A reductive view of those of us worried about the transition into a much more automated society is that we think progress is bad, something to be halted. Not true. Better tools will make us richer and relieve us of a great deal of drudgery. But we should be concerned that the wealth might be in the aggregate, not well-distributed, with widespread technological unemployment possible.

From an Economist piece about America’s Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age, a book that tries to make sense of the new normal:

SOMETHING about the new economy drives prognosticators to extremes. Optimists argue that the world is entering an age of abundance, with productivity surging, diseases like polio being wiped out, and tourists flying to Mars. Pessimists retort that abundance for the few will mean impoverishment for the many. Smart machines will destroy jobs and depress wages. Knowledge workers will be proletarianised. And rising insecurity will promote tribalism and protectionism.

One of the many virtues of America’s Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age is that it avoids such extremes. The authors part with the cyber-utopians in acknowledging that disruption has a dark side. But at the same time they part with the cyber-pessimists in embracing radical change. The new economy is not only generating new opportunities. It is providing people with the tools that they need to cope with disruption. …

A century ago Walter Lippmann, a journalist who was then just 24 years old, wrote a surprise best-seller called Drift and Mastery. He noted that “our schools, churches, courts, governments were not built for the kind of civilisation they are expected to serve”. Americans needed to “adjust their thinking to a new world situation”, otherwise they would be condemned to “drift along at the mercy of economic forces that we are unable to master”. These words ring just as true today as they did then. “America’s Moment” provides as useful a guide as any available to turning drift into mastery once again.•