Hawking: Technocapitalism driving world inequality
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking believes global inequality is set to grow as more jobs are being automated.
That is because the greedy rich owners of machines are refusing to share their fast-growing wealth and are providing less jobs to human workers, he said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything post last week.
“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.
“So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality,” he said.
Silicon Valley in the US has become the symbol of a chasm between the poor and the super-rich but many countries, including developing nations like India, are curiously trying to copycat the model on their territories.
“The anger in Northern California and elsewhere in the United States springs from an increasingly obvious reality: the rich are getting richer while many other people are struggling,” the MIT Technology Review says.
“It’s hard not to wonder whether Silicon Valley, rather than just exemplifying this growing inequality, is actually contributing to it, by producing digital technologies that eliminate the need for many middle-class jobs,” it said.
According to Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, technology “is the main driver of the recent increases in inequality; it's the biggest factor".
While technology is replacing many blue collar jobs, the wealth of the rich machine owners multiplies faster than wage increases and the working class is falling hopelessly behind.
That’s how capitalism works.
The wealth generated in Silicon Valley is as prodigious as it has ever been but “people are stoning buses transporting Google employees to work from their homes in San Francisco”, the MIT Technology Review wrote.
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