Stephen Hawking got this right.
The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow
very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while
employing very few people (eg. Facebook, Google, etc). This is
inevitable, it is technological progress, but it is also socially
destructive.
We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which
brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the
financial sector (eg. Wall Street bankers) can accrue huge rewards
and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the
bill when their greed leads us astray.
So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not
diminishing, financial inequality (ie. worsening Gini coefficient),
in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but
their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no
wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and
Brexit might have appeared to represent.
https://www.unlimited.world/unlimited/this-is-the-most-dangerous-time-for-our-planet
