Stephen Hawking: Technology Contributes to Inequality

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/531726/technology-and-inequality/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415602/The-Jungle-Inside-Americas-largest-homeless-camp-shadows-Silicon-Valley.html

Stephen Hawking, a world renowned physicist, met almost immediate opposition after he made a statement saying that technology is a contributor to inequality. The comment came from an AMA (ask me anything) post from Hawking on Reddit.

“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared,” Hawking said. “Or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving every-increasing inequality.”

The technological community was rubbed the wrong way by the post. They accused Hawking of beating a dead horse with outdated rhetoric. Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley tycoon, tweeted that Hawking is ignorant in finances.

“Shorter Stephen Hawking: ‘For hundreds of years, people who claimed that machines reduce jobs have looked silly. But I’ll be different!’” Andreessen wrote.

He then suggested that someone should buy Hawking an Economics 101 textbook.

Professionals are siding with Hawking on this debate. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, told Technology Review that technology is not just a contributor to inequality, but the main problem.

Income inequality hinders economic opportunity and innovation.

The signs of the gap—really, a chasm—between the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Silicon Valley. On a bustling morning in downtown Palo Alto, the center of today’s technology boom, apparently homeless people and their meager belongings occupy almost every available public bench. Twenty minutes away in San Jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungle—was one of the largest in the country before Police and social workers evicted them in December 2014. It was within walking distance of Adobe’s headquarters and the gleaming, ultramodern city hall. Today, the San Jose metro area has the seventh-largest homeless population in the country, about 6,500 individuals, most of them considered "chronically homeless." Add in those who experience a short-term bout of homelessness in any given year, and the total leaps to around 12,000.

The homeless are the most visible signs of poverty in the region. But the numbers back up first impressions. Median income in Silicon Valley reached $94,000 in 2013, far above the national median of around $53,000. Yet an estimated 31 percent of jobs pay $16 per hour or less, below what is needed to support a family in an area with notoriously expensive housing. The poverty rate in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, is around 19 percent, according to calculations that factor in the high cost of living.

Even some of the area’s biggest technology boosters are appalled. “You have people begging in the street on University Avenue [Palo Alto’s main street],” says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance and at Singularity University, an education corporation in Moffett Field with ties to the elites in Silicon Valley. “It’s like what you see in India,” adds Wadhwa, who was born in Delhi. “Silicon Valley is a look at the future we’re creating, and it’s really disturbing.” Many of those made rich by the recent technology boom, he adds, don’t seem to care about “the mess they’re creating.”