Silicon Valley’s Unchecked Arrogance
In its mind, Silicon Valley creates the future, while the rest of the world will soon become the “idle class.” What if they instead helped people build wealth for themselves?
Last month, Y-Combinator, Silicon Valley’s blue-chip startup fund, announced a request for proposal to study a universal basic income. Sam Altman, the President of Y-Combinator, wrote in a separate essay that in the future, we will have a “smaller and smaller number of people creating more and more of the wealth. And we need a new solution for the people not creating most of the wealth — many of the minimum wage jobs are going to get innovated away anyway.”
The people without jobs will be an “idle class” — and the obvious conclusion, to Altman, “is that the government will just have to give these people money.” (Emphasis ours.) And you wonder why political candidates on both sides are tapping into anti-elitist anger with great success.
Silicon Valley is, with good reason, the envy of the entrepreneurial world. Brilliant people have created transformative companies — and have earned a great living in the process. Facebook and Twitter have given people the ability to express themselves in authoritarian governments; the inventors of the mobile phones have brought information and services to billions; and Google makes the world’s information available to everyone.
But Silicon Valley's view towards the rest of the world is often one of unchecked arrogance.