[hbt]

The anti-innovation backlash is the most likely thing to happen.

Today, politicians are winning the populace by lamenting on unfair trade deals, globalism and foreigners taking jobs. Those jobs are not coming back, if they are, certainly not to humans.

We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless. (read Professor Yuval Noah Harari new book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_... ) And, no, the answer is not basic income. It's intelligence augmentation.

Intelligence is the only valuable currency nowadays and we are not acquiring enough of it fast enough compared to the machines.

Our only tool for intelligence augmentation is still education. Not good enough at all. It's already impossible to keep up; let alone learn something from scratch at a late stage in life and be expected to contribute something significant enough to derive long term economic advantage that can't be taken by a machine or globalists.

I think all other issues will fix themselves or reach a natural equilibrium (overpopulation, climate change etc.). But lack of intelligence is our doom.

[bluetomcat]

> We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless.

Should we build our society on the imperative that every citizen must be "economically useful"? If production of basic goods and services is automated to such a high degree that only a small portion of people are needed to develop and maintain this machinery, aren't we just creating artificial, unproductive niches by trying to employ every citizen?

[branchless]

There are two types of economically useless people:

1. those superseded by tech who are incapable of adding "value" as defined by our current economy

2. those using the state to appropriate labour, such as banks using their monopoly on credit creation to force up land prices to extract labour

We should be focusing on taxing rentier activity to provide for the former in order to obliterate the latter.

Land value tax must be used to fund a basic income.

[yummyfajitas]

The anti-innovation backlash is here.

Shiv Sena, the racist party of Maharashtra, has also been pushing luddism mixed with racism. No Biharis should get an auto driver license, and they want to stop technology (Uber, Ola) from allowing Biharis/etc to compete via other means.

http://www.afternoondc.in/city-news/shiv-sena-mns-raise-red-... http://www.newsgram.com/maharashtra-only-marathi-auto-driver...

There were even riots in my town. http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/news/auto-strike-...

Terrorists (or "illegal armed groups" to use TechCrunch's euphamism) in Columbia and France have engaged in political violence to stop technology, and the government has sided with them.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/ubers-colombian-speed-bump... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3417215/Riot-police-...

See also SF/NY attacking AirBnB.

The anti-innovation backlash is a 2016 issue which we will hopefully resolve before 2076.

[throwaway729]

I think your examples are a bit hyper-bolic.

First, anti-innovation and anti-technology are two different things. Your parent seems to be referring to innovation in the tech innovation sense.

Second, opposing specific companies that market themselves as the epitome of innovation (Uber, AirBnB) is not the same as being genuinely anti-innovation. It's possible to oppose specific (esp. business model!!!) innovations without adopting an anti-innovation or anti-technology mindset.

I don't see anything particularly worrying about people opposing specific innovations -- especially innovations tied more to business innovation than technology innovation (e.g., human Ubers and AirBnB's). Municipalities opposed to sharing economy apps aren't blinding following some unsubstantiated populist sentiment. They typically have a different set of priorities and assessments, but it's not generally accurate to characterize those concerns as luddism.

Anti-technology is much scarier than and very different from opposition to "sharing economy" apps. Conflating to two cheapens the meaning of anti-technology and makes it harder to oppose true luddism.

[yummyfajitas]

I don't think anyone, besides maybe a few extreme environmentalists, is opposed to technology in the abstract.

All luddism - including the original luddites - are opposed to specific technology that they believe harms them. The original luddites were manual weavers who were opposed to mechanical looms that did their job faster and better than they did. The modern luddites are lazy Marathi auto drivers who are opposed to Uber (or Biharis) outcompeting them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

[throwaway729]

> All luddism...

All luddism to date. The article and GP are predicting something new -- a generally anti-technology sentiment.

The post I replied to stated that such a sentiment is already here.

I don't think opposition to Uber or AirBnB demonstrates the sort of general anti-technology or anti-innovation sentiment predicted by the article.

It may very well be the case that this general sentiment arises out of a large confederation of people who have become obsolete for various reasons, who become generally anti-technology due to particular technologies ruining their lives. In fact, I grant you that this is the most probable scenario.

But that sort of confederation doesn't exist in today's world, and there's plenty of opposition to Uber/AirBnB that is not motivated by luddism. Lazy Marathi auto drivers may oppose Uber, but they aren't the only critics. In fact, it's not even clear to me that taxi drivers are the most populous critics of Uber.

[SilasX]

As throwaway says, lumping in Airbnb with Luddism is unjustified. The criticism there is they're facilitating the illegal conversion of quiet buildings and neighborhoods into loud tourist party zones stocked with transient randos that haven't been onboarded to the local rules ("hey, don't leave your stuff in the halls").

Acid test: would cities leave Airbnb alone if they were getting all these guests through conventional travel agents? Would they protest this as hard if it were used to get rooms in neighborhoods/buildings zoned for it? Do they equally object to apps that streamline the reporting of antagonistic neighbors, like those who abuse Airbnb?

That doesn't make their criticisms justified (though here I think they are), but it does mean it's not part of anti-technology backlash.

[eli_gottlieb]

I wouldn't exactly call Uber a piece of innovation. It's a phone app for hiring taxi drivers from a pool of cheap labor. You want to claim innovation? Let's find the people torching self-driving cars.

[yummyfajitas]

There is a world of difference between "hiring X from a pool of cheap labor" and what Uber does. ODesk is hiring X from a cheap pool of labor. Uber is push a button and you get where you are going.

Fundamentally, Uber is a Walrasian auctioneer that solves the socialist calculation problem within the transportation sector.

I consider that to be innovation.

[eli_gottlieb]

Go ahead and consider, but it's an accounting innovation, not a technological one.

[hsod]

Five years ago if I wanted to hire a car to pick me and up and take me somewhere I had to call a taxi company and pray that someone would show up 90 minutes later. Now I hit a button and someone is at my door in ~5 minutes.

[babyrainbow]

Do you think shopping malls are an innovation?

The point is, to be innovative, there should be an innovation. Not just scaling up...

[EGreg]

Why does everyone need to work and contribute to society intellectually? Throughout history it has not been the case.

People will have to cooe with being consumers ALWAYS and producers MAYBE, sometimes.