How is Technology Eliminating Inequality?
I recently came across an intriguing idea. If true, we could escape poverty faster than we think. The intriguing idea is basically this: Technology essentially affects the poor. less poor It can eradicate poverty not by making it easier, but only by making the experience of wealth easier.
Rather than trying to eliminate poverty through resource redistribution, we can ignore financial inequality in exchange for equality of experience.
Financial Inequality
Technology creates financial inequality.
It creates a monopoly by being cheap and spreading quickly.
If products are distributed quickly and cheaply around the world, most people can obtain these products more easily. In this way, the same mobile applications can be used by everyone and become equally popular.
Therefore, those who benefit most from this business are those who receive larger product orders compared to their competitors.
As technology becomes more widespread, there will be more monopolies and more financial inequality.
Equality of Experience
Here's the real trick: Technology makes its creators rich, but it doesn't provide the same level of experience to its users.
240 million Indians use Facebook, but although relatively few, approximately 19 million Turks are also Facebook users.
And while Mark Zuckerberg's bank account has 10,000,000 times more money than the average Indian, his Facebook account offers the same experience to everyone.
Fast and cheap distribution works both ways. So financial While it creates inequality, experience creates equality. In summary, you cannot pay more for a better Facebook experience.
Access to technology is not always the same everywhere, but over time it will become faster and cheaper to deploy technology. In the end, it doesn't matter how rich you are: everyone has the same experience.
As technology becomes more widespread, access to experiences will become more equal.
Companies may want to offer us something that exceeds the cost. And once produced, the technology is actually not very costly.
Ultimately, we will pay in some way to access this technology, no matter what.
And the costs are better than you think, even if people disagree. Uber is used in India as well as in San Francisco. People just pay and there is less money to be made compared to San Francisco.
Once the technical work is done, the money earned is different but the experience is the same.
Artificial Experiences
What if technology drives financial inequality, but experience creates equality?
Facebook and Uber cannot eradicate poverty.
But these are just 'real' from what is The transition to digital, an artificial experience It is a beginning.
In principle, some things cannot be achieved through technology.
Is it possible that one day even the richest person will choose to live in an artificial VR world? To trick your senses? To plug themselves into the experience machine?
Definitely.
This is an important historical moment. If even the richest people preferred an artificial experience over everything their money could buy, wouldn't they be poor too? 🙂
Equality of experience becomes possible when even the rich choose artificial experiences.
If this technology exists only for the richest to access, one day the poor may also have access to it. Because technology is distributed cheaper and faster in our time.
We will all have equal access to our experiences, regardless of whether the experiences we choose are equal or not.
When we opt for artificial experiences and everyone has access to them, the financial inequality in the world will be much less.
After all, we will pay no matter what. And why try to get richer at this point? After all, everyone will have the same experiences in the artificial and virtual world 🙂