Technological Breakthroughs: Who Benefits?

A respondent to last week’s blog about the Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) raised this excellent question: “Who is going to implement and benefit from the TIR…. Fifty or even thirty years ago the answer would have been obvious: the clever, technologically advanced, innovative folks in the First World, with the poor, backward South bringing up the rear and getting picked off by the inevitable results – war and famine etc. – of what Paul Gilding has predicted as ‘The Great Disruption.’ Now, not so clear.”

The respondent implies that today the answer would not be so clear because “the poor backward South” is – at least in part – no longer as poor and backward as it was thirty years ago. Five years ago, who would have thought that India would make the progress it has? Even parts of Africa are coming along. While in comparison with China and India, the West is definitely in decline, the First World, which will soon include these countries, is expanding and the Third World is shrinking.

However, as the respondent makes clear in his introduction, the effects of climate change and population growth in relation to the shrinking resource base may be so disastrous that the benefits from any technological breakthroughs will be illusory or negligible. In that case, the surviving rich will be poorer and the surviving poor will remain poor.

However, it is easy to be pessimistic and difficult to be optimistic, so let us take the difficult way out. Homo sapiens has occasionally demonstrated prodigious resilience, as well as – needless to say – prodigious self-destruction. Therefore, there is no reason necessarily to assume the worst. Human ingenuity may once again overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. If so, thanks to further technological breakthroughs, the poor will continue to become less poor. And if present trends continue, the rich will become relatively less rich. These developments will lead to greater equality and be of immense benefit to everybody, even to us, the (relatively less) rich.