Is the title of a lengthy article published in the MIT Technology Review and dated June 12. Its worth a look.
Written by David Rotman, it lays out substantial evidence that the growing trend towards income inequality and also stagnant employment may well be more seriously structural than we realize.
A small excert:
The contention that automation and digital technologies are partly responsible for today’s lack of jobs has obviously touched a raw nerve for many worried about their own employment. But this is only one consequence of what Brynjolfsson and McAfee see as a broader trend. The rapid acceleration of technological progress, they say, has greatly widened the gap between economic winners and losers—the income inequalities that many economists have worried about for decades. Digital technologies tend to favor “superstars,” they point out. For example, someone who creates a computer program to automate tax preparation might earn millions or billions of dollars while eliminating the need for countless accountants.
It strikes me that implication of this is large. If this is true, and productivity continues to become disconnected from people, the end result eventually would be that large numbers of people would become essentially economically irrelevant. And if we continue the current trend wherein the economic proceeds of improved productivity go to a smaller and smaller percentage of the population, we could eventually find ourselves in a world where some of the circumstances that led to the French Revolution have been recreated on a very large scale.
The current political debate over austerity would seem small should this scenario play out.
This is not modern day luditeism it seems to me. In contrast to the effects of the industrial revolution where production still depended to a great extent on human labor, this suggests a world where people with low skills, less education and even less mental capacity simply fall by the wayside. Over time that could create a pretty ugly situation.