Readit NewsThe important lesson here should be that retail prices != prices.
In general just taxing the winners (wealthy) period is well tolerated politcally, but it also requires a goverment that's somewhat fiscally responsible and not spending $800B a year on their military instead of social programs. The US hasn't had a fiscally responsible government since Clinton, and the pigeons are currently coming home to roost in the form of inflation and loss of confidence in the US dollar as the reserve currency.
In Northern Europe it’s handled quite well. In the U.S. it’s handled with a “callous lack of empathy” as you phrased it.
My point is disruption is the engine of progress, but it also causes temporary pain (that might not be temporary on the scale of human lifetimes.) It’s the wrong reaction to want to stop or slow progress. You can actually prove that through the lens of game theory and the fact that we have multiple human societies. The right thing to do is ensure your society doesn’t leave the losers of that process behind.
The issue is that as change comes faster and faster, a higher proportion of people fall into the "disrupted" category.
It’s still a good thing for society - the alternative is halting or slowing progress.
A valid question is are there inventions for which this would not be true? I think yes for general AI, but also yes for people who are unable to migrate between a job lost and any of the new jobs created due to lack of education or willingness to reinvent themselves or relocate to where the new jobs are. Innovation can definitely create winners and losers. That’s bad for the losers, but not necessarily for society as a whole. Unless so many losers are created that they rise up and overthrow the system. That’s a real long tail risk if the pace of change sufficiently outpaces our ability to adapt to it.
IQ is a proxy for intelligence. People often use them interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Your statement is more valid for intelligence than IQ.
The point is people on HN missed the potential of Dropbox because for them it was a problem they already had a half solution for. For regular people who don’t know what an rsync is, Dropbox seemed like magic.
The moral of the story is that if a solution is only available to a technicaly savvy minority, the market opportunity is still wide open.