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February 13 - March 3, 2020
We can already see that a lot of the tasks that technological progress has left for human beings to do today are the “non-routine” ones clustered in poorly paid roles at the bottom of the labor market, bearing little resemblance to the sorts of fulfilling activities that many imagined as being untouched by automation. There is no reason to think the future will be any different.
The fact that inequality levels are so different among countries, even when countries share similar levels of development, highlights the important roles that national policies and institutions play in shaping inequality.”51
Inequality, then, is not inevitable. And the same is true for the economic imbalances that technological unemployment would bring about. We have the power to shape and constrain these economic divisions—if we want to.
The idea that education can indefinitely solve the employment problems created by technological progress is pervasive and largely unchallenged;
it is also, as we will see in the second part of this chapter, a big mistake.
When Sebastian Thrun taught his computer science class to 200 Stanford students, and then to 160,000 non-Stanford students online, the top Stanford student ranked a measly 413th. “My God,” cried Thrun on seeing this, “for every great Stanford student, there’s 412 amazingly great, even better students in the world.”19
Harari was arguing, rightly, that some people may cease to be of economic value: unable to put their human capital to productive use, and unable to reeducate themselves to gain other useful skills. He was not claiming that they would end up without any value as human beings. That we so often conflate economic value and human value shows just how important the work that we do (or are seen by others to do) can be.
In Europe, for instance, the last two big falls in inequality were caused by the Black Death plague pandemic in the fourteenth century, and then by the slaughter and destruction of the two world wars in the twentieth.
the Big State will have to perform two main roles. It will have to significantly tax those who manage to retain valuable capital and income in the future. And it will have to figure out the best way to share the money that is raised with those who do not.
First, the Big State will have to tax workers whose human capital increases in value with technological progress.
Second, the Big State will have to tax the owners of traditional capital.
The threat, in short, is the “privatization” of our political lives.53
have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”
to take activities that the invisible hand of the labor market had marked down as worthless, and, with the visible hand of the community, to hold them up as being valuable and important.
The economic problem that haunted our ancestors, that of making the economic pie large enough for everyone to live on, will fade away, and three new problems will emerge to take its place. First, the problem of inequality, of working out how to share this economic prosperity with everyone in society. Second, the problem of political power, of determining who gets to control the technologies responsible for this prosperity and on what terms. And third, the problem of meaning, of figuring out how to use this prosperity not just to live without work but to live well.
The looming problems—of inequality, power, and meaning—are just the consequences of this unprecedented prosperity. They are the price we pay for the material abundance that some of us (though as yet not all of us) have been fortunate to enjoy. And in my view, it is a price worth paying.
