We Solve for X: Steve Jurvetson on the accelerating rich-poor gap

[jeanystein]

I enjoy your talks. They are very thoughtful, they bring awareness. I'm sure they are helping of reducing this gap! It is not easy topic and very proud that you are helping so many people!

[Regenerativeshape]

This guy fascinates me. Intellectual vitality.

[jeanystein]

That was a very courageous and powerful talk!
Thank you very much for sharing.

[jurvetson]

It’s a subject I had not spoken on before, and it begs more questions than answers.

What if the nature of technology leads to an accelerating rich-poor gap that is not self-rectifying?

What if technology raises the bottom of the pyramid for all, and democratizes upward mobility, yet at the same time, transforms it from a pyramid to a conical spike?

What happens to peoples who opt out of the vector of progress?

What is the nature of work?

Can our culture co-evolve during the transition?

[AlanDeRossett]

Im optimistic too Steve! The rich poor gap hit in 1999 and it hit again in 2007, 2013 will create the giant sucking sound while money flows to improve the standard of living for all. The argument against Moore's Law by Peter Theil forgets that absolute Capitalism or Greed is only for the newly rich. Some of us don't mind paying for employees health care and welcome a stable economy where the middle class thrives. It's good for Business assuming you don't have a short turn exit strategy.

.

[DrJoySmithMaxwell]

As I understand, several EU nations have successfully addressed the gap simply by introducing job-share & <100% positions, & as a by-product enabling better work-life balance, as well. Given the lack of sufficient sleeping hours & the pandemic it has spurred, job share & reduced hours might be a good option to consider in US!

[osulime]

Thanks for sharing this Steve. Great points made here. I knew you from the interesting stuff in your Flickr feed, which led me to this, but now you caused me to stumble upon Solve For X, there goes my Friday night!

[paulcapestany]

Awesome talk. I ran out of characters with what I was originally going to say about how one could go about reaching the inverse conclusion — that technology is actually narrowing the rich-poor gap when you think along broader terms. Posted it up at PaulCapestany℃om

[davidseaton]

Great talk! Could you get some decent English subtitles on it, a la Khan Academy? (the automatic subtitles suck). There are some Spanish technological mavens I know who would benefit greatly from seeing it. Accompanied by English subtitles they would have no problem following it as your exposition is wonderfully clear, however... you talk so damn fast, even I have trouble catching up

[scientious]

This was an excellent talk for 2013. However, these ideas are likely to be obsolete in a few more years.

[SailorBarsoom]

An unconditional guaranteed basic income, so that nobody has to be SO poor that they don't have food, water, plumbing, energy, shelter, healthcare, education, oh a dozen other things. Not enough to make everybody rich (YET!), but enough so that nobody is desperately poor.

[AliceRathjen]

The need for idea space to correlate with humanity is key. Currently aggregated human behavior is consolidated under a "lucky" domain with a winner taking all wealth creation. If idea space was distributed with each human having their own bio-metric based domain, then aggregated human data could still occur - but wealth could become more distributed. Data aggregation can have consent and compensation tied back to each human contributing to the technical wealth creation.

[AlaskaFinal]

The wage hasn't grown much, but it isn't flat, and we've seen dramatic growth in benefits, which, if we include it as a part of overall worker compensation, you can only conclude that conditions for workers is getting better.

It goes hand-in-hand with most good becoming cheaper, so the wealth you earn now goes further than it did 20 or 30 years ago.

And while Moor's law might not be a lie, there is a good possibility (as you likely know) that it will be breaking down:

/watch?v=bm6ScvNygUU

[camelbrook]

King Hubbert's "Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture" could help you answer some of the paradoxical views of the future.

[foremski]

Scale matters on the Internet. It's the ultimate scalable technology and that means businesses can build very powerful positions, unassailable positions because they are protected by their scale. Too large not to fail.

[CJ_]

Shares should be a standard and proportionate part of everyone's pay. The road from graduate recruit to executive should not have an exponential gradient

[jorled]

I make $51.50. Your income goes up by 50%, half, my income goes up 50 times, 5000% ! just to be "equal" by this standard. I sure love this standard! Keep talking it up...it'll be something entirely new in the history of economics if it works...Who should I start shooting to get it happening?

[jsalsman]

Steve, please read Sheila Bair's NYT op-ed "Grand Old Parity" -- she's the only progressive Republican left in the country, and her ideas deserve to be amplified in the conservative community as much as possible.

[Off-The-X]

Basically to some it up, I am screwed! He used words that I don't even know. Therefore how am I ever going to understand. Can't fault a man that doesn't have dirt under fingernail and talks to animals everyday, but being a laymen is the true essence of who we are supposed to be as a society.

[jorled]

It's the people who aren't contributing to the technical wealth creation who anchor the bottom end.