Technology Lowers Prices
The Impact of Technology
We haven't made the emotional case for technology.
The assumption behind sci-fi like Black Mirror is that the present is okay, but technology could make the future dystopian.
But perhaps the present is dystopian and technology is our only hope for a positive future.
Technology Lowers Prices
Prices are up in education, healthcare, and real estate, but they’re down in computers and telecommunications. In every area technology touches, the price decreases.
Everybody becomes more equal because they have the same iPhone or Android phone experience. They’ve got the same Google, Wikipedia, GitHub—anything that is digital.
The consumer economy actually creates a form of equality. At a massive, massive scale, you produce the same product for everybody. There’s not that much difference between a top-end smartphone and a low-end one.
Every area the government touches sees prices inflate. That’s due to regulations or subsidies, which impairs the increases of labor productivity from technology.
For example, in medicine a doctor is required to be in the loop for any diagnostic decisions, even if artificial intelligence can do it better than 99 percent of doctors. (And 99 percent is just in early experiments. Once you get the AI into production with all the data, it will become better than every doctor.)
Maybe we have a medical doctor supervising it, so it’s not just a program running by itself without any supervision. But right now we aren’t allowed to automate the doctor because of regulations and subsidies.
A subsidy is similar to a regulation because it casts a particular way of doing things into stone. That’s why we still have yellow school buses and number two pencils. These decisions are set in budget appropriations, locked in, and then they become lagging aspects of the system.
Law, medicine, education, finance, real estate…all of these are lagging areas that are regulated or subsidized. Technology has partially reformed them, but not fully. Now, they’re just relics being dragged into the future.
There is obviously value to tradition. People say something is “Lindy” to mean it’s been proven by the test of time, or existed for a long time. But, of course, there's a tension between tradition and innovation. Going to the moon wasn't Lindy; it was just awesome. This is a tension within humanity itself.
Technology changes microeconomic leverage. It expands the range of options available to each person:
- Accept ignorance vs. search Google
- Accept a broadcast vs. reply on social media
- Accept fiat vs. buy Bitcoin
You may want to know, talk back, or opt out. Now you can.
