My feeling is "Don't hamper technological progress but provide a robust safety net to take care of those left behind" is itself a straw man. No one is hampering technological progress. Instead a lot of people are (correctly imho) not willing to blindly succumb to it on a promise from those at the top that it will all work out in the end. Everyone is a stake holder in society and entitled to their own fears, hopes and beliefs. pmarca has his, the guy about to be replaced by a robot does too. A responsible society listens to both and figures out an equitable compromise. The problem is pmarca has billions of dollars available to bolster his position in the debate. The guy on the factory flaw does not. A second problem (for me at least) is that what pmarca says and what pmarca does often appear to be two different things.
> My feeling is "Don't hamper technological progress but provide a robust safety net to take care of those left behind" is itself a straw man.
> No one is hampering technological progress.
I'm sorry, but this could not be more wrong. This is what the entire conversation is _about_. Protecting jobs that do things less efficiently (higher cost, lower output, worse quality by some other metric, whatever) is a HUGE topic of discussion and something that a lot of the country still thinks makes sense[1], despite the fact that it transfers wealth from arbitrary consumers (even the poor) to arbitrary workers (regardless of income), and destroys wealth overall. I've yet to hear a single credible argument for why this is not infinitely worse than maximizing the total amount of wealth (by using the best tool for each job, be it robots or workers) and then explicitly redistributing it the way we want (so transfers will come from e.g. the rich and go to those who need it, like the poor and the sick). The arbitrary, untargeted welfare system that protecting inefficient jobs entails is obviously going to give you a lot more people receiving transfers who don't need it (i.e. middle-to-high income) and a lot more people losing wealth who do need it (consumers who have low incomes).
It is a very important point (and one that I've given a lot of thought to) that obsoleting people's jobs _requires_ the robust safety net for them (which we simply don't have in the US), and going full-speed ahead with technology while failing to implement the safety net can be dangerous. That's just an argument for pushing that much harder for a robust safety net (which is something any reasonable person in the US has been doing for decades, at least). Even this distinction is irrelevant when we're talking about someone's view of what the optimal solution would be: you start from an optimal solution (don't intentionally gimp productivity, use the gains from higher productivity to provide a safety net for those who get left behind) and then try to push it through the layers of politics etc that's required to get it actually working. Shouting it down at the ideas phase is just gonna end up with a system where
[1] c.f. all the complaints about replacing workers with robots in factories etc
