"Innovation threatens social and economic upheaval and our existing institutions are not fit to handle the change"
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"In a sense, it was surprising that 2016 was the year in which the social threat posed by rapid technological progress became a topic of serious and widespread discussion. It was, after all, the first year since 2007 when all of the world’s advanced economies managed to grow and in which unemployment rates fell across the rich world.
"Yet those bright spots could not distract from other worries. Pay rises remain elusive for many workers, despite economic growth. Each day seems to bring new evidence of the massive economic disruption to come: from self-driving vehicles deployed by Tesla and Uber to experimentation with cashier-less shops by Amazon.
"But the biggest warning signs that something in society has gone awry were the political shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump. These votes seemed to reflect not just a resentment at the elites who have captured most of the gains from recent economic growth, but also the dawning realisation that the economic and social marginalisation of whole classes of people might, thanks to technological change, become a permanent feature of the landscape."
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