does technology make us more un/equal?

There is the idea that today it's 'washing machines for everyone':

The magic washing machine | Hans Rosling - YouTube

How Capitalism is Setting Washerwomen Free - Foundation for Economic Education

How Free Trade Liberated Women from Housework - Foundation for Economic Education

Stop "Protecting" Us from Affordable Washing Machines - Foundation for Economic Education

You can see all this 'technology for all' as the result of our current system: 

In 1919, the Frigidaire was the first self-contained refrigerator. It cost $775 (over $11,000 in today’s money). As the average hourly wage in 1919 was just $0.43, it took the average American 1,802 hours of work to afford this luxury appliance. 

Today, the standard Whirlpool French door refrigerator holds 25 cubic feet’s worth of food and drink. It has “fingerprint resistant stainless steel” and costs just $1,529. According to the latest BLS statistics, it would take the average American just 57.5 hours of work to be able to afford this – now common – appliance. (The average wage today is $26.55 per hour.) 

As Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute previously pointed out, “an ordinary person today lives better than most kings of yesteryear,” thanks to innovation, capitalism and mass production. As we wait for the warm weather to return, we should be thankful that virtually all Americans have access to refrigeration and, thus, the ability to store food all year round.

Thanks Capitalism, Refrigerators Are Awesome! - Foundation for Economic Education

But maybe you can have your washing machines and refrigerators under a very different system:

Aaron Bastani | On Fully Automated Luxury Communism, climate change, and more - YouTube

What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism? - The Atlantic

Opinion | The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. - The New York Times

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani – a manifesto for the future | Books | The Guardian

However, it is not necessarily 'technology for all'.

New gadgets or machines or industries effect us differently. 

The World Economic Forum warns that 'the rise of technology' isn't in itself a good thing:

Is technology making inequality worse? | World Economic Forum

And the Guardian looks at how 'technology' can have very different uses:

Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this

Here’s the bad news: technology – specifically, surveillance technology – makes it easier to police disaffected populations, and that gives badly run, corrupt states enough stability to get themselves into real trouble.
Here’s the good news: technology – specifically, networked technology – makes it easier for opposition movements to form and mobilise, even under conditions of surveillance, and to topple badly run, corrupt states.
Inequality creates instability, and not just because of the resentments the increasingly poor majority harbours against the increasingly rich minority. Everyone has a mix of good ideas and terrible ones, but for most of us, the harm from our terrible ideas is capped by our lack of political power and the checks that others – including the state – impose on us.

Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this | Inequality | The Guardian

One particular idea running through much of this is that of 'technological discontinuity' - and even those who use the term are not clear exactly what they mean by it:

On the definition and measurement of technological discontinuities - ScienceDirect

Science fiction is a good way to look at these things.

In this video, at 10:30, the critic Will Self looks at the difference between movies of the 1950s which gave us futures with jet packs and eating pills; but the 1982 film Blade Runner gives us a dirty and messy future. 

And what we find is a future of 'discontinuous technologies' where one technology which you would think is obsolete exists alongside the shiny new technology.

He calls this 'steam punk' - and every age is this 'steam punk' age, because we are always surprised that we don't all get the same new tech at the same time.

The future is not going to be 'all wipe-able surfaces'.

The film Solaris is very different to the other film of the same time, 2001:

Sculpting Time - Introduction to Tarkovsky's Solaris by Will Self - YouTube

Will Self also challenges the idea given in the first link above to the TED Talk by Hans Rosling.

The end of the Apollo missions into space ended a vision of a shiny, metallic future. And in place of optimistic and  Promethean space operas such as Stanley Kubric's 2001, science fiction began to mutate into 'steam punk', which saw technological development as 'asynchronous'.

And without a vaccine for covid, we won't be able to rely on medical technologies which have made it possible for humans to live in high densities while travelling frequently and en masse.

In other words, we are not 'all in this together', with some enjoying access to hi-tech medicine to fight the coronavirus pandemic, and others not.

BBC Radio 4 - A Point of View, The End of Progress?

File: Times Square looking more and more like Blade Runner... (8735774078).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

To finish, here are some more pointers from Blade Runner:

Are we living in a Blade Runner world? - BBC Culture

Blade Runner Insight - How Science Became God in Blade Runner

Blade Runner 2049’s politics resonate because they are so perilously close to our own

And here we look at whether technology makes us more un/equal:

The Computer Did It? Technology and Inequality | Dissent Magazine

Can digital technologies really be used to reduce inequalities? | Development Matters

Reamer_The_Impacts_of_Invention_on_Economic_Growth_02-28-14.pdf

 

Finally:

We’re on the Brink of Cyberpunk
It’s not just the technology, surveillance, and dystopian vibes—it’s the culmination of decades of deliberate governmental erosion.
By KELSEY D. ATHERTON APRIL 08, 20209:00 AM

Where is the president in Blade Runner?
Beneath the 1982 neo-noir’s trappings of genetically engineered human automatons is a story about corporate power over and indifference to life, alienation in the face of wealthy indifference to the plight of workers. Replace the Tyrell Corporation with Amazon and reframe the replicants as “essential services,” and suddenly you have a world of workers terrified that their jobs are inherently a death sentence—moving straight from fiction to reality.
But while Blade Runner’s once-distant future of November 2019 feels resonant in so many ways—vast corporate power, persistent surveillance, life in a time of constant crisis—it misses the actual 2019’s most salient feature: an inescapable, painful awareness of politics and of the presence or deliberate absence of government in daily life.
Government, as experienced for much of the 20th century, is largely absent from the lives of characters in cyberpunk stories. Police are a durable feature, but government services and functions beyond the security state are absent.
Yet for all the aggressive visibility of politics in our daily lives, we’re not that far off from the powerlessness of a cyberpunk future. Cyberpunk speaks to the present because the conditions that inspired cyberpunk remain largely unchanged.
As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps through the world, it collides with governments in the West that have spent decades deliberately shedding power, capability, and responsibility, reducing themselves to little more than vestigial organs that coordinate public-private partnerships of civic responsibility. This hollowing of the state began in earnest in the 1980s, and the science fiction of that time—the earliest texts of cyberpunk—imagines what happens when that process is complete. Cyberpunk is a genre of vast corporate power and acute personal deprivation. The technologies at the center of it are all means of control, control bought by the wealthy or broken by criminals. Where recourse is available, in whatever small way, it’s through direct action.

The coronavirus crisis shows that the cyberpunk future is about to come true.

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