Tell HN: Driverless trucks: just because we can, doesn't mean we should
There are hundreds of thousands of people and families whose livelihood, ability to pay their bills and put food on the table depends on driving trucks.
Just because we can make driverless trucks does not mean we should.
It would be great if sometimes our society made decisions looking to the wellbeing of other people instead of focusing on profit for companies.
What is going to happen to those people and their children who no longer have a means of income?
I feel like technologists corporations and government don't have much ability to put themselves in the shoes of those who aren't doing well financially.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadThe machines are coming and there's nothing you can do about it -- adjust and thrive, or don't. It's going to happen either way.
There is time to plan for this change.
That said, I don't think making everyone pay more to ship things so that some people can do something that isn't valuable any longer is the way to go.
Oh wait. That gave the livelihood to truckers, so it's Something Completely Different. Right?
The benefits are also tremendous though. Those people would be unburdened of repetitive, menial, dangerous work and society would have a more effective and reliable way of transporting goods.
In the end it's about what fulfills more people's needs more effectively. You can't blame a company for trying to find any way of increasing profits, you can't blame governments for trying to protect tax payers, and you can't blame unemployed people for being restless. The question the world has to answer soon: if boosting economic growth and increasing the efficiency of the market are our main goals, what are we willing to do or not do to get there?
Perhaps.
If, and only if, they can get something that at least partially replaces the menial work they lost.
To give a worked example, some of the former mining communities decimated by the pit closures in the 80s are dead communities with unemployment around the 40% mark, to this day. Many people never worked again, despite having spent many years in constant employment and were plagued with depression and other illness as a result of losing career. Many of those former miners would trade the half lifetime of unemployment for repetitive, menial, dangerous work in a heartbeat.
So in that case you're not filling people's needs more effectively, especially when as is so often the case, only lip service is paid to providing alternate options, encouraging industry to move to decimated localities and providing real, substantive help to those unable to find alternate employment.
This discussion is not full without some mention of the basic income debate. That is the leverage point at which governments can make a difference. The problem is that those policies will be difficult to fund at the beginning, before we see the possibly dramatic economic benefits of automation. My other fear is that this reality will cause governments to stifle automation. Things are usually very messy before they get better.
In the UK minimum wage is around £11k, welfare gives somewhere around £3k I think. A basic income is likely to be nearer a welfare level than a working minimum. Politically I think it's going to be a very tough sell to set it at working minimum. I think it has to be at or near working minimum to be effective.
We're potentially looking at unprecedented numbers of lives ruined unless it is handled better. Nearly all options for manual or lower qualified workers are going away. It probably is going to be very messy.
It's been happening for decades tho.
http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/_layouts/CWP.In...
>Volvo’s vision of combining a well-trained professional driver with increased automation is being realized through the SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) project. The idea behind the project – of which Volvo is a part through its centre for research and innovation, Volvo Technology – is to develop a technology for vehicle platooning – that is, a convoy where a professional driver in a lead vehicle drives a line of other vehicles. Each vehicle in the convoy measures the distance, speed and direction to the car in front, and adjusts accordingly. The vehicles are not physically attached to each other and can leave the procession at any time. But once in the platoon, the following drivers can relax and do other things while the platoon proceeds towards its destination under the expert guidance of the lead driver.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea...
> In 2012, Volvo Trucks tried out its autonomous vehicles on public roads for the first time, as part of the European Commission-backed Project Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), which looked at the feasibility of platooning – when a single, lead driver in a truck, using what might be thought of as a kind of digital towbar, controls the speed, steering and braking of two or more trucks or cars, to form a road train.
> Now, the EC has just announced the €5.4m (£4.55m) Project Companion, led by Scania, to develop the technology further and explore the legislative changes necessary for this kind of automated road train to run on motorways such as our own M4. So while talk of Amazon's delivery drones have caught the headlines, autonomous trucks may be doing precisely that in about 10 years' time, if the law catches up with the technology.
Video from 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV3nINN2ELQ