Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…That’s what VR is for. – of figuring out what to do with your time or we don’t work. But I think there’s an immediate pressing problem which is companies will get extremely wealthy by having really fat profit margins on being able to achieve great value for tons and tons of people through Aggregation Theory and those people will be completely served, but it will be the same price that we’ve been paying for things except that lots of people don’t have jobs. There is going to be this kind of scary valley where we eliminate the jobs long before we have any sort of like support redistribution system. A couple of thoughts. I think what we’re talking about is a consequence of Aggregation Theory where if you believe it, that we’re entering a world across all industries now where a superior customer experience becomes a winner-take-all business. That means there is a winner and lots of losers. As opposed to where you have equilibrium in other industries and how such as the auto industry where there are 10-20; or the airline industry, 10-20 firms. They’re all employing lots of people and maybe they are not as profitable as firms as a winner-take-all business. But they are at least providing jobs. So, this is definitely as far as I know, nobody has solved what this means, how to deal with this on a societal level. But what you’re saying after that reminds me of there is a great… I believe this was in Wired. I’m going to find this article. I’ll link to it in the show notes. Right before the election, Obama gave a few interviews where he talked a lot about tech and sort of mused on what he saw as the biggest challenges for the world and for America going forward now and called on the tech industry to respond to them. The first one was inequality. And this piece they had six well-known figures from the tech industry sort of respond to each of these things, the challenges that Obama called out. I believe, yes it was Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media answered the inequality topic and he said exactly what you’re talking about, Ben, which is that Silicon Valley often forgets that it takes consumer circles and people with jobs who have disposable income to then spend money on Silicon Valley products and technology. So you’re always kind of eating your own tail in the economy and to the extent that we put more people out of jobs as an industry, then there’s going to be far less consumption of our own products as an industry.…

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