We've been reading The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and it paints a very somber future ahead of us. It discusses the potential of all jobs being replaced by machines and everyone becoming unemployed. And while this has not happened completely yet, it has happened in many industries such as manufacturing and others.
This book actually outlines one of my greatest fears: What if my job is completely replaced and I can't support myself in the future. Fortunately for me I think my future profession (computer programming) will be very difficult to automate. Writing a computer program that writes other computer programs is not exactly the easiest task. It essentially means having to program a human brain. It also involves having to program the ability to take arbitrary input from a human.
One of the most depressing parts about the book is the income inequality that is present in our society today. Workers' productivity has skyrocketed since the 1950s but their wages haven't kept up. The gains in productivity from the working class have basically all gone to the wealthy business owners. According to the book, between 1983 and 2009 Americans became vastly wealthier as the total value of their assets increased. However, the bottom 80% of Americans actually saw a net decrease of their wealth!! And the top 20% saw an increase of over 100%! What this means is that not only did the wealthy take all the gains between 1983 and 2009, they also took from the poorest 80% of Americans and shifted the wealth to themselves.
What this book has done a very effective job of in my mind is showing how disgustingly greedy some people in our society are. The best example of this is the following: The 6 heirs to the Walton family fortune have more money that the bottom 40% of Americans. Think about that for a minute. 6 people have more money than the poor 120 million people in the United States. I think we have a big problem in our society. It's not the impending replacement of all our jobs by machines. I don't really see that as a problem. I see the disgusting income inequality that we allow to exist as the biggest problem in our society. Allowing people to amass such enormous wealth while the majority of Americans struggle to survive is completely disgusting.
I haven't read the last few chapters of the book where the author outlines solutions to the impending second machine age (where all our jobs are replaced) but my solution to it is this: I don't see a problem with all of our jobs being replaced by machines. This however assumes that when that happens we will all equally reap the benefits of complete automization. I don't think this will happen. I think we need to get rid of this disgusting capitalist society we have that allows people to amass these huge fortunes and replace it with something that allows everyone to reap the benefits, not just those that were in the right place and had the right connection that allowed them to start a company and make billions.
I think we need to pass laws preventing people from amassing huge fortunes and take away the ill-gotten gains of the top 0.1%.
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