From Hacker/Essayist Paul Grahams Mind the Gap
Will technology increase the gap between rich and poor? It will certainly increase the gap between the productive and the unproductive. That’s the whole point of technology. With a tractor an energetic farmer could plow six times as much land in a day as he could with a team of horses. But only if he mastered a new kind of farming.
We’re all learning to cope with an exponentially increasing amount of information. I’ve yet to find anybody with a bigger burden than attorneys, just in eDiscovery review alone. Clearly the attorneys and firms that are able to overcome this burden have a huge opportunity to excel. Because of that fact, a lot of law firms and corporate legal departments have set out to build tractors or are making huge capital investments in technology and the teams of people needed to maintain those investements. Meanwhile there is an infinite amount of land to be plowed. Why not lease the tractors and plow bigger fields?
