I’m about to leave for a trip to the Amazon jungle to live with indigenous indians.
One of the most interesting trends is that we’re flattening the economy. Friction is being removed at a very fast rate. Adam Smith’s invisible hand may crush the 99% completely out of the economy. If that happens, what happens to capitalism?
Naval Ravikant from Angellist told me “There will be information tech based small businesses, where you roll out of bed in the morning and you get assigned a task by an Android phone, maybe it’s in a bidding market place, you choose what you want to do, you get rid of it at the end of the day, and you’ll work for yourself.”
So I’m going to spend some time living with indigenous indians. They don’t have electricity or most of the things we take for granted. I had to get a yellow fever shot which made me sick. There are guerillas who kidnap people in the area. But it should be very interesting.
Should we disturb their traditional way of life? Of course not! But large numbers (the majority?) of indigenous people do not want to continue their traditional way of life so they move to major cities.. But they are often unable to adapt well – we have seen this frequently in Australia with the australian aborigines.
What if we had a netflix prize, which rewarded finding the highest hourly rate possible in a scalable way for indigenous groups? Lets say the average hourly amount an indigenous person could earn while living in their traditional environment was $1/hr. What if we could bring this up to $5/hr? Would this enable more of them to return to their traditional lifestyles while still gaining some benefits from modern civilization?