I have to disagree about being the middle man. Deskilling the workforce into an assembly line is a value creating activity, it's what engineers basically do. The typical middle man is simply there to skim some money because there are communication bottlenecks.
Yes, you're totally right - land will get devalued. The older generations in richer countries will lose the most relatively. This is not a bad thing fundamentally (it reverses the rich get richer trend), and is actually what's already happening, but people don't feel it. Every story that is heard about poverty reduction in China is also a story of westerners getting relatively poorer - though in absolute terms everyone is getting better quality of life.
Deskilling the workforce may be a valuable activity but those who make the best of it will be those doing the deskilling rather than those who are deskilled.
I'm not sure that the older/richer will lose out. They have a lot of political clout that they will bring to bear to keep value in their homes and retirement assets. A lot of this will be hoarded rather than redistributed so demand will continue to outstrip supply in many areas.
The 'rich' in this case are middle and upper middle classes (wealth in homes), not the uber rich (wealth in stocks), so they don't actually have that much clout (doctors, teachers etc) on the international level, and they already are losing out. Doctors are relatively poorer than in the 60s/70s.
Deskilling benefits everyone, is leads to more equitable wealth distribution. The people inventing the assembly lines (hackers) will be paid more than the assembly line worker (cloud laborers), but that's a fair reward for the effort. They won't be much richer (just like mechanical engineers who invent factory equipment) because fierce competition will prevent it (there aren't network/platform effects that lead to gates/zuckerburg).
Comments
I have to disagree about being the middle man. Deskilling the workforce into an assembly line is a value creating activity, it's what engineers basically do. The typical middle man is simply there to skim some money because there are communication bottlenecks.
Yes, you're totally right - land will get devalued. The older generations in richer countries will lose the most relatively. This is not a bad thing fundamentally (it reverses the rich get richer trend), and is actually what's already happening, but people don't feel it. Every story that is heard about poverty reduction in China is also a story of westerners getting relatively poorer - though in absolute terms everyone is getting better quality of life.
Deskilling the workforce may be a valuable activity but those who make the best of it will be those doing the deskilling rather than those who are deskilled.
I'm not sure that the older/richer will lose out. They have a lot of political clout that they will bring to bear to keep value in their homes and retirement assets. A lot of this will be hoarded rather than redistributed so demand will continue to outstrip supply in many areas.
The 'rich' in this case are middle and upper middle classes (wealth in homes), not the uber rich (wealth in stocks), so they don't actually have that much clout (doctors, teachers etc) on the international level, and they already are losing out. Doctors are relatively poorer than in the 60s/70s.
Deskilling benefits everyone, is leads to more equitable wealth distribution. The people inventing the assembly lines (hackers) will be paid more than the assembly line worker (cloud laborers), but that's a fair reward for the effort. They won't be much richer (just like mechanical engineers who invent factory equipment) because fierce competition will prevent it (there aren't network/platform effects that lead to gates/zuckerburg).