lacked sufficient trained humans to fill all these positions, and therefore faced an ironic crisis in manning its unmanned aircraft.
In the First World War it made sense to send millions of raw conscripts to charge machine guns and die in the thousands. Their individual skills mattered little.
We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor.
In addition, no remaining human job will ever be safe from the threat of future automation,
volatility will also make it more difficult to organize unions
“Protect workers, not jobs.”)
post-work societies, post-work economies, and post-work politics.
Some might argue that humans could never become economically irrelevant,
However, it is far from certain that the future economy will need us even as consumers.
most successful ice cream vendors in the world are those that the Google algorithm ranks first—not those that produce the tastiest ice cream.
Many jobs are uninspiring drudgery and are not worth saving. Nobody’s life’s dream is to be a cashier. We should focus instead on providing for people’s basic needs and protecting their social status and self-worth.
universal basic income.
widen the range of human activities that are considered to be “jobs.”
The question, of course, is who would evaluate and pay for these newly recognized jobs?
universal basic services
government might subsidize free education, free healthcare, free transportation, and so forth.
It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise).
the real problem is in defining what “universal” and “basic” actually mean.
developing countries lacking natural resources made economic progress mainly by selling the cheap labor of their unskilled workers.
Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.
To really achieve its goals, universal basic support will have to be supplemented with some meaningful pursuits, ranging from sports to religion.
But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job.
Losing control over our lives, however, is a much scarier scenario.
what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms,
In politics, liberalism believes that the voter knows best.
In economics, liberalism maintains that the customer is always right. It therefore hails free-market
Big Data algorithms: they have lots of glitches, but we have no better alternative.
temptation to rely on algorithms is likely to increase.
algorithms might gain authority because we will learn from experience to trust them on more and more issues, and we will gradually lose our ability to make decisions for ourselves.
The ability to navigate is like a muscle—use it or lose it.
People might argue that algorithms will never make important decisions for us, because important decisions usually involve an ethical dimension, and algorithms don’t understand ethics.
humans all too often forget about their philosophical views and follow their emotions and gut instincts instead.
manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their existing prejudices.
ancient hunter-gatherer bands were still more egalitarian than any subsequent human society, because they had very little property. Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.
just as in the human body not all members are equal—the feet must obey the head—so also in human society equality would bring nothing but chaos.
Governments in both democracies and dictatorships invested heavily in the health, education, and welfare of the masses, because they needed millions of healthy laborers to operate the production lines and millions of loyal soldiers to fight in the trenches.
