Why inequality will only grow

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Who was there who said that self-driving cars are a matter of the distant future? Here is some fresh news. The trucker robot made the first delivery of real cargo. The robot covered 190 kilometers, delivering a loaded 16-meter trailer to Colorado Springs, an American city where the laboratory of the famous Nikola Tesla was located for a long time:

The two-legged trucker was also in the cockpit to take control levers in case of anything. As befits a representative of the dominant species, he sleeps in a sleeping place, without distracting the robot from the road.

Let me remind you that 3.6 million professional truck drivers work in the United States. Rest assured, as soon as the capitalist sharks calculate that robots are cheaper than live drivers, all these 3.6 million will immediately go to the labor exchange for benefits. As the author of the article I referred to mockingly writes, "they will be able to perform more creative and intellectual tasks."

The Internet, alas, has flattened the world. This has led to a widening income gap between the best and the mediocre. There is a shortage of good programmers in the world, so their salaries are constantly growing. There is an abundance of people in the world who can perform simple tasks that do not require special knowledge. You can familiarize yourself with their earnings, for example, on Yandex. Toloka:

A typical assignment is to collect on the Internet a collection of 20 professional images of nature, animals and plants, provide each card with an accurate link to the source and a good text description. Make sure you take no more than three images from one site. Payment: 12 rubles (20 cents). This is not for one card - this is for the entire collection.

Not enough, do you think? But this is the market price. There are so many people without paid skills that they are willing to work for the money. If the collection of one collection takes 20 minutes, you can earn 300 rubles a day, and about 8 thousand a month. Not a bad salary for residents of some republics of the FSU.

For comparison, the salary of novice programmers (juniors) who know the basics of the Java language starts at 60 thousand rubles. Since there are few programmers, you can work from home without any problems; not all employers require personal presence in the office.

As you can see, the gap is already wide. In the mid-term, however, it will only intensify, because robots will take over the work of searching and sorting pictures, and work on complex programming, on the contrary, will only increase in the next 5-10 years.

The conclusion from this is simple. We, both individual citizens and the country as a whole, have no choice but to actively learn and master new technologies. The big race has begun - soon it will change our planet beyond recognition.