> >But Mr. Toyama disagrees: “Technology — even when it’s equally distributed — isn’t a bridge, but a jack. It widens existing disparities.”
> Evidence please? And what if disparities are widened because everyone gets a 50% boost? Don't do it?
Well, it's not evidence, but Paul Graham said the same thing in one of his essays (don't remember which one, sorry). He said that technology is a multiplier. Instead of the distribution of talent (or perhaps productivity?) going from 1 to 10, now it goes from 1 to 1000.
So PG's position is that it's not just 50% boost for everybody. It widens differences more than just by scaling existing ones by a constant factor.
I'm not convinced that widened differences are a real problem. They are certainly a perceived problem, and they seem to give people emotional flutters about the envy center, but I'm not sure what there is to "solve" about that.
> Evidence please? And what if disparities are widened because everyone gets a 50% boost? Don't do it?
Well, it's not evidence, but Paul Graham said the same thing in one of his essays (don't remember which one, sorry). He said that technology is a multiplier. Instead of the distribution of talent (or perhaps productivity?) going from 1 to 10, now it goes from 1 to 1000.
So PG's position is that it's not just 50% boost for everybody. It widens differences more than just by scaling existing ones by a constant factor.