Great article for lots of comments and discussion. I can’t possibly address all of the points that I thought about while reading it, but I will mention a few. First, the disruption we are seeing with tech is not new in the sense that technological innovation has always led to efficiency gains and has always displaced workers. The problem now is that the pace of disruption is growing and many of the workers being displaced cannot shift into the jobs newly created by the disruptions. Factory workers who lost high paying jobs in the US for example, have often found themselves working in much lower paying retail jobs. They (and possibly their children) are unlikely to recover from this. I like to think about each person as posessing a set of skills—lots of different skills at different levels. Now think of the distribution of people for each skill. Each skill curve probably resembles a bell curve with few very bad at that skill and few very good. My hypothesis is that recent innovation is requiring one or more skills at the upper end of the bell curve. As more jobs are displaced, good jobs require even higher levels of skill. The trouble is that few people have either the inate ability to move up that curve, or the money or time to move up (for trainable skills). As a result, more and more will be left behind.

My second point is with respect to becoming self-sustaining. I certainly would like to be more off the grid, but remember that all of our technology progress (progress that has lifted many out of poverty) came about because of specialization and the resulting economies of scale. So we must be sure to find some kind of balance between doing everything ourselves vs. specializing and trading or buying what we need from others.