Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
There is nothing about Silicon Valley that has any less "empathy" than many non-tech organizations. If the financial incentive structure runs against this ideal of "empathy", it happens and is bound to happen. End of story.
The empathy vacuum is real in finance, politics, health insurance, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, law, law enforcement, and virtually any other large bureaucracy in which individual actions are rewarded in spite of impersonal behavior. At the end of the day, people are rewarded for what they bring to the economy, not the mental happiness of a populace, which is not always quantifiable or captured by the market.
Technological progress may be an issue that contributes to this so-called empathy vacuum, but all industries that cause negative externalities (in cyclical or permanent unemployment, or pollution, or wealth disparity, etc) are just as much a problem.
If we want to have this debate, that's great. It needs to happen, especially as our economy ends up with an increasing human labor supply as it's automated away or sent to places where labor is cheaper. The track we are on now will likely end up with massive Gini coefficients worldwide, a ruling class and a noted underclass based upon who was able to achieve capital accumulation while their labor was still worth something.
The problem I have here is that the New Yorker isn't even going for this debate in this article. They are complaining about something and pointing a finger at but a sliver of an issue that they are also a part of.
The right tech startup can sometimes have the power to destroy an entire industry all at once and make its workers obsolete. So trying to cultivate empathy in startup founders deserves special attention.
(In online arguments about this I've seen over the years, an econ student comes along to talk about buggy whips and entire new classes of jobs being created, but in recent decades the trend has been to create a small number of jobs for highly educated people that go to the young, and lots of zero-benefits freelance work the displaced workers can compete for.)
There is also a critically important moral angle in that any one country dominating manufacturing internationally as the US and Germany do makes things more difficult for emerging countries as opportunities have been limited by big players.
Beyond that it is not clear that jobs are truly desirable. The economy no longer generates enough opportunity to keep people employed. One of the biggest employers of the middle class is the trucking industry which is being automated. This is essentially inevitable and will improve safety and productivity. Looking realistically we have to question a system that encourages people to work to the point that their ties to friends and family fall away and drowsy driving has become an epidemic. Given the huge percentage of the workforce that is tuned out at work and present without being engaged with purpose the idea that work was ever a good thing needs to be questioned. In any case the old days where anyone with skills and ambition could find work that would support them and their family are gone and now more than ever we need to account for those who don't have skills or ambition or discipline.
This is the real challenge for the empathic: How do we look to an age where work is no longer at the core of our society?
There are mechanisms in capitalism to reward those who show the most empathy, but there are also components to reward anti-competitive behavior. I think it is necessary to distinguish them.
On the one hand, the company that delivers a product that best serves someone is going to be financially rewarded for having "empathy" for their customer. Basically for creating something that better suits their needs. That is a way capitalism increases empathy.
On the other hand, the kinds of problems you discuss I think are more associated with large corporations and industries that get so large that they are effectively woven into fabric of government.
Under democratic systems, politicians are more concerned with votes than empathy. In theory votes are supposed to be rewarded to only those who show empathy to their constituents, but that seems to be the case less and less.
In reality, the ability to effect change for a large corporate donor has more reward than empathy towards a politicians constituents and that is what is causing the lack of empathy.
I have seen very little outrage against Silicon Valley from its output of technology. When there is outrage I think it is more along the lines of lack of empathy between metropolitan areas and rural areas and essentially the differences between Left vs Right.
You're right, and the better term would be something along the lines of "the American capitalist system", or "the American economic system", but those seem too specific. It is a form of capitalism that has found its way through most of Western-style representative democracy and economic planning in its various forms through the 20th century. Usually that's what we call a capitalist system in any definition outside of economics or fringe political science.
I want to believe that those of us who are opposed to the use of technology purely for greed and power still outnumber, but am starting to feel like maybe we are an island and a dying breed, giving way to a new callous generation of technologists who wish to wield the power of social technology for only individual ambitions over the democratic idealism of collaboration that it was founded on. This is a dark time indeed
This may have been true five years ago, but now? The real median income has been going up since 2011 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...). Jobs have been increasing since at least 2009, i.e last recession (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?jt). I don't think Brynjolfsson's thesis-- that technology destroys jobs-- is holding up (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-...).
Think of a 55 year old factory worker who's job is outsourced. They may have been damn good at that job, but the industry is now gone, replaced with another. They're far enough away from retirement that they need to find something else. Maybe they have commitments like a very elderly parent, ties to a community etc that make it hard or impossible to leave where they are.
Those 2 stats don't tell the whole story:
Median income can increase simply because the top earners earn a heck of a lot more, while the lesser earners are still earning less. This graph on the page you linked tells that story: (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e2/US_GDP_per_ca...)
More jobs do not mean jobs that pay as well as previous ones do. They could all be low pay service sector employees to chauffeur the rich people around, or deliver burritos to them at 2AM.
We need to look closer at the devastation that an industry leaving a town can have when there are no ready replacements - its been going on for decades but all people seem to care about are "number of jobs" in most cases.
> This graph on the page you linked tells that story: (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e2/US_GDP_per_ca...)
That graph is misleading because it leaves out benefits and other compensation; a more accurate picture is the graph here: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/07/productivit...
> It destroys jobs, and (maybe) creates them elsewhere. This can be devastating to individuals who's jobs are destroyed, and we don't exactly do much to help those left behind who cannot re-skill, move into new jobs etc. Think of a 55 year old factory worker who's job is outsourced. They may have been damn good at that job, but the industry is now gone, replaced with another. They're far enough away from retirement that they need to find something else. Maybe they have commitments like a very elderly parent, ties to a community etc that make it hard or impossible to leave where they are.
This is true, but it is also less severe and less frequent than at any other time in American history. Jobs and wages are increasing over the last five years (since the recession) on the whole, not decreasing. On the whole, Americans are better off than probably at any other time in history. So it is not likely that Americans laid off or outsourced made the most significant impact in this political election, there just aren't enough of them relative to the rest.
As loathsome as Trump is, I do look forward to having our collective nose rubbed in our collective shit.