Noah Chomsky says technology is neutral: it can be used to empower companies, automate jobs away (as it's the case right now). It also could be used to empower employees (into super craftsmen??) but so far this direction isn't pursued.
policy & regulation within capitalism determine whether corporations can be commoditised by customers (a lot of market competition) or labour can be commoditised by corporations (monopolies & job scarcity, collusion)
If you think about it, wouldn't more advanced technology lead to higher consumption until everybody has literally everything that they could possibly want?
Technology is more of a scapegoat for rising inequality than a proximate cause.
Not to undermine the increasing inequalities between employees and employers in many aspects, but there is a strong increase in work-at-home thanks to telecommuting and there is an increase in self-employed people thanks to ease of access of new technologies.
I don't know. Anyone who I'd consider a supercraftsperson usually has their own shop & tools. Most of the stuff coming out of maker spaces are trinkets. You won't find there the old man who builds 1/10 models of steam locomotives.
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. --Warren Bennis
Bu imagine an alternative world without factories. The maker movement is still ahead of us. Imagine there exists an open-hape-wiki with 3d-models of every part of every thing we ever built (actually these models exist already but are not open source).
The shop & tools are would be a 3d-printer plus remote controlled robot arms (so that a person from Ukraine can deliver service to you).
The person from Ukraine is in the loop anyway, except currently they are employed by BigCo1 at $1/day and still BigCo1 charges you $100/h for services taking all the arbitrage profits.
The goal is to dis-intermediate, to enable person to person (customer & supplier) to profit from the living cos / efficiency arbitrage.
