“To put it crudely, it’s bribing the population to be well-enough-off,” Mr. Khosla said. “Otherwise, they’ll work for changing the system.”
full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/vinod-khosla-silicon-valley-disruption.html
To spend time in Silicon Valley in a year of political upheaval is, on one level, soothing. It is pleasant to hear talk of wearables, walled gardens and disruptive beverages in between updates about mass deportation.
But there is another conversation happening in the valley today. Its premise is that, when it comes to populist revolt, we may have seen nothing yet.
The idea is: If you think globalization, immigration, trade and demographic change have contributed to displacement and political anger, wait until robots take away millions and millions of jobs, including those requiring the use of a well-trained brain.
Some believe it will be glorious to live in this “disruptive” future; others believe it will pose devastating social and political challenges that dwarf anything being discussed in this election.
And then there are those, like Vinod Khosla, who ardently believe both things.
Mr. Khosla, a billionaire venture capitalist and a Silicon Valley celebrity, is gung-ho on disruption and an investor in start-ups that are building technology to take away people’s jobs.
“If you’re doing anything disruptive, you’re disrupting somebody, and somebody’s getting hurt,” he said at a conference last year. “Revolutions are hard on people. People get killed. People get hurt.”
And yet Mr. Khosla is part of a cohort of Silicon Valley types who have begun to sound warnings about the very future they are invested in.
“It seems likely that the top 10 to 20 percent of any profession — be they computer programmers, civil engineers, musicians, athletes or artists — will continue to do well,” he told me. “What happens to the bottom 20 percent or even 80 percent, if that is the delineation? Will the bottom 80 percent be able to compete effectively against computer systems that are superior to human intelligence?”
Others in Silicon Valley, most notably the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have dismissed this concern as Luddism, assuring people that new jobs always replace the ones that vanish.
And it is hardly surprising for stalwarts of an industry to claim it won’t harm anyone. What is more notable is what sometimes is called “argument against interest” — people criticizing a thing from which they stand to benefit.
Mr. Khosla looks at the technologies he and others are investing in and sees massive displacement down the road. He thinks of it as both an entertainment problem (how would we occupy the minds of all those jobless people?) and a political problem (how do we keep those people from revolting?).
“I worry a lot about how do you keep humans motivated to live,” he said.
In the world Mr. Khosla envisions, technology will continue to widen inequality by amplifying the productivity of some hypertalented people — 100xers, they are sometimes called in Silicon Valley — even as it beaches many others.
The only answer, he believes, is massive economic redistribution via something like a guaranteed minimum income. The idea has been gaining ground.
“Does capitalism need to be reinvented for modern technology? I’m absolutely convinced it does,” he said.
In primordial capitalism, he said, the challenge was efficiency — how to juice as much as possible from scarce resources. In a coming world of abundance, he added, the problem will be political: how to create the conditions in which a minority of hyperproductive people can do their work.
My eyes drifted over to a wall of glass to my right and, beyond it, a lovely garden. “Otherwise, there’ll be people coming in through the windows all the time?” I asked.
“Imagine 10 times as many people were unemployed today than are,” Mr. Khosla said.
To be plain, Mr. Khosla and others of like mind in the valley are not radicals. They are speaking of a new social contract, in which an undisrupted few assume new obligations to the disrupted many, in order to be freed to go back to their disruptive works.
“To put it crudely, it’s bribing the population to be well-enough-off,” Mr. Khosla said. “Otherwise, they’ll work for changing the system.”And then he said, “Capitalism is interesting, because capitalism as a system is by permission of democracy, right?”
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