Innovation is always disruptive and the best positioned to take advantage of the disruption are the capital owners. If you have the money, you can simply buy stock in the latest tech IPOs or angel ten AI startups. The switching cost is low. Those who only harness their own human capital have massive switching costs, as the example shows, a famous Luddite learned for 7 years a trade that was made obsolete by machines. This has always been the case, yet innovation was historically beneficial creating new winners and social mobility.
What could be different this time compared to the Luddite era is that machine progress happens at an ever faster rate, until you reach fundamental - biologic and social - limits of the humanity's ability to adapt, especially as workers age. The majority of people will never be programmers or stock traders, and the market for those professions is shallow anyway.
This is all to say that it seems the fundamental social contract of capitalism - that the benefits of innovation are redistributed to everybody through competition and growth, employing more people in new industries and lowering real prices of machine manufactured goods to almost nothing - seems seriously threatened going forward in the AI and super-internet-company age. If the majority of the workforce can't adapt fast enough to become productive with the new methods, then they are redundant as far as capital is concerned; not only do they not make a living wage, they won't make any wage, since whatever they are able to do a machine can do it cheaper.
So you would end up with this near-feudal arrangement where returns to capital can be maintained in perpetuity as long as capital owners can maintain IP rights, strong walled gardens, control over limited mineral and natural resources, or keep innovation and disruption going using the services of a few loyal samurai-innovators, the tech salaried class.
What could be different this time compared to the Luddite era is that machine progress happens at an ever faster rate, until you reach fundamental - biologic and social - limits of the humanity's ability to adapt, especially as workers age. The majority of people will never be programmers or stock traders, and the market for those professions is shallow anyway.
This is all to say that it seems the fundamental social contract of capitalism - that the benefits of innovation are redistributed to everybody through competition and growth, employing more people in new industries and lowering real prices of machine manufactured goods to almost nothing - seems seriously threatened going forward in the AI and super-internet-company age. If the majority of the workforce can't adapt fast enough to become productive with the new methods, then they are redundant as far as capital is concerned; not only do they not make a living wage, they won't make any wage, since whatever they are able to do a machine can do it cheaper.
So you would end up with this near-feudal arrangement where returns to capital can be maintained in perpetuity as long as capital owners can maintain IP rights, strong walled gardens, control over limited mineral and natural resources, or keep innovation and disruption going using the services of a few loyal samurai-innovators, the tech salaried class.