Economic opportunities for our avatars | Social Mobility in the Digital Age | L'Atelier

But besides those issues are challenges seemingly harder to overcome. In isolation each is historically significant, yet taken together they can be viewed as threats whose scale is civilisational, holding the potential to undermine the ability of capitalism to reproduce itself as a system based on infinite growth, production for profit and wage-lab

As the economies of more countries more deeply assimilate information technology, they will see the emergence—so evident already in North America—of a more or less unemployable underclass. This is exactly what is happening. This will lead to a reaction with a nationalist, antitechnology bias, as we detail in the next chapter.

Where increasing globalization of production hit industrial towns hard, the automation revolution will hit the service-oriented companies of central business districts around the world, not to mention Indian call centres, Chinese factories and German car plants. Dystopian scenarios could play out, in which control over the automation software and r

Perhaps even more than their late-nineteenth-century equivalents, these workers today—whose daily tasks involve knowledge, design and creativity—experience a world that can be reprogrammed and remade, and so they naturally extend these ways of thinking to the society around them. While their relative privilege cuts them off from others, the nature

When we scan the economic horizon, we see that artificial intelligence promises to produce wealth on a scale never before seen in human history—something that should be a cause for celebration. But if left to its own devices, AI will also produce a global distribution of wealth that is not just more unequal but hopelessly so. AI-poor countries will