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Comment by spottybanana | Hacker News Reader

> trillions in capital will be captured by the 0.01%.

How is that different from the current situation?

In the current arrangement, capital by itself is useless - you need workers to utilize it to generate wealth. Owners of capital can then collect economic rent from that generated wealth, but they have to leave enough for the workers to sustain themselves. This is an unfair arrangement, obviously; but at least the workers get something out of it, so it can be fairly stable.

In the hypothetical fully-automated future, there's no need for workers anymore; automated capital can generate wealth directly, and its owners can trade the output between each other to fully satisfy all their needs. The only reason to give anything to the 99.99% at that point would be to keep them content enough to prevent a revolution, and that's less than you need to pay people to actually come and work for you.

It is very similar to the current situation, but intensified. Technology tends to be an intensifier for existing power structures.

Except some random nobody can become a disruptor.

I was debating bringing up disruptors when I made the grandparent comment. My 2 cents: they can shift the balance of power at the very small scale (e.g. "some random nobody" getting rich, or some rich person going bankrupt), but the large scale power structures almost always remain largely intact. For instance, that "random nobody" may well get rich through the sale of shares in their company - now the company is owned by the owner class, who were previously at the top of the power hierarchy.

> but the large scale power structures almost always remain largely intact

Is that anything new? That seems to be a repeating fact of life throughout history.

Nothing new, certainly, but still worth examining. If we are not content with the current power structures, then we should be wary of changes that further intensify them.

We need not totally avoid such changes (i.e. shun technological advancements entirely because of their social ramifications), but we need to be mindful of their effects if we want to improve our current situation regarding the distribution/concentration of wealth and power in the world.

Uber vs taxi companies, Google vs Yahoo, or Facebook vs MySpace, Amazon versus all retailers ...

Exactly, in all cases the disruption was localized, and the broader power structures were largely unaffected. The richest among us - the owner class - were not significantly affected by all of these disruptions. They owned diversified portfolios, weathered the changes, and came out with an even greater share of wealth and power. Those who were most affected by the disruptions you listed were the employees of those companies/industries - not the owners/investors.

Random nobody whose parents just accidentally happened to be a millionaires and/or live, work, and study in the top capitals of the world.

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