A good deal of that shrinkage was up, not down.

You could make the case that that's also bad because having a middle is better than having just rich and poor. I might even agree with some of that thinking. But at least be honest about what actually went down.

And also about the fact that a shitbox used car that only the poors drive today has stuff in it standard that only came on luxury models back in my childhood. Power windows? Keyless entry? AC and stereo?

Yeah man. Maybe society bifurcated more than you mi

It's not "computers"/specifically that concentrated wealth. It's politics. All computers did was make.us more efficient at getting shit done.

Case in point: wealth was concentrated in few hands when there weren't any computers, shortly after invention of the steam engine.

There's only two ways of not concentrating wealth in few hands: (1)/) we cease to be efficient and essentially revert back to growing our own food without mechanisation; or (2), we get our ahit together and install a long overdue more civili

That shrinkage has nothing to do with computers and almost everything to do with competition for middle class jobs via globalization. If anything, computers and automation slowed the shrinkage because it helped maintain a higher worker productivity in the US than in developing nations.

Not a bad FP branch, though I wish I could see a funny angle to lighten the mood a bit... The key problem is that the tools are morally neutral, but people ain't. Some of them have good motivations and will try to use AI for good stuff, while others are immoral or downright evil and the AI tools will work tor them just as well. So the nice folks have visions of making everyone happier while some other people are fixated on making themselves richer and more powerful, even though the money and the power are j

While the rich have gotten richer faster, the poor have gotten richer, too. The is the nature of technological advancement. The alternative is to go back to hunting dinner - or each other - with sharp sticks, and everybody dies by age 30.

That shrinkage has been almost exclusively in the United States, while the standard of living around the world has gone up with poverty rates going down almost everywhere and with drastic improvements by other metrics also. See e.g. [1]https://ourworldindata.org/poverty [ourworldindata.org] . And even in the US there's evidence that the rise in inequality slowed down and even reversed in the last few years. See discussion at [2]https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inequality-might-be-going-down-now [noahpinion.blog]. So if there's a problem, it is US policy

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/poverty

[2] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inequality-might-be-going-down-now

"Middle class" is a fun term because you can define it all sorts of different ways, and change the definition over time. Makes for great articles.

Pretty much everybody on the planet, from the richest to the poorest, is much richer than they have ever been, both in quality of life and in raw income. Income inequality has been decreasing in the world as a whole too, and also decreasing or staying much the same in most of the developing countries, the EU, Canada and Australia. The US has been drifting up.

> People thought computers would crush the working class because only rich people would have access to them. People are still making that argument to this day.

>> Rich people have disproportionately derived the benefits, haven't you been paying attention to the widely reported shrinkage of the middle class for the last 45-50 years?

My guess is that massive income inequality comes from personal greed and is independent of computers or AI. Unfortunately for the ultrarich, the US economy is overwhelmingly consumer driven, so eventually those tens of billions will become merely billions as the economy contracts with fewer consumers and consumer dollars. If fewer people can afford to buy iPhones, Apple will get crushed. If general consumer spending plummets and sends online ad revenue decreasing, Google and Meta will get crushed.

"People thought computers would crush the working class"

When? Certainly not in the 80's, when relatively few owned computers. This is simply not true. Plus, the working class has been crushed, just not by computers.

"The fully-automated factory of the future will have two employees: a man and a dog.

"The man will be there to feed the dog, and the dog will be there to make sure the man doesn't touch anything."

- “Datamation” 1978. Journalist Fred Lamond, UK

> "People thought computers would crush the working class"

> When? Certainly not in the 80's, when relatively few owned computers. This is simply not true. Plus, the working class has been crushed, just not by computers.

Technology, including computers, made workers more efficient, but the workers did not obtain much of an increase in $$$ given those productivity increases.

> "People are still making that argument to this day."

> No, they are not. They make that argument about AI, but few even acknowledge that AI is simply a computer application. Computer ownership is pervasive, smart phones are computers. No one argues that smart phones will crush the working class.

> This is pathetic.

The good AI is centrally controlled. Those who build and run such AI will control and manipulate the user/consumers of the AI. And much like the proto-AI algorithms of social media manipulate those users to enrich, almost solely, those who built and run the AI.

That's why the Zuck is pulling out all the stops on compensation for AI talent.

Want to bet there

The reason wages haven't risen as fast as worker productivity is because an increasing amount of the worker productivity is the product of using mechanization owned by their employer to do the job.

You've been hiring 10 guys to dig a ditch. You buy an excavator and for $100K and fire 9 of the guys, the last guy runs the excavator. Worker productivity just went up by a factor of 10. Are you going to increase his pay by a factor of 10 so your payroll stays the same? No, you'll pay him maybe a little more

"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

And how exactly do you believe a free markert can exist if private citizens cannot pool their capital (!) together to have a go at making something to sell in the market?

What even are we talking about?

rotflmao, so, tell me, what year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop? Remember now, as bad as Windows is, as unethical as Micro$oft is and as expensive as Windows is, yet Linux struggles to get even 5% share of the desktop market. There's a reason for that.