Do we have moral obligations towards global tech education?

[I'm in London and Cambridge this week with the Traveling Geeks.]

Monday morning we met with Tristan Wilkinson, director for public sector for Intel UK Capital. His main interest is how technology can be used to improve countries' economies and improve the quality of life for people through work opportunities..

He posed an interesting question: Do the people that enjoy the benefits of the digital economy have an obligation to help those that don't have the same access and skill sets?

The way the question is phrased doesn't invite much debate because it shoots straight for the moral high ground.

Mr Wilkinson says he isn't "selling anything" but he clearly is. As a representative of Intel, it is natural that he would be of the opinion that more technology and more people that know how to use the technology, the better for society and the earning power of individuals. And thus better for Intel as the dominant building block infrastructure provider.

There is a lot of truth to the view that people with technology skills will have better employment opportunities but will this always be true? Our experience constantly shows that as certain technology skills become more ubiquitous, their potential earning power diminishes proportionally. You constantly need to keep climbing up the value chain.

New technologies do provide new jobs as new types of businesses are created but they are also used to reduce the costs of operating a business and that means eliminating jobs.The overall effect over the long term, in my humble opinion, is that our use of new technologies will reduce the number of jobs, it is not a zero sum process. [Please see: The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches, Anything That Can Be Digitized.]

This all leads to a much more interesting question that we face in the not too distant future, which is not about who gets the new tech jobs.

I'd like to know what happens when, say only 20 per cent of our population needs to work in order to provide all the goods and services for 100 per cent of our society?

We constantly create new types of "divides," our economy thrives on new systems of haves and have nots. At some point, because of the incredible productive capacities we are able to build and to manage as a result of our technologies, we won't have to have everyone working to produce the goods and services we all need.

In such a scenario, a system of division becomes meaningless and useless -- so how will we deal with that? How will we equitably divide up the spoils of our technological progress and prowess?

I strongly believe we have a moral obligation to begin discussing these types of questions before we have to deal with their inevitable arrival.