The Knives of Class Warfare Turn Towards Tech’s Plutocrats

You can be rich as you like as long as you don't go off the ideological reservation - for example, look at the entertainment industry, which outsources overseas as much as it can but consistently supports the right causes and donates to the right people. But support a conservative cause, for whatever the reason, and a lot of the press will try to make you as hated as Donald Trump or the Koch brothers.

The Daily Beast article was just a warning shot - I'm sure FWD.us got the message and won't do it again. If not, there's almost certainly more to come.

Now obviously efficiency should on balance be good—automation should free people for higher pursuits—but when you look at the objective reality of what the democratization of distribution has really done for people, you see that despite being free from greedy middle-men sucking up all the value, it's tremendously difficult to actually make a living from the easy distribution we enjoy in the YouTube era. Technologists can still become millionaires relatively easily, but only by aggregating the effort of literally millions. The most elite social media celebrities are earning low six figures and there aren't very many of them.

I still believe in the idea that value is not necessarily always reflected in cash money, and that a lot of the automation that computers produce can help everyone, but as the privileged few I think we owe it the world to give some consideration to destitute and unemployable. Moving towards in the direction of socialist policy where a minimum standard of living is guaranteed is probably the right thing to do if automation is driving the economy, but at the same time I don't think it's a panacea, because people want to work and feel useful, and even if the minimum standard of living is acceptable, the poor will still be resentful if their is an intellectual thought-worker class above them.

All of this has me really questioning how and where I want to apply my skills for the remainder of my career.

Not so sure, I was involuntarily involved in shipping my own manufacturing engineering job along with many of our production staff's jobs overseas and it was not due to robotics and automation. We had a lot of automation in our US manufacturing but when production went overseas the robots went away and were replaced with manual labor. Most of our US jobs were higher qualified with operators and engineers working alongside automated equipment but our partners in Asia found that the robots were more expensive than manual workbenches and that it was hard to find operators and technicians that could keep up with automated manufacturing.

If you can get enough farms/factories producing the widgets of everyday life essentially for the sum of the input commodity costs, energy costs, and some small overhead (and the free market/technology relentlessly drives overhead towards 0), you wind up being able to take care of everyone-- but you don't take care of everyone with jobs. You take care of the people by enabling them to not worry about the basics of life. You remove the survival problem from the game, and allow people to choose between living little or thriving through voluntary creative pursuits. Some people will certainly focus on the creative pursuits, and generate wealth that enables them to thrive instead of merely survive. But I have a feeling that a bunch of people will focus on their tennis game instead (which is fine with me).

I don't think most people yet realize that this sort of model is coming into humanity's reach. Most people are looking for ways to recreate the solutions of the past. But that's a horrible idea-- the past had problems because the solutions of the past create problems. We're almost on the verge of a technological/humanistic revolution in which everything will be changeable. But things won't change if we keep recreating the past (or, more accurately, if our ancient social structures keep trying to maintain control of the population by merely tweaking what are actually completely obsolete mechanisms).

I hope we can overcome the status quo and turn this world into a true utopia, instead of letting it continue to become yet another of the countless possible dystopias that are outlined by science fiction and other speculative fiction, and which have constituted the dystopian reality that most people ever born here have had to live through.

I'm very optimistic-- I think the hard part is mostly behind us. The social power structures (the institutions that use money, violence, and killing to control people) have not routinely killed scientist and engineer society-changers for probably several hundred years, at least in the West. Money is still used to this day-- e.g. the VCs (and other financial industry and government people) hold the capital-- not some science/engineering/humanist foundation headed by scientists/engineers/humanists. I think it's possible to work within these constraints though, and to have a significant impact.

America’s New Oligarchs—Fwd.us and Silicon Valley’s Shady 1 Percenters: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/14/america-s-n...

Some of the biggest cost for the average American household is housing(34.1%), food(12.4%), and transportation(17.6%). http://visualeconomics.creditloan.com/how-the-average-us-con...

Housing is mostly a regulatory or social issue. People do not need lawns or lot of space. There is a tendency for people to buy the biggest house they can afford. It's also because of zoning restrictions that prevent high density construction, and developer's disinterest in cheap housing. High standard building code obviously contributes to the cost of engineering and developing housing, but they are solvable through technological development. There's also the problem of the network effect and the economy of scale of high density constructions leading to more people emigrating to the city, increasing the demand for housing.

Food, on the other hand, are easily leveraged with technological development, especially with GM crops. Growing meat in factories will be much more efficient and ethical than growing complete organisms like cows or chickens. Food wastage is a major problem. In the US, half of the food is wasted. If somebody could solve the problem of food wastage, that mean a corresponding reduction in the food budget of the average American and perhaps the world. http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/Supply-Chain/Half-of-US-f...

In the future of transportation, electric will be the primary mean of transportation except rockets as they are much more efficient than ICE and have a lower total cost of ownership. The question is merely about how fast can we diffuse the technology. Governments around the world can help by taxing carbon emitting transportations as opposed to subsidizing the electric startups, which could be seen as political favoritism. We could also drive the cost down by making public transportation better and widespread, accelerating the development of self driving cars, and reduce traffic rush hours by implementing congestion charges.

Overall, the toughest challenge is definitely housing, because housing appears to be least amicable to technological leverage. However, if you can make headway into the biggest cost to the average household, our need to work in order to live will be drastically reduced.

And as is said here, and is true, it costs almost nothing in capital costs to start a startup nowadays, create an app, get a cloud presence etc. Wages are the main cost. The people doing the work create the wealth, either paid (infrastructure) or even unpaid (free content, free contextual links etc.)

jwz is someone who "hit the jackpot" with his options, yet even he saw up close what happens ( http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se... ). I would quote the relevant part of his blog post here, but all nine paragraphs could be quoted, really.

The main point is, the programmers create the wealth making the platform, and perhaps the people working for free uploading content like pictures, or getting their web sites crawled. The money goes to the VCs, and a little bit of it to the CEO and top execs. Even those that hit the jackpot at a Netscape don't really hit the jackpot. And these are the programmers who slept under their desks and made the killer product. What about the guy in the Midwest?

Organized labor allowed an equitable distribution of wealth. VCs are leeching off the US government, the universities of China and India, the high tech workers here etc. How is some heir putting his millions in some fund creating wealth? We create the wealth. The heir is a leech. Like the kids in the "Born Rich" documentary.

New technology can mean less hours for workers, more pay for workers etc. Instead it goes to the aristocracy.

Modes of production change and so does the organization of labor. Workers in Ancient Rome went on strike, and I remember the strike waves in the US in the 1970s. Things change over the millenia, but these notions labor will stop organizing circa now are silly. It hasn't stopped after all these millenia. We are the programmers, system/network/database admins etc. creating this wealth of all the people in the world, and as jwz points out, even when we hit the jackpot we get screwed. Production is changing but there will be a revival of organization, education and then agitation. What happened before in history will happen again. It's to the oligarchs advantage to tell us all these millenia of struggle have finally stopped in the past few years. It hasn't. And we are the ones in the most key positions to do something. I will quote one sentence from that link. "When a VC tells you what's good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers"