In the near future, most Americans will have their own private robotic chauffeur. Self-driving cars will save roughly 32,000 lives lost every year to auto fatalities, reduce dependence on foreign oil, and free up valuable leisure time otherwise spent cursing in stalled traffic. Like steamboat captains and horse-drawn carriage drivers, innovation will wipe out cabbies, and concentrate income in a smaller workforce of higher-skilled workers.
The inevitable march of technological efficiency means making the trappings of luxur—personal assistants, cutting-edge medicine, and world-class education—less reliant on brute human force (i.e., jobs).
The inevitable gap between the innovative elite and (unfortunately) disposable blue-collar workers has once again been thrown into the spotlight by The New Yorker’s George Packer, who brands wealthy Silicon Valley technologists as antigovernment utopians who prioritize an army of yuppie immigrant app designers over San Francisco’s shrinking middle class.
