Even if we should be humble in predicting that self-driving vehicles will upend the trucking sector or drone delivery will decimate supermarkets, we can be confident that some creative destruction is coming.
Our current policies － and impulses － are to resist such destruction. If a large manufacturer is set to close, subsidies and other policies kick into action to prevent that shutdown. But while we may save a factory, ultimately we hinder the rise of new technologies; rather than propping up incumbent firms we ought to enable innovation to take its course.
If that idea makes you uneasy, it is probably because our current policies do nothing to protect the most vulnerable from the costs of all this destruction. We resist letting factories close because we worry about what will become of the people who work there. But if we had a social insurance system that allowed workers to move fluidly between jobs, we could comfortably allow firms to follow their natural life and death cycle.
In the 1990s, Denmark began adopting what has been called “flexicurity,” combining policies that promote a flexible economy － allowing creative destruction as needed － with those that promote security for workers. The Danes have also emphasized lifelong learning, giving workers income support as they transition between jobs and circumstances.
By contrast, the current approach in the United States could be called “flex-nosecurity,” which hardly seems the appropriate way of preparing for an economy of rapid change.
There are surely many other ways of preparing for upheaval. We should broaden the current conversation － centered on drones, the end of work or the prospect of super-intelligent algorithms governing in the world － to include innovative proposals for handling the unexpected.
One problem is that social policy may seem boring compared with the wonderfully evocative story arcs telling us where current technologies might be heading. How can the minutiae of unemployment insurance compete for attention with movies describing the birth of Skynet, the diabolical neural network in the “Terminator” series?
Yet even science fiction teaches humility.
Take “Star Trek.” The future imagines is wondrous to the point of bordering on impossible. The laws of physics as currently understood are circumvented so that ships can travel faster than the speed of light. Unfathomable technologies are routine. People can be disassembled atom by atom and transported somewhere else, keeping their memories and consciousness intact. Any kind of food can be instantly replicated.
Even the inventive “Star Trek” writers peering into the future, though, could not imagine a completely self-driving Starship Enterprise. While at times the Enterprise appeared to have some autopilot capacity, it routinely relied on a navigator to pilot it and was even equipped with a view screen that looked suspiciously like a car windshield.
The safest prediction is that reality will outstrip our imaginations. So let us craft our policies not just for what we expect but for what will surely surprise us.
Our current policies － and impulses － are to resist such destruction. If a large manufacturer is set to close, subsidies and other policies kick into action to prevent that shutdown. But while we may save a factory, ultimately we hinder the rise of new technologies; rather than propping up incumbent firms we ought to enable innovation to take its course.
If that idea makes you uneasy, it is probably because our current policies do nothing to protect the most vulnerable from the costs of all this destruction. We resist letting factories close because we worry about what will become of the people who work there. But if we had a social insurance system that allowed workers to move fluidly between jobs, we could comfortably allow firms to follow their natural life and death cycle.
In the 1990s, Denmark began adopting what has been called “flexicurity,” combining policies that promote a flexible economy － allowing creative destruction as needed － with those that promote security for workers. The Danes have also emphasized lifelong learning, giving workers income support as they transition between jobs and circumstances.
By contrast, the current approach in the United States could be called “flex-nosecurity,” which hardly seems the appropriate way of preparing for an economy of rapid change.
There are surely many other ways of preparing for upheaval. We should broaden the current conversation － centered on drones, the end of work or the prospect of super-intelligent algorithms governing in the world － to include innovative proposals for handling the unexpected.
One problem is that social policy may seem boring compared with the wonderfully evocative story arcs telling us where current technologies might be heading. How can the minutiae of unemployment insurance compete for attention with movies describing the birth of Skynet, the diabolical neural network in the “Terminator” series?
Yet even science fiction teaches humility.
Take “Star Trek.” The future imagines is wondrous to the point of bordering on impossible. The laws of physics as currently understood are circumvented so that ships can travel faster than the speed of light. Unfathomable technologies are routine. People can be disassembled atom by atom and transported somewhere else, keeping their memories and consciousness intact. Any kind of food can be instantly replicated.
Even the inventive “Star Trek” writers peering into the future, though, could not imagine a completely self-driving Starship Enterprise. While at times the Enterprise appeared to have some autopilot capacity, it routinely relied on a navigator to pilot it and was even equipped with a view screen that looked suspiciously like a car windshield.
The safest prediction is that reality will outstrip our imaginations. So let us craft our policies not just for what we expect but for what will surely surprise us.
