The Second Socialist Economy

[mzrowan]

I was particularly interested to read this article on the "second economy" -- that of computers talking to computers -- and how it's failing to create jobs for humans. It comes very close to touching on some Deep Thoughts I had a few weeks ago

Comments

[lightcastle]

Headed for dystopia? The world is burning and the lesson the VSPs have learned is that as long as they are better off than the people they can sacrifice, then it doesn't matter.

[wotw]

Well....once upon a time you could get a job
cleaning horse poop off the streets. Or ironing
clothes with backbreakingly heavy flatirons that
were heated continuously over the stove. Or
copying manuscripts by hand. Who today do you
think is substantially worse off because those
jobs have vanished?

It's certainly true that scribes suffered when the
printing press came in, and candlemakers suffered
when we got the electric light bulb. But before
very long, people stopped training to become
scribes or candlemakers; they trained for
something else instead --- and had the advantage
of living in a world where books and lighting
were more affordable.

I'm not sure I see any reason to expect the
future to be much different from the past in this
respect --- new technologies eliminate the need
for old forms of manual labor; the people who
specialized in that sort of labor are hurt by
these changes; a generation later, there are no
such specialists and the technology has improved
life for pretty much everyone.

[lucidite]

Every so often, I get depressed at the state of our world and I wonder how soon it'll self-destruct. And then, someone does something that surprises me. Or then I have to remember that while we still have large portions of our world that still lives in poverty, the percentage keeps dropping.
I hope that it's a bump and that in the long run, we'll continue to move in the right direction.