i think, like alan kauffman's histrionic article about ebooks, that this book most likely oversimplifies the issue to an intellectually suspect degree. for instance: "the producers of content get poor. this is why the newspapers are dying." yes, the gazillionaire tycoons like rupert murdoch who own newspapers, those poor hand-to-mouth souls getting the life choked out of them by fat cats a google. who in the middle class owns a newspaper and is being forced into the lower class by data aggregation?
and the poor musicians! the poor, poor working musicians who were living it up on fat checks sent to them dutifully every month by the honest, profit-sharing record companies. oh the horror of technology swooping in and giving their music away, so now they essentially work for free! everyone knows that pre-internet, music was a totally viable way for thousands of people to earn a living, but certainly not anymore.
and, for fucking serious, "WHEN ROBOTS CAN REPAIR THE ROADS?!!" this is now what we're worried about? leaving aside the centuries of mechanization required before road repair is a totally automated and remote procedure requiring no human intervention whatsoever, are we to assume that the companies at the top can "program" the robots into existence in the first place? like, no manufacturing base at all will need to be created to serve society's apparently overwhelming need to do everything by robots instead of humans?
i will admit that i haven't read anything about this book and am basing my opinion about it solely on the quotation below, but that one quotation is pretty fucking stupid.
