Your Hopeful Optimism vs. Pragmatic Realism
It would be nice if your ideas did not clash with economic and political realities. First, capitalism is, first and foremost, about maximizing return. While chastising Uber for wanting to move to self-driving car, you know full well that if they did not their competitors would at their expense. It is not a moral or theoretical issue, just fact.
As for more visionary risk-takers like Musk, that would be great. Setting aside the rarity of people in Musk’s position, this is the idea underlying venture capital. However, as you know, venture capital has become dominated not by risk-managers not risk-takers. As friends in the venture capital biz say to me, they are no longer visionaries engaged in venture capital, rather “chicken capitalists” looking for statistically safe bets and predictable returns.
Then there is crisis theory of change. The example cited is the Great Depression and War. You know we effectively had a depression in 2008 and have been at war for 15 years now. Neither event provided the employment innovation “lift” sought beyond the military-surveillance complex, which itself was primarily taxpayer funded.
To advance the crisis idea implies some event far more dire. While the increase in violence and new emerging lethal technologies may generate such a crisis, the nature of the response seems more likely to increase automation than add jobs.
As for politicians and government somehow doing something constructive, you must be joking. In today’s dysfunctional, career-oriented, polarized, Citizen’s United special interest money world, as illustrated in our sorry electoral campaigns, the type of courage and vision needed is unwelcomed.
Even if such courage and vision existed, the institutional process and inertia would make any results long in coming and minimalist in nature. Indeed, aside from New Deal-WWII example, there is scant effort such programs have ever had any real and positive impact.
Am sure you know the “Boiled Frog” parable. Seems our situation is less about a sudden system shock and more about the slow boil.
But realism can move beyond cynical facts by providing an evolutionary context. On the one hand, as you know, jobs, employment and careers as we now view them are a 200 years historical anomaly; primarily associated the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, the goal of all humanity has always been for a post-scarcity, self-actualizing existence.
We are now in that transitional nonlinear evolutionary period. Denying this only serves to promote a fiction about the post-scarcity inevitability and exacerbate the transitional pain and suffering.
So, yes we want to augment human with machine as appropriate, but recognize we have probably passed the point of peak employment and need to prepare for a post-scarcity world with minimal work. This in no ways suggests innovation will stop, rather that we need to confront reality. Of course, at present there is little vision for this and far less courage.
So, sorry to rain on your parade but to have, as you say, the “courage to invest in the possibilities of a better future,” pragmatic realism and vision are required.
In this respect, it seems to me that what is missing and really needed is not augmented jobs but augmented knowledge systems, especially as we move toward ambient virtual assistants. Said differently, we all need to learn more, better, faster to become collectively smarter. I devote most of my efforts in this direction and you might want to read some of my articles at my Medium publication, A Passion to Evolve — Time has come to rethink everything.
Doc Huston
