Comment by cliveowen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cliveowen | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know, at this point I've read a great deal of similar articles that seem to imply a golden age for software developers and technology entrepreneurs and a dark age for everyone else. Even worse, the implication seems to be that the winner-takes-all mechanism will concentrate wealth in an ever-shrinking elite. I don't think this is completely true, while on one hand we have more automation and ever-lowering operating costs for many kinds of businesses that in the end let relatively few people service even millions of customers (think Instagram for a recent, technology-related example) I think, we're also heading to an even more globalized landscape where every company will try and capture customers in every country. Servicing not millions, but billions of people and offering services in every corner of the world will actually create demand for people with average skills, a new form of middle class will emerge. If the future will get to a point where everything will look really bleak, I think jobs will be created with the sole purpose of keeping the cash flowing. Unemployed, unhappy people aren't customers, are lost sales. A middle class is needed, middle class jobs are needed, if they won't come up naturally, someone will make sure they'll exist somehow.

Its hard to test a very large scale theory based on optimism about human nature, but you can downscale it and try it on smaller scales like states and cities. So why didn't your example of Instagram benefit West Virginia or Detroit?

If a self organizing phenomena doesn't happen at a small scale in almost all examples, you need a theoretical reason why it doesn't downscale if your claim is some time in the future it'll self organize at a larger scale.

The future of the whole country probably resembles WV or Detroit much more than SV. This has certain startup implications; for example, creating a luxury electric car startup in a permanently down-trending country seems unwise, in comparison sharing photos sounds like something poorer people can continue to cheaply do as they gradually become permanently poorer and poorer because even the 3rd world has mobile phones.

Exactly, anything that scales up to large, especially to fast ends up becoming an inefficient and uncontrollable behemoth. Take a look at any corporation(ie. Microsoft, HP, IBM) or governments(USG, China vs. Canada, Poland, Finland) or media (News, MTV, Cable) where large entities cannot function efficiently and only get worse as they become larger.

The only thing that works is some sort of self-organizing nature that similar to the way biological organisms form, which then end up creating neuron/brain like structures which form higher intelligence. Take a look at the universe, there is an interesting talk on how the Internet is starting to show that phenomenon, it's appearing more and more like a brain and may be starting to show some signs intelligence.

Take a look at this post from LinuxCon2013(it's not about Linux).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6425227

The conditions for that to happen aren't there yet. There's a growing population of unemployed people but it's not like there's no enough cash flow that companies are struggling to find customers. I think if and when unemployment will be so widespread as to pose a real threat to cash flow we'll see countermeasures to what are now just bleak predictions.

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