I just listened to the JRE clip from that ep(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2AbxWr6I4s) - Everyone Can Be Rich. And based on the below excerpt in which he misses the mark by a million miles, I'm doubting his wisdom.
from 02:13 on ..
> okay imagine if tomorrow we could wave a wand and everybody was trained as a scientist or an engineer everybody, even if you weren't very good, you had enough understanding computers you could write some code.
You could build some hardware and don't tell me people can't do it because they can that's just a tyranny of soft expectations.
That's just you looking down on somebody else they can't do it they just have to be educated. Now if they're educated all this hardware software engineers scientists biologists technicians hard sciences not the social sciences we would all be done within five years. Robots would be doing everything from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying airplanes and driving goobers and what would we be doing? We would be doing all creative jobs to entertain each other and researching science and technology we would have wonderful lives so it is really just a question of Education nothing else is this a scale issue
My (rushed, sorry) take is that Naval expresses a rather naive take on the future.
I've seen this sort of scenario promised for 5 decades now, and while the technological benchmarks get met, most people are still slogging away in boring office or technical jobs, just the same.
This dream would also require a different form of government and economy. As I see it, it will require some heavily state-controlled economy or a substantial Universal Basic Income.
Capitalism isn't exactly going to thrive under the pseudo-gig economy that Naval's take suggests. Most people will continue to have regular, necessary monthly expenditures. And, they are not going to be saving money as a cushion, they're going to be buying the new iPhone/Watch/AirPods/TV/Shiny Thing over and over again every year.
And while I love Naval, I see these naive takes of his , quite often. But that's OK, because it still provides me with food for thought and hey, sometimes I find I'm wrong myself.
from 02:13 on ..
> okay imagine if tomorrow we could wave a wand and everybody was trained as a scientist or an engineer everybody, even if you weren't very good, you had enough understanding computers you could write some code. You could build some hardware and don't tell me people can't do it because they can that's just a tyranny of soft expectations. That's just you looking down on somebody else they can't do it they just have to be educated. Now if they're educated all this hardware software engineers scientists biologists technicians hard sciences not the social sciences we would all be done within five years. Robots would be doing everything from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying airplanes and driving goobers and what would we be doing? We would be doing all creative jobs to entertain each other and researching science and technology we would have wonderful lives so it is really just a question of Education nothing else is this a scale issue