The twin political shocks of 2016–the bad Brexit and the worse Trump victory–have provoked Stephen Hawking to pen the Guardian editorial, “This is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet,” which encourages those with vast power and wealth to address the needs of ones left behind in our technological age.

The physicist’s focus is noble, though I wonder about the efficacy of his prescriptions. Hawking believes we need to retrain those whose skills are no longer required. That’s easier said than done, and automation may make it unlikely enough jobs exist even for those who are successfully upskilled. Not every trucker can become a self-driving car engineer.

He further feels we need to support those being retrained financially while they’re indoctrinated into a computer-dominant era, though with the miserly, bigoted plutocrats soon entering the White House, a dismantling of existing social safety nets is far more likely than some form of Universal Basic Income.

The scientist also believes global development on a larger scale is needed to in the face of mass migration, which is great but unlikely in many war-torn areas and even in more stable locales, that level of investment is unlikely without a profit motive. Hawking is rightly saying it shouldn’t be that way, but that’s the way it is.

An excerpt:

The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.

We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.•