A digital age that serves people, not profits.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Column

We are told that this is a new age. Yet all that is new are the gadgets we are sold-- and the prospect that those gadgets might put many of us out of work.

The schemes of fabulously wealthy monopolists to increase their wealth are certainly not new. They are ancient. They were ancient more than a century ago, when labor leader and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs decried "the old ethic that man's business on this Earth was to look out for himself." That, complained Debs, "was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man."

Just as monopolists and monopolies are not new, neither are the responses to the schemers and their schemes. It is good and necessary to demand jobs for the unemployed and wages for the underpaid. It is good and necessary to fight to maintain the rough outlines of civil society through public education and public services. There is nothing new about these fights, nothing modern about these demands.

Unfortunately, in a digital age, some responses are less sufficient than they once were. There is even, in specific circumstances, a danger that incremental responses may fit rather too easily into the business plans of the new monopolists --who meet demands for fair pay for human beings by spending more to develop the apps and robots that replace human beings.

It's a vicious circle, and most of us are running in it. The way out is not to run faster. The way out is to seek a new politics that is adapted to our times; a politics that asserts a social and human agenda in the face of rapid technological change and raging inequality; a politics that puts people in charge of economic decisions.

The crisis of the twenty-first century is that digitally defined and driven automation, combined with the race-to-the-bottom ethic of multinational corporations in a period of rapid globalization, will lead to dramatic displacement and dislocation of workers.

European Commission technology commissioner Neelie Kroes explained in 2014 that "a shortage of jobs is a pending social disaster." For millions of workers already displaced by failed trade policies, rapid globalization, and automation, this disaster is already a reality. And experts at the Oxford Martin School's Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology have concluded that almost half of U.S. jobs (47 percent) are at high risk of being eliminated by advances in computing and...