Naked Capitalism has the article People and Power – The Technology Threat featuring an Al Jazeera documentary. If me telling you the source of the documentary puts you off, then it is your loss, not theirs. It is time to wake up about the huge amount of intelligence that resides in the Arab world and the media organizations that they control.

When the talk of what historic waves of technology innovation did to jobs before, everybody in this documentary leaves out one very important piece of history. The benefits of more jobs at better wages did not happen automatically in any of the previous industrial revolutions. The people, unions, and governments all took actions to make sure that the gains from these revolutions were not concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few. We need to be thinking of how this problem is going to be solved this time around. Did anyone think of asking Watson for a suggestion on how to fix the problem?

I’d hate to see people come to the conclusion that we must shut technology down to save the world. The real point is that we must learn what social/political actions we must take so that the most people get the most benefits out of this great new technology. We can’t leave it to the markets to solve the distribution problem. Any politician who does not actively address this issue is not one that we need to elect in the next few decades.

We need to test each politician to see if that person has the vision to see the problem and to imagine ways to begin to address the problem. Another test might be that any politician who claims to have all the answers we need about this problem is not one who is either telling the truth or one who understands the depth and breadth of the problem.

I don’t think I can remind you enough of one of the quotes on my quotes page.

Scott Santense – posted here June 3, 2015 – source

If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”