The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

It all depend on how you look at this and that society you have. If due to robots you can work much less and your work becomes safe and more easy to do - it is all good. But not in capitalism, where people are thrown out and remaining must work more hard and learn 10x more stuff for same salary.

This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.

Internet is no different from anything else. And it is capitalism that is "widening economic inequality around the world".

But is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities is far more apparent than it has been in the past. For me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years past.

But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.

Well, well. Poor are able to better see how rich live and spent money they got via exploitation. And it is bad thing, isn't it?
For me it is good thing - the bigger and more pronounced the conflict - the better.

With resources increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, we are going to have to learn to share far more than at present.

And here start fantasies of idealist.

With not only jobs but entire industries disappearing, we must help people to retrain for a new world and support them financially while they do so. If communities and economies cannot cope with current levels of migration, we must do more to encourage global development, as that is the only way that the migratory millions will be persuaded to seek their future at home.

Migration did not happen by itself, and migrants are not cause of it. You need to do something with your own capitalists who invited them.

We can do this, I am an enormous optimist for my species; but it will require the elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the lessons of the past year.

While elites certainly learn, they learn how to exploit people more, how to protect their precious lives and how to defend capitalism. Only thing that can force them to share anything is fear for their miserable lives.

Citations from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/01/stephen-hawking-dangerous-time-planet-inequality