Hi everyone,
http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/12/news/economy/stephen-hawking-technology-inequality/index.html******************
Stephen Hawking warns that great technological advances can leave most people "miserably poor."
The well-known British physicist and author said technology is partly to blame for the rise in income inequality.
"Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution," he said in a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) post last week.
"So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality," Hawking said.
The tech community has already fired back.
Marc Andreessen, the outspoken entrepreneur and de facto Silicon Valley spokesman, tweeted that Hawking was trotting out old rhetoric.
He even suggested someone should buy Hawking an Economics 101 textbook.
It's a hot debate among economists and in Silicon Valley where the rising wealth of young tech workers stands out starkly against the mostly minority low income communities in San Francisco.
Hawking wins this round, according to most experts.
... while the pie is growing, not everyone is getting more of it.
"My reading of the data is that technology is the main driver of the recent increases in inequality. It's the biggest factor," Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management
The key problem: Technology has replaced many blue collar jobs that paid well. Those workers have had to switch into retail and home healthcare jobs, where the pay is typically lower.
So Andreessen is right that people still have jobs. But the question is, at what pay?
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The old 'does technology reduce jobs for humans' argument.
Any views?
Sriram
