The Software Revolution

An anonymous reader writes: Y Combinator president Sam Altman writes about how the third great technological revolution — which he calls the software revolution — is affecting the world economy. He says, "It appears that the software revolution will do what technology usually does—create wealth but destroy jobs. Of course, we will probably find new things to do to satisfy limitless human demand. But we should stop pretending that the software revolution, by itself, is going to be good for median wages.

Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea. Trying to find new jobs for billions of people is a good idea but obviously very hard because whatever the new jobs are, they will probably be so fundamentally different from anything that exists today that meaningful planning is almost impossible. ... The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups. ... I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get."

Comments

Re: Software is the wrong villian here.

[Pfhorrest]

Christian law also prohibited usury for the longest time. (Until around the Protestant Reformation).

It's the reason Jews were villainized as greedy schemers: Christians (in Christian lands) were legally prohibited from lending at interest, but Jews (not being bound by Christian law) could, meaning that they were the only ones doing it, and getting all the flak for it.

Even then though, and still today in the Muslim world, there were complicated work-arounds involving a combination of an "interest-free" loan, insurance, and rental, which created in effect a loan at interest, and is part of why the Christian world eventually let up on prohibitions of usury, because it was effectively happening anyway despite the prohibition of it. The loophole there, as I see it, was failing to see that rent is precisely the same thing as lending at interest, or rather, that interest is a special case of rent: it's just rent on money.

In any case you're lending capital temporarily in exchange for a permanent transfer of even greater capital back to you, which causes the problem of wealth concentration, redistributing wealth from those who have less of it (and thus need to borrow it) to those who have more of it already (and thus can afford to lend it out), which has the secondary effect of requiring those with less of it to labor for those with more of it in order to continue borrowing to survive, in effect creating perpetual servitude of a working class to an owning class.

And when technological revolutions make labor less valuable, that kind of class division becomes unsustainable, and either the working class has to just die off, or take some capital for themselves by force —unless everyone can see the undesirability of either of those outcomes, and change the system somehow to let the capital flow back from the leisure class to the labor class, as it naturally would without such concentrating influences as rent and interest.