In a Nation of so much wealth, technology, and capability there is absolutely no reason that anyone should fall into or remain in a cycle of poverty. Technological changes are making our lives more comfortable and efficient. These changes will lead to the end of human drudgery — that is to say that people will no longer need to work in order to survive. And isn’t that the point of technology: to reduce the need for menial, meaningless work, to make us healthier, to make us happier, to allow us to pursue true meaning, to help us to learn, grow, and explore? The answer is yes to all of the above.

That said, this change comes at a cost and presents another daunting problem. As technologies improve and time passes, the production of goods and services will become more centralized and automated. This will result in increasing levels of capital concentration into the hands of those who own the means of production. As robots and algorithms take over jobs, this will result in severe job loss in many sectors of the job market. Take self-driving cars for example: As of 2015 there were 1,797,700 truck drivers on the road in the US. What happens to all those jobs when trucks can drive themselves?

Since it is the explicit goal of technology to automate and eliminate human work, this trend will only continue and quicken. And let’s be real, our current economic and political system is not prepared for this new reality. While we’re at it, let’s be honest, if we continue to subscribe to the idea that everyone must work at “a job” (no matter how pointless) to eat, then we are simply not leveraging the benefits of our technological advancements. Creating jobs for the sake of jobs is pointless.

If we continue to follow outmoded socio-economic policies despite radical technological changes, then we can expect to see even more capital leave the middle class. At some point one has to wonder, if there is no more middle class to purchase the goods that are being produced, then what happens to an economy driven by consumerism?