poverty, culture, technology, scarcity

I have lived in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the US (though I live in a nice suburb now), in New York, Philly and New Mexico ... and my mother runs social-service programs helping poor women and children in inner-city Philadelphia ... so I have seen a lot of US-style poverty. I can tell you that these people have TVs and video games and cellphones and MP3 players ... many of them have cars (though often in poor repair) ... they have plenty of junk food to eat ... and generally seem to have beer money, etc. They don't live as nicely as I do. And there are real difficulties: for instance the cost of daycare is sufficiently high that working is sometimes not an economical option for a mother with children ... commute time on public transport to get to work can be objectionable because the US public transport system generally sucks ... etc. But, I don't think we should overlook the steady rise in qualitative standard of living that technology has provided even for this underclass. Compared to the wealthy of 30 years ago, the US poor of today are dramatically better off in many ways: MP3 players, cellphones, the internet, 500 channels of wonderful TV, and on and on. Even if the gap btw rich and poor is increasing, as it is according to some measures, technology is lifting everyone up in a lot of meaningful ways.

It's also notable how technology flattens the real gap between rich and poor. I remember a friend with $100M+ net worth who was unable to find expensive toys his kids wanted -- all they really wanted were Gameboy games. Which were the same games being played by kids of the same age in the ghetto. And which were genuinely more fun than the expensive toys he'd bought his kids, which sat there unused.

The "culture of poverty" is another question, and how it's impacted by the magnitude of the rich-poor gap (according to some measures) versus the equalizing effect of technology is a subtle question...

I stress that I am talking here specifically about the urban US poor. Similar observations apply to many of the poor I have seen in Brazil: but not to the poorest of the poor in Brazil, who are living in truly horrible conditions, in some cases effectively in slave-labor camps on rural plantations. And of course folks in the Congo, Zimbabwe, etc. are in a wholly different situation, and not reaping the benefits of the technology revolution in the way that the US urban poor are.

But the "culture" issue is a serious one...

I remember one guy I knew (my mother's partner's nephew), who was from a very rough inner-city Philly neighborhood, who was very smart and quantitatively talented. He did study on his own outside of school, in spite of lack of much encouragement from his family, and he won a scholarship to a college across the country from his family. He moved there and got an apartment off-campus ... but he relied on his roommate's car to get to classes, and so when his roommate committed suicide, he wound up transport-less and returned home to Philly, where he eventually wound up becoming a "numbers runner" and making good money applying his quantitative bent to help run an illegal gambling operation....

In this case, we had someone with uncommon ability and initiative, who could easily have wound up contributing in a positive way to society and technology and science ... and wanted to ... and would have, if we'd had *slightly* better support systems in place for people like him...

And yet, he certainly *could* have returned to that college the following year ... if he'd made the right pleas to the university administrators etc. But he didn't really know how to do that, and his family probably didn't either ... and he was upset about the situation ... and I was 18 at the time, without the skills to really help him out either, though I did tell him he should try to go back...

What one wonders is, what kind of consequence will the often inept, uncompassionate nature of our society have in the years running up to the Singularity.

Once scarcity is abolished once and for all, things will be totally different in ways that are hard for us to imagine.

But what happens along the way, when scarcity is partly abolished ... how erratically will the Singularity-enabling technologies come about ... how will they be distributed across different socioeconomic strata as they emerge ... I have a feeling things will go more smoothly if there is less inequity involved and broader education and awareness, but that doesn't exactly seem to be the way things are evolving... and it's hard to say what impact these aspects will have...