I've been reading a lot lately about the causes of isolationism and non-assimilation that is such a huge problem in muslin communities in Europe, and one thing I keep seeing crop up is that so many European communities gave so much welfare to immigrants that they were never forced to get along with natives to get by. And it makes me think of the looming threat of automation-induced joblessness.
What happens to an already polarized society when UBI ensures that no one has to put aside their differences because they have to go to a place for 8 hours a day that contains people they may not agree with? What happens when the echo chamber playground for adults that is social media - adults who clearly want the benefit of being taken seriously without earning it through actual effort - essentially becomes real life? When you finally have that IRL "block button" because you can literally decide to never interact with a person again when they offend your most trivial of sensibilities?
But there simply is no putting the march of technology back in the bottle.
I've been thinking this for a while now: today's bogeyman is wall street, because yada yada yada evil 1-percenters. Tomorrow's bogeyman will be silicon valley, and the charge will be that they betrayed us with dreams of robot cars and tone-policing AI, but didn't tell us our paychecks would go away for it.
