https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-the-tech-giants-be-stopped-1500057243?mod=e2twGoogle, Facebook, Amazon and other tech behemoths are transforming the U.S. economy and labor market, with scant public debate or scrutiny. Changing course won’t be easy.
by Jonathan Taplin
July 14, 2017
Sometimes it is hard to grasp how quickly the giant tech companies have come to dominate the world economy. Ten years ago, only one of them, Microsoft , was among the biggest companies in the world as measured by market capitalization. These days, the top five usually consists of Apple , Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon , Microsoft and Facebook .
It has been an astonishingly rapid rise for the tech giants, and it’s far from over. The big question for the future is: How will their ever-expanding control affect other businesses and the labor market?
Over the past decade, Google, Facebook and Amazon have wreaked havoc on much of the creative economy—journalists, musicians, authors, filmmakers. In the decade ahead, the tech behemoths will use their dominance in artificial intelligence to overturn much of the service economy as well, including transportation, medicine and retail. With what result? To give just one example, Goldman Sachs recently reported that self-driving cars (a technology that both Google and Apple are developing) could eliminate as many as 300,000 jobs a year in two decades or more.
Will we be ready when the flood of unemployment brought about by the artificial-intelligence revolution is upon us?
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