The problem is that individuals often cannot see the bigger picture. It also does not necessarily follow that individuals benefit from aggregate wealth creation. If you are unemployed (by technology) and can no longer feed yourself or your dependents why do you really care that goods are now available cheaper and can be delivered 247: you still can't afford them. If in your lifetime technology only brought starvation upon you, why should you care that future generations will benefit. Last I checked, we are not indoctrinated from young to be altruistic martyrs for humanity nor do I recall that being a basic human instinct either.

So displacement is a somewhat inevitable outcome from mass technological disruption. It's very easy to champion progress when you're on the winning side, and ultimately progress is important. It falls to the powerful (the wealthy like Gates and Zuckerberg) and nation States to protect the interest of all citizens to make sure everyone's basic rights are still preserved. Especially over trasitory eras such as the current one.

Technological progress may be an issue that contributes to this so-called empathy vacuum, but all industries that cause negative externalities (in cyclical or permanent unemployment, or pollution, or wealth disparity, etc) are just as much a problem.

If we want to have this debate, that's great. It needs to happen, especially as our economy ends up with an increasing human labor supply as it's automated away or sent to places where labor is cheaper. The track we are on now will likely end up with massive Gini coefficients worldwide, a ruling class and a noted underclass based upon who was able to achieve capital accumulation while their labor was still worth something.

The problem I have here is that the New Yorker isn't even going for this debate in this article. They are complaining about something and pointing a finger at but a sliver of an issue that they are also a part of.

1) technology development has tended to hugely improve society-wide productivity and be a general (though not unmitigated) good.

2) technology development has been absolutely shit for many individuals as their careers disappear.

people should be way more worried about good national governance and safety nets to deal with the terrible consequences of 2 while we reap the benefits of 1.

> Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages.

workers are capturing less and less of that, especially over the last twenty years.

This ever increasing march of technology may result in more goods being created, but due to the nature of our capitalist society, it tends to pool the capital in those who have capital to begin with.

The huge disparity between the rich and the poor in the US is not due to "technology" but it is not being helped by it either.

Technology creates efficiencies, but there is no natural way for those efficiencies to benefit those whom it puts out of work.

Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. Historically, efficiency was driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it an explosion of prosperity. Productivity and wages remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate due to AI. We may already be on the other side of the critical point.

> What matters is that society as a whole was better after every automation.

If your family's wealth had historically sat somewhere around the median in your society and then a major change occurred which caused your family's wealth to drop to the bottom 20% in your society, wouldn't you be angry about that? I would be. And I wouldn't be placated by assurances that society as a whole will be better off.

Not that I think demanding a halt to technological progress is a rational response (I've mentioned elsewhere I don't think that's really possible to achieve, even if we wanted to), but I understand why some people might respond that way.

The people "throwing a hissy fit" are, in my opinion, right about the problem but wrong about the solution (which is often the case). Automation rapidly making a large number of people redundant is an economic shock which can be softened via sensible intervention.

I hear this a lot in discussions about technology (and about free trade) but it contains a fallacy: just because a group is collectively better off it does not mean that all persons in that group are better off. It's quite possible for a society to become wealthier at the same time that many members of that society become poorer. Indeed, there are large parts of the U.S. for which this has been true for the last 30 years.

That doesn't mean that we should retard technological progress, but it's disingenuous to paper over the real suffering it causes real persons by talking only about society collectively.

I had the fortune/misfortune of moving furniture for 3 years right out of college 20 years ago to support my internet business at the time. I saw how the vast majority of people toil away their lives to make rent and child support each month. That experience shattered my will to such a degree that I came out of it a different person.

My concern is that the divide between working poor and techie riche is now so vast that they can't even see one another. If the wealthy and powerful could see, they would invest less in profitable schemes and more in shared prosperity. But they can't. So wealth inequality continues to grow unabated, with AI being just another tool to profit from another's labor or eat their lunch outright.

It's just the stress on GDP which makes me feel alarmed - historically speaking, things like GDP are always excuses to convince people they're goals worth following before we improve things like inequality or the quality of life. Do people now generally feel happier than half a century ago since GDP has drastically increased? Or the mental health of a large fraction of us was deteriorating all along over the decades?

It almost feels lies like "let us focus on delivering the features first, we'll get back to the technical debt once we have time" in some organizations - there are always new features, and always room for development, other things are always overlooked or keep bare minimum.

Back to the specific topic of increasing lifespan. Inequality is a problem much harder to solve than the technology itself. If we don't solve it carefully, it's very likely to be more harmful than helpful to the world. The right to live and the right to reproduction are the two most sensitive things to creatures - fundamentally it's much more risky than inventing the Internet or plastic surgery.

I can't help but think what I saw in the hospital - people with cancer and with no money giveaway their painkiller to drug dealers in exchange for some dirty motel nearby. Meanwhile, I know there are old, important figures who live in the hospital and spend several years of the average person's income per day, taking up a large fraction of scarce medical resources, equipment, and wards, just because they're old (many of them have no serious problems, just in case) and "important".

Think about the ancient tyrant who spent a lot, searching for immortality elixir died from poisoning. He became a laughing stock because the elixir didn't work, but it wouldn't be so funny if the elixir works. Nowadays, rich people can already fight cancer much better than poor people. Just imagine, how it feels when you know the first 0.1% of powerful figures you know (name the first 3 at least), are going to live for the next 500 years, but not everybody else?

We could be working far fewer hours, we could have higher pay, but neither are realized because we can't shake off the goddamned aristocrats and neo feudalists.

The thing is we are not all actual beneficiaries from technology. In fact a lot are victims who loose their jobs, get smaller paychecks and basically lost the ability to offer their skills to the workforce.

Technology gives and technology takes. What it takes is increasingly important to have a critical view on because something more fundamental is going on I think that is going to be increasingly clear.

It happens that I'm on a pretty favorable part of the curve (in terms of ability and inclination to "work with computers"), so take my thoughts with as much salt as you think is appropriate, but I'm glad past societies didn't turn their noses up at farming, beer and bread making, writing, indoor plumbing, domesticating animals, stonework, bronze, iron, steel, water wheels, coal/oil/nat gas, electricity, the steam and internal combustion engines, telephony, interchangeable parts and the moving assembly line, automobiles, modern medicine, transistors, integrated circuits, etc.

I'm sure that all of those innovations caused some significant amount of displacement amongst the established practioners of the "old way" of doing things. Had societies past decided that that displacement was too costly, the life of today's 99th percentile priveleged person would almost certainly be significantly worse than the life of today's actual 1st percentile (un) priveleged person.

Many of these problems are political/societal, and not technical: the stagnation of wages in particular. I would argue that instead of a lack of change being the problem, the issue is that society is still trying to desperately adapt to the increased rate of change that's happened during the last century.

When people are stressed and impoverished they aren't exactly compelled to improve their communities or start hip local businesses. You have millions of people stressed, annoyed and envious of all the other happier people.

How the benefits from increased efficiency are distributed matter to how much progress benefits average people. Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. But crucially, the need for human labor kept pace with the expansion of wealth creation. This largely avoided the creation of a new distribution problem. But this time is in fact different. The expanding impact of AI on our economy will create a serious distribution problem as wealth creation becomes more and more decoupled from human labor. It is extremely narrow-minded to ignore this problem. It is not something that will just work itself out.