This is a story about revolting peasants...

The problem with a race to the bottom is that once taken to its ultimate conclusion, mass extinction or war, revolution & regression are the only options.

As a technologist it seems like the huge cash mountains, built up by the dominant players in the information age, might lead to innovations that could solve some of the crises facing humanity.

If you think that Elon Musk and his Gigafactory producing staggering amounts of lithium batteries is the answer, you haven't looked at the fundamentals. Batteries are about energy storage, and energy still has to be generated somehow. Lithium is a metal, and all metals have to be mined. All that production capacity for batteries drives the price much lower, while the countries who have the mineral reserves can price gouge for their scarce resources.

Let's imagine that the gulf states move from oil to solar, because they're hot desert countries with very little cloud cover. Let's imagine that China produces all those solar panels, and also fulfils its ambitions to become one of the world's top lithium exporters, to rival Chile, who are currently number one.

Wealth is going to continue to flow to the gulf states, because we're still wedded to petroleum products. Nobody has yet come up with a realistic way of moving huge container ships, aeroplanes, freight trains and heavy goods vehicles, without fuel oil, kerosene and diesel. Most industrial plant used in mining runs on diesel. Crude oil is still the grease on the wheels of industry.

Automotive transport is a disproportionately high energy user in the USA because it's a wealthy country where almost every household has a car. In China, only 13% of the population have a car. Electric self-driving cars might be a big deal in the land of the free, but the 320 million people in the USA just can't compare to China's 1,360 million.

The bulk of what's going on in the tech world at the moment is silly toys for silly boys. Yes, the achievements of the SpaceX project are incredible. Yes, electric vehicles appear to go some way towards addressing climate change. However, it's an absolute piss in the ocean for most people on the planet.

I'm not even that worried about the rise of the robots, and automation. The main problem we've got is the social disruption. For sure, things like Uber seem to deliver a great advancement for people who are already wealthy. As a rich city dweller, being able to have a "private driver" (to borrow from Uber's tagline) feels like the promised future has arrived. In fact, what's happening is that a load of cab drivers who invested a lot in their local 'knowledge' and fleet of vehicles are now on the scrap heap. Uber attracts immigrants who can raise the money to buy a Toyota Prius, and are prepared to accept appalling working conditions.

For every person's livelihood robbed by technological 'advancement', a whole family is put into an economically precarious position. What are all London's black cab drivers going to do, with their investment in their vehicles and the approximately 3 years it took them to memorise 125,000 points of interest?

It seems logical and rational that people should adapt to change as quickly as they can, because hesitation will only leave them further behind. However, people don't tend to like it very much when the rug is pulled out from under their feet. People tend to dig their heels in, complain and protest, when their comfort zone is threatened.

From weaving looms to agricultural mechanisation, the peasants have been deeply unhappy with technological advancements. For hundreds of years, people have wrung their hands about the proletariat being left idle, while the machines till the fields and make our clothes. Clearly, the workforce has adapted. New types of jobs have been created. We have seen the rise and rise of the service sector, and entertainment.

You would have thought that people would be happy. We have low mortality rates, and we no longer have to work in the blazing heat and pouring rain, out in the fields, or in the choking smog of the industrial towns. We sit in our air-conditioned offices, moving a mouse around and tapping on a keyboard. These should be halcyon days.

However, we have failed to stem the flow of information and imagery of the excesses of the wealthiest 1% flaunting their money on the world stage.

We can't help but compare ourselves with others, and most of our media is obsessed with the super-rich. The idea of a jet-set lifestyle, with limousine transport is part of what makes Uber so successful. We have been promised a better life for so long, but yet we are stuck with the drudgery of menial jobs. Suddenly we too can be chauffeur driven around. However, we forget that we are living in a tiny bubble.

The very vast majority are still living absolutely shit lives of grinding poverty. While wage increases at the bottom of the food chain look very good in percentage terms, they really don't measure up to the increased expectations of those people who are being paid marginally more. Also, there is little data to suggest that increasing somebody's salary from $1 a day to $2 a day is transformative to their quality of life.

Nearly 50% of the world's population uses the Internet, and so implicitly, those people expect to soon have a helicopter, a superyacht, a private jet and an idyllic desert island. These are the images that we see every day. This is what we're promised. I can follow Kim Kardashian on Instagram, just like I can follow my mate Fred Bloggs from down the road. It takes one swipe of my finger on my smartphone to compare myself with the top 0.1% of the population, just the same as it does to compare myself with the 99.9%.

I'm not given to comparing myself with the billions of other Internet users. Looking at Twitter is depressing. Guess what? Everybody's got a mum. Everybody's got cats & babies. Everybody's got the same worries about money, relationships and how attractive their body is. Everybody blogs. Everybody photographs. We're all just so much meat in the mincer.

There is a bit of us that needs to feel special and unique and different. "Big data" doesn't care that you're special, unique and different. Technology says that you're just one of billions of users. You're just one pair of eyeballs in a sea of marketing opportunities. Tech is a numbers game. You're a statistically negligible number.

As our communities have collapsed, and we have been driven into increasingly desperate lonely isolated lives, where our only connection with the world is through social networking, the war on our workplace rages on. The same technology that knows if you're engaging with advertising can be used to make sure that we're paying attention while we're working our jobs. Eye-tracking technology could easily be used to deduct money from your wages every time you stare out of the window, instead of focussing on your spreadsheets and email.

Technology is developing very fast, and the hype suggests that exponential growth is delivering all the things that we've been imagining for hundreds of years.

The truth, however, is that somebody still has to mine your lithium, install your solar panels, and actually permit the switch to be thrown to enable our robotic overlords.

What we're going to find is that even though the geeks might be right, people still don't like to end up standing around with their dick in their hands, looking like a total idiot. The message from the technologists seems to be "this is better, so you'd better get on with accepting the future" and "evolve or die".

It's been very frustrating as a technologist to be held back by dinosaurs who just don't 'get it'. It's been very frustrating to work with organisations that are extremely resistant to change. A lot of people who I meet in my job have 99 reasons why something won't work, and will be deliberately obstructive. In order to get anything done, I've had to become extremely resourceful about going round people who just want to protect their jobs.

There are more people than you think who are having a shitty time. There are all those people who society has been happy to leave festering in the "economically inactive" bucket. There are the vast majority, who are seen as a commodity pool, to be given zero hours contract McJobs on minimum wage. There are the jaded, disillusioned, demotivated and demoralised people who are educated and intelligent enough to see that the system's pretty crooked - the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer - who are also bored zombies in their horrible office jobs.

The thumb screws are getting tightened on the working class, with austerity, benefit cuts, job insecurity, pay cuts in real terms, ever-increasing cost of living (i.e. food, housing, energy, transport) and every other thing that creates a death by a thousand cuts.

And why are the ordinary people suffering this low growth, high stress environment? So that we can have bank bailouts, corporate welfare and tax breaks for millionaires.

Yes, us technologists can imagine a utopian society of endless leisure time, self-driving electric cars and android servants, but we are very unlikely to get there while the bankers, oligarchs and politicians are attempting to feather their already plump nests.

Already, we see anger directed at gentrification. How long before the peasants march to Palo Alto with their pitchforks and burning torches, in order to lop off the heads of the plutocrats who say "let them eat Facebook likes"?

Tags: #computing #socialmedia