Not surprisingly, yet another ‘techie’ in San Francisco was attacked by a random person for wearing Google Glass. There’s clearly some anti-tech sentiment simmering in some people’s minds and I can see why. There’s a limited supply of houses and lots of demand from high-wage technology workers. People are being forced out of their homes because they don’t earn large amounts of capital. They have no say in the matter. A recent Swiss study concluded that the US is no longer a democracy, but an oligarchy. People have no say in how their taxes are spent, no say in what issues the government thinks are important at the moment, and no say in the shielding of their data from the NSA. To top it all off, the person who attacked the Glass-wearer had no say in the abrupt eviction notice they probably received. I can understand their emotional response; the frustration, the hopelessness, the anger...

Robotics and automation technology is advancing at an accelerating rate. Within a few decades, everything that can be automated will be automated. Construction, agriculture, folding Chipotle burritos, anything that requires a repetitive labor-based task will be automated by machines. This can be seen as a problem, since almost half of the current employment landscape in the US is devoted to labor-based jobs. If robots will soon do all of those jobs, without requiring pay or any kind of benefit package, what happens to the scores of unemployed people?

A popular argument is that new jobs will be created as they always have. Some will point to the printing press and say that it took the jobs of scribes, but created new jobs in distribution of text. This has always been the case indeed, but there is one key component this time around that changes the game; software. Software has only been...