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We Thought Technology Would Solve Our Problems. Instead, They Got Worse
Techno-optimism may have reached its zenith in 2011, when Marc Andreessen declared that software was eating the world. Back then, it seemed that anything rooted in the physical world was doomed to decline while geeky engineers banging out endless lines of code would own the future and everything in it.
Yet as Derek Thompson pointed out in The Atlantic, the euphoria of Andreessen and his Silicon Valley brethren seems to have been misplaced. A rash of former unicorns have seen their value plummet, while WeWork saw its IPO self-destruct. Today, even Internet giants like Amazon seem to be investing more in atoms than they do in bits.
We were promised a new economy of increasing returns, but statistics show a very different story. Over the past 30 years wages have stagnated while productivity growth has slowed to a crawl. At the same time, costs for things like education and healthcare have skyrocketed. What is perhaps most disturbing is how many of our most basic problems have gotten worse.
1. Extreme Inequality
The digital revolution was supposed to be a democratizing force, increasing access to information and competition while breaking the institutional monopoly on power. Yet just the opposite seems to have happened, with a relatively…
