It's the government's job to redistribute wealth and income to the needy, and provide safety nets and retraining opportunities for people whose industries have been disrupted. Not Silicon Valley businesses.
I don't believe in companies because they think in the short-term. The average life-expectancy for companies in the S&P is 18 years.[1] Over our lifetimes, we will see endless companies live and die, each only seeking profit for the next quarter, year, or decade.
Believing that the role of companies (and especially Silicon Valley businesses) should be profit-seeking without any thought to empathy is like shooting ourselves in the temporal foot. What should our long-term strategies be? What company is going to care about you when you retire, or be thoughtful about the next generation's well-being?
It's the most idiotic of strategies that would invest in a few long-term strategies (governments, cooperatives, (a few) non-profits) and almost all short-term strategies without thinking about how they balance.
[1] https://www.innosight.com/insight/creative-destruction-whips...
We need universal basic income to soften the impact of the rise of automation in the workforce. The problem is that the same people influencing government to write policies that are clearly against the middle class also control the media, and they seem to have just convinced a majority of US voters to vote for a government that will create more income inequality by cutting taxes for the wealthy.
In a masterful stroke, now the policy makers pulling the strings are using the media to blame silicon valley for creating these problems. As if Facebook's news feed is the sole cause of the decimation of the middle class that has been happening for about 40 years now...
People need to feel useful. Universal basic income doesn't give that to people by itself.
Are we conceding that only government can solve certain problems?
An alternative way to approach this, which the author of the article could also consider, is how might we, as technologists, build companies that help solve this problem?
For example, our country will have 3.5 M truckers (the most common profession in the US and in 46 of the 50 US States) out of jobs within 10 years due to automated trucking.
Option A: We cheer at the success of the automated trucking industry and ignore the impact (the 19th century robber barron approach)
Option B: We say "government clean up our mess" (the 21st century liberal approach)
Option C: We build companies, or organizations, that educate and employ those out of work truckers. (??)
Assuming we care about time periods longer than tomorrow, we cannot ignore the societal impacts of the companies and products we build. These cultural externalities are real; similar to the environmental externalities of the industrial revolution.
Its time for the entire tech community to decide what role our industry will play in society. We have a choice about if we want to be part of the solution - or just ignore it and wait for the coming societal chaos.
Without them trying to make this effort, and the common man fearing the gaze of the innovation beast, governments will have to act - and not necessarily by transition those affected into positions where they can still be secure, but by stifiling the innovation by actively targeting the catalysts of these changes with laws and regulations and hoops upon hoops to jump through.
This is the problem.
The difference between the army of geeks powering silicon valley and other industries is that the SV people don't realize that they are cogs in the wheel. The optimism and hope of the late 90s is gone.
The "magic" is at an inflection point and is tipping towards becoming a menace. When SV gets "disrupted" in 10 years, either by an earthquake or some group of rich plutocrats somewhere else, the popular reaction is probably going to be a big "fuck you".
The type of thinking you just espoused leads to sweatshops, environmental destruction, and corporate fraud.
We all have a responsibility to show empathy to others. Anyone who tries to hide behind the corporate shield of "it's just my job and fiduciary responsibility" should be shown the door.
However, I do see it as a business failing. Dislocations in the job market and other social and economic disruptions in middle America are business opportunities in their own right. Like the old schtick from SWOT analysis about turning threats into opportunities. For example, automation in factories will lead to laid off factory workers. They will need training for new jobs, perhaps via online courses/certifications. Providing those would be one example of such an opportunity. There are almost certainly many more such opportunities, upon which not even the slightest fraction of the intellectual might of Silicon Valley has been brought to bear.
If a general sense of duty doesn't motivate SV business to address the issue, perhaps the dim foreshadowing of pitchfork-wielding hoards streaming from the heartlands to the coasts will. Millions of unemployed truck drivers, restaurant servers, and factory workers will not idly stand by while falling into an economic ruin rendered ever more stark by the excessive accumulation of wealth in Silicon Valley. An awareness of opportunities for business growth in less prosperous regions could help prevent that.
Lack of exposure to economic realities elsewhere in the country is one of the chief dangers of a highly insulated, highly centralized tech center like SV. How we address that risk is a hard question. Empathy may not be the ideal term or tool for facilitating the flow of information between SV and other, less thriving communities across the country, but it's at least a first order approximation of the deficit.