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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

And yet over 3B (billion) people are below the poverty line...

EDIT:

Luckily, weapons systems are much more effective than they were in the 1970s, so I guess we will be able to fend off the poor.

EDIT2:

Look, downvote all you want...the elephant in the room is that the rewards and advances in technology are not and can not be distributed evenly. Even in a first-world nation such as the US, so many of the products listed in my parent post are out-of-reach of anyone without significant financial means. CT scans, for example--what does imaging matter if you can't afford it?

You think that the starving huddled masses are just going to sit outside the walls and go "Man, sure wish I could live there?". That's never how history has worked out, you nitwits.

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The poverty rate has halved over 20 years: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/06/ec...

This is a reason to be optimistic. w00t for humanity! Also b000 to your fearful and unfounded outlook on humanity.

People are quick to downvote when it's inconvenient to their vision of the world.

What he says is true, and innovation seems to affect fewer and fewer people - the rest can only dream of it.

Good drugs are being banned, electric cars are being laughed at by people who can't fathom that an electric motor can put out the same performance as a V6, smartphones can be used as full digital assistants yet they're used for phone calls/Skype and alarms, SpaceX - what's that, etc.

Not to mention that "over 3B (billion) people are below the poverty line..." as angersock said.

Those who are lucky enough to be touched by innovation surround themselves in a bubble and dismiss everyone else.

  Those who are lucky enough to be touched by innovation 
  surround themselves in a bubble and dismiss everyone else.

Totally correct!

Despite of (political correct) statistics made by the world bank, the inequality is rising in the world. Only look at the US. Once the US had a broad middle class. Today, the middle class is shrinking more and more and is replaced by quarters for the poor and others for the rich. The only reason, that it is not seen by most people is, that they stick in their own peer-group -- and do not look to much into the lives of others. Also, there is no country in the world that has that many people in prisons ...

I think I could agree with your point if I agreed that we're slowing down. But I don't think that's going to happen. A lot of the stupefyingly awesome and expensive tech is going to miniaturize and cheapen faster than people will rise up.

Your example of a CT scan got me to think that way. I don't think it's practical to assume that such a device would be widely distributed; heck, I'm not even sure it's possible to fuel them all with liquid He if we tried to proliferate it. But I would bet anything the tech matures and branches such that the cost incrementally drops and the quality incrementally goes up. Or it leads to a breakthrough tech that supplants it (prolly more likely).

So I'm optimistic that the incremental improvements will compound faster than unrest; I think that's what's historically different now than times past - the compound improvements are taking less than a generation. We've made the jumps in tech, now to refine it to be available to all. (Cell phones are a pretty good example of this happening, I think.)

But I suppose there's no telling other than time passing. I prefer optimism, as the alternative is heartbreaking, as you note.

The poor are far better off than they were in the 1970s but that doesn't fit the narrative that things are always getting worse. If anything technology is moving too fast for regulation to keep up and any decrease in acceleration could be helpful.

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