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RE: ADSactly Tech News - Does Increased Access to Technology Increase Societal Inequality?

in #technology7 years ago

This is one of the ironies of technological advancement - it gives opportunity but it also takes away opportunity. It gives opportunity, as you say, by giving unprecedented information access to anyone (with an Internet connection) but as technology advances, the discrepancy increases between those with Internet access and those without it - and the discrepancy even increases in between them! Faster and faster speeds means those with faster Internet can still outperform those without it, and having access at all beats out those with no access.

Jobs may be taken away, but jobs are also created. Although, the same idea applies - lower skill jobs that need more manpower vanish while fewer higher skill jobs come in as someone needs to maintain the robots. But the main way that robots are profitable if the overall labor costs go down so I would expect that there is still a net loss in jobs.

But that's not completely a bad thing - many manual jobs are fairly tedious, maybe dangerous, and some may argue a form of wage slavery where people must commit a part of their lives to slaving away at some tasks. If (a big if) a society was interested in the well-being of everyone, especially after an upcoming revolution in machine learning and artificial intelligence that wipes away jobs, then a share of these profits should go back to society in some way - they take opportunity, so it's fair to give some back. There's always even more work to do that currently has no pay, but this work is important like cleaning up our land and oceans that robots probably can't do anytime soon by themselves.

The opportunity and vision is there, it just needs someone with the means to care enough to do it.