The case for realizing the potential of AI:
George Packer recently wrote a piece in the New Yorker on the political culture of Silicon Valley in which he worried about inequality created by technological advances. After getting some pushback, he clarifies his main argument:
My analysis of the Valley’s politics isn’t about left-right in the usual sense. It’s about a particular brand of utopianism that sees solutions for social and political problems in the industry’s products and attitudes. There’s an example of this in what [author Steven] Johnson, in “Future Perfect,” calls “peer progressivism” (also mentioned in the piece). I am skeptical that Kickstarter and Airbnb provide models for solving more than superficial problems. I’m even more skeptical after reading Johnson’s argument that Silicon Valley is fighting back against inequality by creating large numbers of millionaires and distributing profits to its workforce in a relatively equitable way.
This is pretty much my point: life inside Silicon Valley can be a paradise (for its winners) of opportunity and reward. Meanwhile, life outside falls further and further behind. All those highly paid engineers, with their generous stock options and unheard-of buying power, aren’t making the Valley more equal—they’re making it less so. And their success isn’t extending very far into the rest of the economy. Unless everyone becomes a software engineer—a proposal that was floated to me by several tech people, in one form or another—egalitarian stock plans are not an answer to the deepest structural problems in America.
Gregory Ferenstein defends “prosperous inequality”:
Over the long run, technology creates jobs we never even knew existed. The nonprofit Samasource farms out manual data-entry work to refugees in the bleakest war-torn areas on earth. Car-ride sharing service, Lyft, is giving steady income to San Francisco’s unemployed college grads. And Google’s new WiFi-network in sub-Saharan Africa will bring opportunity to the poorest of the poor. Technologists, however, must face the reality that their innovations create financial inequality. Building the technical infrastructure for entire industries or automating jobs inevitably benefits the designers in far greater proportion.
But, in many respects, equality is a lazy measure of social welfare. If certain political interest groups stall innovation, we may be all equally worse off. Instead, judge Silicon Valley by the free time, wellness, and educational value it creates for all of us. By those measures, the Internet economy is a welcome part of society.
The Dish 