>1.8 million American truck drivers ... well-paying working-class jobs
Those two items right there are exactly why they are being automated (in addition to additional efficiencies and cost reductions). If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality.
What to do about the aftermath that affects actual people and families as pay is reduced or eventually eliminated over the next 10-25 years? Well, that's the new problem. Not one that the companies that employ truck drivers will be looking to solve, but the one everyone else has to cope with in some capacity -- whether directly affected by the reduced jobs, or indirectly affected by those now looking for work in their community.
Our education system needs to adjust to prepare our youth for highly technical jobs. Instead of truck drivers we'll need engineers to build the automation systems and programmers to write the complex software behind it.
Intelligence isn't equally handed out. Especially the analytical kind required of engineers/programmers. Not everyone can do those jobs. As the market price for the truck-driver demographic declines, new sectors will be able to afford to hire them, but they largely won't become engineers.
Except the extra 1.62 million engineers can be working on other things.
There's no shortage of useful things to build. It might be hard to think of things for 1.62 million people to build, but the good news is you and I don't have to think of those things ourselves right now. Those 1.62 million people will be thinking about it too.
Unfortunately, highly technical jobs have a floor problem. It's sort of like the "You must be this tall to ride" signs at the amusement park, except its "You must be this smart to do this job effectively." Not everybody that can drive a truck or swing a chainsaw has the mental tools to handle the increased complexity.
> If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality.
I have a hard time accepting the reduction in the cost of production as "unfortunate reality". This process is a key element of economic development. Why, at this point in history, is it now 'unfortunate'?
I think there are some very difficult challenges associated with the macro-trends in our global economic system but I'm pretty sure that viewing productivity increases as "unfortunate" isn't very helpful towards dealing with these challenges.
This is a perfectly reasonable intuition – that there will be large net loss of jobs as trucks are automated – but we should not mistake the intuition for evidence. There is a long history of believing that massive job losses are imminent due to technological advance.
The problem with mistaking this fear for a fact is that it often leads to an incorrect intervention. (I call this a WMD argument.)
We’d be much better served with much greater caution about what is actually, observably, measurably true. In this case, we’d have to discover the yet-unfound correlation between technical advance and employment rate.
It's scary and understandable at the same time especially when you multiple the number of drivers with their salary, then you get a yearly cost of 72.000.000.000$
The other question you need to ask in order to understand this future scenerio:. Shipping costs will significantly decrease, what will consumers and shareholders spend the extra money on?
Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.
It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"
Imagine telling a farmer in 1850s America, when 64% of America farmed, that in 2016 only 2% of people would be farming! Imagine the distopian horror (1)! If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today.
Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors, leading to the enormous improvement in production, income and standard of living since then. If 64% of people still farmed, or 2% farmed and 62% were on UBI - who would have had the time or incentive to create computers, software, advances in healthcare, etc?
I'm not claiming the transition is easy for someone who's laid off - it can be an extremely tough process, but it's absolutely necessary for the improvement of humanity.
Surely some people will opt to not have a job at all, if they didn't need to worry about maintaining a minimum quality of life and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I often see a lady riding her RoundABout scooter, on disability, picking up trash on the side of the road. She's incredibly nice and good hearted, and hates sitting around doing nothing. But the reason I stopped to talk to her was that it is unbelievably unusual for someone who is obviously on disability to be out doing something for the common good.
And unless you have some hard data showing people on public assistance use their free time doing the unsung dirty work society needs, I don't believe it will magically start happening if we change the name of welfare to UBI.
Not sure how that's relevant. It's pretty clear the proposal is "require people to do the handiwork of their community in order to receive a basic income."
Also, just because no one is willing to pay for what you do doesn't mean you are doing nothing. I think there will be a bunch of people doing different things than now and many anti-UBI people would call what they gonna do 'sitting around'.
Maybe it's just me but I'm getting tired of UBI being put forward as a realistic answer to technological displacement of workers. The most immediate problem would be getting it through legislatures without loopholes that undercut its purpose as a replacement for all other redistributions. That simply never happens, particularly in the US.
The next problem is that no one seems to appreciate how incompatible it is with open borders in a world of nation-states. The latter is particularly telling since advocates of UBI are often advocates of less restrictive immigration across the world, yet they don't seem to see the problem. It's an indication of how ungrounded the discussion about UBI is right now.
I have the feeling, alle the counter arguments simply boil down to "all humans are lazy and won't work anymore if we don't force them" which is a pretty dull view on humanity.
Matter can't travel faster than c. Thermodynamics is a bitch.
These theories are as intractable as they are annoying. They are not proven beyond doubt. But before launching a venture in contradiction to them, evidence must be mounted. "It feels right" isn't a scientific basis for policy.
I think what you are missing is the fact that this time the changes will take place much faster. With farming, the changes were slower and generational.(The children of farmers didn't do farming). And still these changes had colossal impact on societies(and a lot of blood was spilled).
Exactly, plus there's no way driverless trucks will be allowed onto city streets. Maneuvering trucks in urban and suburban corridors requires the drivers to break the rules of the road constantly.
Automation makes sense for long haul highways, so truck drivers will shift to being last mile drivers.
I disagree that it'll never happen but driverless 18 wheelers are the trolley problem writ large. The momentum from these vehicles is far more than a passenger vehicle so they have that much more capacity to cause damage and death. I think driverless taxis will happen first and then probably smaller delivery vehicles. I'd love for USPS to have automated delivery into standardized neighborhood boxes.
Once there's enough driverless vehicles large trucks can signal smaller vehicles things like "I need to turn right so please leave me room in the left turn lane to my right". Frankly the tow truck industry needs some disrupting. At least here in Houston they are the most dangerous lawless drivers on the road and need to go.
18 wheelers will drive to depot, cargo will be moved over to smaller self driving trucks and other delivery vehicles for the last mile. At least, that's the way it should be, even today without the automation. Huge trucks have no place in an urban environment.
Shockingly enough, a UBI has been a libertarian concept for nearly half a century. If UBI had some reasonable limitations, like say 10% of the GDP divided evenly amoungst those who apply, it would provide a hard bottom to poverty while leaving huge incentives to find gainful employment.
I'm not saying it wouldn't quickly turn into 51% of the people voting themselves 100% of the money (which would quickly become worth nothing), but it isn't the worst idea out there.
Also worth noting, Milton Friedman advocated that in lieu of other poverty programs, because it gets rid of bureaucracy, leaves an incentive to work, and is less parent-like than existing methods.
The EIC is on top of the programs Friedman wanted to replace.
It's not too small to matter. For the worst case scenario of a mother of 3+ who's working several part time jobs, it pays on average around $7K. In most of the country that is rent for a year. And since someone getting an EIC is likely in government housing as they'll qualify for it, it could then be groceries for a year. Only as they qualify for EIC, they are likely on SNAP, and this money is somewhat freed up for things besides food and housing.
So for many it is too small to matter either because they don't have dependents, don't work enough, or work too much. But it's actually a near damned perfect incentive to keep people working and trying to find better jobs while keeping them out of abject poverty. Likely the best anti-poverty tool the US government has blindly stumbled upon ever.
Professor Zwolinksy of the University of Sand Diego had a good paper on it a few years ago. Covers the history and differing ideas and their drawbacks.
Neat to think about, but would take a miracle for most people to take seriously.
Were the people who created computers and advances in healthcare and those other innovations really driven by the need to have food on the table? Is that, and not either the seek of knowledge or the desire to get rich, really the engine of these advancements?
I think it credible that some people need stress in order to perform at a high level (in response to short to medium term objectives), and yet others require peace & quiet to develop for longer periods.
These may or may not be the same people. I think it is important we understand in detail how humans become creative before large scale implementation of UBI.
Personally I believe UBI should be earned in some way, with some kind of duty/responsibility (that doesn't require coming into work everyday obviously e.g. having trained to be part of an armed response corp or a diaster response agency).
Presently Israel makes people train for the army for a year or two, which I believe is partially responsible for their high level of innovation. I believe the garages in the US serve a similar helpful function (in my country people don't have them, in the US they seem like a default).
Having people just work together is a very difficult but necessarily task and I believe obtaining UBI should require that.
I say so as a person who finds working with people quite difficult!
Does anybody remember the Decentralized Republic from the Diamond Age making people do random (strange) things together to string their society together?
I think it credible that some people need stress in order to perform at a high level
How is that relevant? UBI doesn't propose to eliminate jobs (even stressful ones), just make them non-compulsory.
If you're saying that these people would simply not get a stressful job if they had UBI, hence they wouldn't perform at an high level, what about if they currently choose a non-stressful job? Doesn't your argument imply we should force people to take certain jobs, even against their will, so that they perform at an high level?
Presently Israel makes people train for the army for a year or two, which I believe is partially responsible for their high level of innovation.
There are 71 countries in the world with compulsory conscription, including Algeria, Austria, Austria, Azerbaijan, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, Finland, Georgia, Greece, Guatemala, Iran, Kuwait, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Norway, Paraguay, Russia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan.
Do you see them all as countries with high levels of innovation? Have you considered that the correlation may be spurious?
Having people just work together is a very difficult but necessarily task and I believe obtaining UBI should require that.
How do you account then for the existence of the Open Source community, a mostly voluntary collaboration between many thousands of inviduals often thought to be people with poor social skills? Not to mention all the volunteer-based non-profits, churches, events, etc?
>> I think it credible that some people need stress in order to perform at a high level
> How is that relevant?
Well, people are motivated differently from each other and at different stages in their lives. Have you ever noticed some people intentionally generate stress? They do that because they require it to get themselves going. Stress isn't always a bad thing, that's mostly the continual low level stress that can hurt health.
> Doesn't your argument imply we should force people to take certain jobs, even against their will, so that they perform at an high level?
No. Some jobs deserve higher pay because they aren't pleasant but in the current environment they receive minuscule wages because people have no other options.
I am saying two things about the role of stress. One is that many, perhaps most people, have been 'coached' by workplace experience to endure stress. In a way they are institutionalized. The same thing occurs with schooling. It serves a purpose but that diminishes under UBI.
This means many maladaptive habits exist, like overly sensitive stress responses, that will take many years to break out of, perhaps even requiring a generational change before the full effects of UBI are evident.
Let's use an extreme example, consider the mental model of a member of ISIS. If you give them UBI, you change literally nothing about this person and their attempts to strap bombs to their bodies because their entire mental model was never aligned with optimizing their personal outcomes. Similarly many people are hardwired into existing mental models to such an extent that UBI may simply bounce off them. This is sometimes expressed by the inhabitants of urban ghettos as 'you can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the girl'.
The second thing is that most people really do currently require stress in order to operate. When they feel a tangible connection to 'survival mode', they get stuff done. Otherwise they risk stagnation. This is a simple fact that cannot be hand waved away.
Examine the lives of lottery winners if you want to see a full spectrum of irrational behavior. Only a few manage to become the improved human you want them to be. Look at the communities of those who subsist nearly entirely on welfare. There are whole housing estates in the UK where nobody has held a job in generations and it has caused immense harm.
It is interesting to note that once they become 'pensioners', they become quite a bit happier.
People like to have a solid justification for their existence. You have to provide for that, or allow them to provide that, regardless of what happens.
I think all this can be solved, but first it has to be thought about in depth.
> There are 71 countries in the world with compulsory conscription,
They are not all the same (and it doesn't have to be conscription). Some countries do it better than others. It is hard to explain with words but it is something you know when you see it. The US and Israel have it. Eritrea and Iraq do not. The soldiers of the USA and Israel are proud of their role and see themselves as part of a higher noble purpose. The soldiers of Eritrea and Afghanistan manifestly do not. We may be sure the first two groups will work well together in forming businesses.
Conscription or not, this is something that can be cultivated.
It is also a single factor, I was not using it as a universal explanation of everything innovation related. What I am saying is that people who work under short periods of severe stress make for good teams to do anything.
It is hard to do this convincingly artificially, corporate team building is mostly placebo in comparison, that's why I suggested the army but police or disaster response may work just as well.
> How do you account then for the existence of the Open Source community, a mostly voluntary collaboration between many thousands of inviduals often thought to be people with poor social skills...
The idea of decreased shipping costs might not pan out at all (at least at first).
First, the initial (expensive) investment in the self-driving trucks will offset the wage gains from not hiring truckers ----, so shipping costs will remain where they are mostly for the first few years at least until this is balanced.
Second, the "increased spending"/"creation of new jobs" effect might only be relevant if the shipping costs are a significant part of the final price of a product. From what I've seen, it's at most 10% (at most), and less for the average item. That's why we can have $1 stuff that comes all the way from China.
But, let's accept that this (reduced retail prices) will happen, there are other things I don't see working with this idea:
>Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.
Which, more likely than not, wont involve people with trucking skills.
And most likely wont involve domestic labor either, most things are made abroad (China, etc) anyway.
>It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"
That's because your whole job sector hasn't been deprecated when you're forty (or approaching)...
>Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors
That was in a time those other endeavours had a huge boom and needed tons of hands (and even so, millions of ex-farmers ended up getting the short stick).
We don't have an industrial revolution expanding the need for workers now, we have a software/automation revolution slowly decreasing workers demands sector by sector.
In fact we haven't had a need for more workers for quite a few decades -- what we did is inflate, as much as we can, the services sector to compensate for it instead. But there's only so many service type jobs really viable, plus automation also begins to eat into them, and with the squeezed middle classes pinching pennies its even bleaker for them (being non essential et al), even if decreased shipping costs turn out to mean a (huge and unrealistic) 10% more income.
Don't kid yourself. New jobs get created, but fewer. And many of those who lose their jobs don't get retrained—for a myriad of reasons—and end up leaving the workforce entirely. Many just end up on long term disability because it's the only path they have.
Jobs are disappearing. They aren't "coming back" in greater numbers. And the new jobs, by and large, aren't for the previous workforce.
We already live in a world where many jobs are unnecessary. A large portion of government jobs are, essentially, welfare jobs. One of the systematic reasons of for the expansion of government is "job creation". Politicians will create jobs, but those jobs add nothing to society. We've got people pretending to work a job to collect a paycheck. It's welfare.
The industrial revolution replaced muscle with machine, but brainpower was still a required input. There was a clear shift: from doing the work to using a machine to do the same work, but faster. There was enough demand that things didn't collapse.
The current shift is replacing both muscle and brainpower. Outside of creative jobs, what is left for the human to do? Make the brain smarter? We are already entering into a time where the machine makes itself smarter without the advent of the human.
New jobs will be created, sure. But those jobs will not be for the 1.8 million truck drivers. Instead the government will likely end up soaking it up through one program or another. Tens of thousands will end up in welfare jobs. Hundreds of thousands will end up on long term disability. The numbers aren't small.
UBI is an inevitability. You've got some 40 million people on food stamps, about 9 million on disability. Millions more working pointless government jobs like directing people from one TSA employee to another. At what point to we recognize that the future does not look like the past?
UBI is inevitably doomed, because the equation doesn't hold.
You are right that ongoing elimination of jobs is a problem leading to huge social unrest, and UBI fits the bill to be a good solution for this.
The only problem with UBI is that it is unsustainable and therefore impossible. The balance just doesn't check out. The mere retirement schemes are in grave danger of collapse; the money there are long spent. UBI is huge, and there is no way to get this kind of money from anywhere (even if you strip away all capital from the top 1% and send them to labor camps, as it was done elsewhere, the money from this will fuel $1000/month UBI for about 2 years tops).
Antigravity would be an excellent solution to our space travel challenges, but we don't know any way to make it work. It is exactly the same with UBI.
You can't really say definitely that the equations won't work without some details. If the UBI level was similar to unemployment benefit / social security and workers received it but had less tax allowances then the payments could work out about the same as they do now.
People will have to adapt to a new way of life. We are going to move into a world where full employment means 50% of people don't work, because there is nothing for them to do. Like the computer, the cost of everything will begin to decline rapidly when general purpose robots and automation take over human tasks. The UBI equation may well balance. When there are no human costs the only cost is energy. In theory, you will need far less income.
Honestly, I'm excited to see what happens as it will happen in my lifetime. 30 years ago we had the first general purpose computers. Look at where we are now. Today we have the first general purpose robots. Imagine where we will be in 30 years. It's hard to imagine.
Drivers, construction workers, doctors, lawyers—it's all going to be dramatically different 30 years from now. Forget the US. All those jobs making everything from iPhones to t-shirts will also be at risk. When you don't need specialized equipment and you can buy a robot that can make t-shirts for a few thousand dollars you don't need the human anymore.
If not UBI, then what? What do all these people do?
> The current shift is replacing both muscle and brainpower. Outside of creative jobs, what is left for the human to do?
Guarding the robots.
Face it; self-driving cars and trucks are going to be a HUGE target of vandalism and theft at first, especially for people who're made unemployed by them and can't find other jobs.
You're gonna need other people to keep them safe, and carrying guns doesn't require a lot of retraining in the US at least.
Those soon-to-be-out-of-work drivers may very well be required to tag along with the upcoming robot-vehicles anyway, to sit in them as guards and protect them from the rioting Luddites.
Until we can make robotic clones of Arnold Schwarzenegger to automate this as well, that is.
Around 40% of American adults are on welfare, unemployment or disability pay now.
Typically when people run out of unemployment, or approach retirement in the case of emergency services people, they find a sympathetic doctor to sign for disability pay.
There is no transition available for them to the "knowledge economy."
This only makes the press occasionally now, but wait until it inverts to an unsustainable 60/40 welfare/taxpayers.
Farming and other types of automation that put people out of work in the past used technology to amplify and/or replace physical labor. Now we are learning how to use the general purpose computer to replace mental labor. These are different types of automation that will have fundamentally different effects on society. While we have many examples of new technology replacing physical labor, automation of mental labor is new. I suggest watching CGP Grey's explanation[1] of why "this time is different."
> went into other endeavors
We are automating away entire classes of jobs, so this will require retraining. How, exactly, do you propose to send half[2] of the workforce to college for retraining in a highly technical field? Assuming this was even possible and assuming there will be jobs for all of these new programmers/etc, is this retraining cheaper than UBI or other plans? It is relatively easy for a farmer to learn another trade that requires primarily physical work. Retraining drivers for unautomatable technical work is a lot harder and more expensive.
[2] Driving is the largest category of jobs. The next handful of job types (e.g. retail sales, various clerical work, customer service/support) are also being automated away. Together is very roughly half of all jobs.
>Assuming this was even possible and assuming there will be jobs for all of these new programmers/etc, is this retraining cheaper than UBI or other plans?
That's assuming that programming won't be one of the first categories of jobs to be automated away by AI. Think of the cost savings! But thankfully we don't have to worry about what all those poor programmers are going to do since it's progress for humanity.
A few jobs I feel pretty safe will still be here in 50 years. They include robot repair, nurses, and computer programmer. Maybe not in 100 years but I won't care then.
If robots can do surgery, surely they can do nursing. And repair themselves. And write programs. And even new and better programming languages that humans can't understand.
So surgery is a mechanical thing. Take a heart like X, make it look like Y. I can see robots being able to get there at some point.
Nursing, at least part of it, is about empathy and care. If someone is in the hospital getting robot heart surgery, someone has to help guide them through the practice. I do not see robot empathy in the next 50 years. Same reason I do not see robot counselors on the horizon ;)
Why repair robots when you can just disassemble them the same way you assembled them(automatically) and reuse the functioning parts and recycle the rest?
Thus the reason I know carpentry :3 but, having programmed for a while, it seems like the hardest problems are converting plain english requirements to source code. At the point that that becomes trivial (and doesn't fall into WYSIWYG editors or graphical languages, which already exist and haven't brought about the apocalypse), wouldn't you just ask the computer to make itself smarter over and over? Or ask it to automate any other profession with stupendous ease?
I think specialisation in software will be the first to go not programing itself.
I expect machine learning software to get very good at finding and fixing software exploits in the next few years. Google used deepmind and machine learning to optimise their energy use. How long before (maybe they are doing it already) put it to work on optimising their software code like chrome and android etc to find to speed it up or find exploits.
I watched the video, and I have to say it had pretty poor arguments. Too many to name, but I think the core is this:
If any conceivable software was free, required no human labor, and instantaneous: Would the world be a better or a worse place? (although I'd need to find something else to do)
If computers replace doctors, and I get better care for cheaper, aren't I better off?
...If every job was automated, and you can press a button to have robots make software or do medical tasks, that is the ultimate UBI for every person on earth. Everything is free, and then everyone can do whatever they want to fill their days.
P.S. - I want my own clothes-folding coffee-making robot.
P.P.S. - One tiny thing the video said, that is a piece of incorrect common wisdom: Auto insurance companies will not be helped by automated cars, they'll be hurt greatly. If accident rates decrease, premiums decrease, and so the insurance companies margins (and float) decrease, making less revenue and profits.
> If computers replace doctors, and I get better care for cheaper, aren't I better off?
Doctors have a state-guaranteed monopoly that is created via lobbying. That is why, in many countries, doctors are extremely expensive -- even though most of the miracle of healing is done by medicine.
In the future it will probably be a doctor owning and "supervising" the machine. Patients use the machine (paying $XXX). A doctor will take 30 seconds to one minute to look at the results, sign it and your prescription and then charge you exactly the same as before.
The only way the general public will benefit is from more accurate prescriptions. But I sincerely doubt that the cost of a doctor's visit will be reduced significantly. But don't worry, the laws will the there for your own good.
Some aging countries will face a severe loss in standard of living if they fail to automate huge parts of the economy. Presumably the worlds population will not continue to grow infinitely and at some point labor shortages will be a big problem.
One of the most destructive outcomes could come from poor government policy during an economic transition. Socialist or capitalist is one thing, but policies which are in direct opposition to another is another ( e.g. Venezuela, Zimbabwe.)
There are also big AI existential risk issues, but I think that is separate from the labor impact.
There will always be scarcity of some sort or another, and there will always be want of something. There is also a predilection to be the person with the most stuff, and robots only accentuate that those with capital are the ones who are winning.
Maybe at some point people will just throw up their hands and start to embrace higher taxes on capital and UBI, but I'm not holding my breath.
The common wisdom of autonomous transportation being lucrative for auto insurance companies may be correct, albeit for some not-so-common reasons.
As an analog to Wirth's law I'd suggest that in the transportation industry, technological advances in mitigating damage risk are offset by increased risk tolerance in seeking higher throughput / lower latency in the transport of goods and people.
So while the absolute accident rate will go down and the number of meatbag casualties will be reduced by automation removing human error, the _severity_ of catastrophic failure damaging _property_ will increase due to the incentives to push more autos through the pipes in less time: extreme tailgating, hyper-dense cargo, excessive velocity, and bountiful heterogeneity.
Really this is about a transition from (mainly) insuring against loss-of-life to (mainly) insuring against destruction-of-property. Of course, humans will still die even in 'negligible' quantities. But an actuary's loss-of-life liability assessment doesn't need to discriminate between fatal blunt trauma and fatal atomization.
I can see how the brain vs. brawn distinction could be pernicious, because mechanical robots can do one thing, but a robot that's smart like a human can do anything. Something about that formulation feels like an oversimplification though.
We've had technology replace mental labor before too.[0]
Spreadsheets democratized accounting and while making the work easier, also put a tax prep firm on every corner in the US. It vastly increased the number of people performing some sort of accounting. Some are small business owners that do it themselves, and can now hire a few extra employees.
We've had AI that can write beautiful music for ages, now it can duplicate the style of any composer,[1] but we largely don't care and still have pop stars. And composers.
The work Taylor Swift does for her millions of dollars probably involves layers of cultivating a story about a real person, responding correctly to paparazzi in different scenarios, and judging when to capitalize on interactions on Twitter between other celebrities. This probably sounds like I'm saying she's calculating, but really it has to be an enormous amount of instinct, because it's all probably not reducible to any series of tasks that can be enumerated or even perhaps knowable. Several people have tried to analyze her success, I'm not sure anyone actually understands it.[2][3]
More important for ordinary employees, we still have people compose film scores for some reason. Maybe because even if you can emulate other composers, someone has to decide which composer to emulate, which means having some ability to guess at another artist's as yet unexpressed artistic vision. Once you have the decades of training and experience to do all that, might as well write the thing yourself. Maybe recommendation engines could get there, but I'm not sure those work with novel creations, and I'm not sure we're even interested in perfecting those anymore for areas where they're proven (more or less) to work.[4]
Maybe the weird thing about mental assistants is that they expand the workforce, rather than reducing it. Robots are set up to run automatically, but all the AI we develop is driven by humans to solve day to day problems.
It's like if instead of robotics we built programmable exoskeletons or mechs. The number of employees would explode. There'd still be people building everything, inside the machines. That's what we're doing with computers in a lot of fields. Software is most often like a suit our brain wears to think faster or more reliably.
On the other hand, there are also examples of muscle jobs that haven't yet been perfectly replaced.[5]
The lack of a sewing robot (or ubiquitous clothes folding robots as another commenter mentioned) illustrates that we tend to overgeneralize. Some brawn problems are easy, and some are hard. Same for brain problems. Some problems will stick around, either stubbornly unable to be mechanized, or just not worth the cost.
Also, feedback systems kick in to ensure that labor force participation bounces between reasonable extremes. A lot of the recent downturn in the LFPR can be attributed to retirees.[6] It seems to be leveling off or even heading up again, but regardless the US rate remains well within historical norms.[7]
> If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today.
Perhaps we'd be in a better place today. We can't know for sure, without first experimenting.
Wealth inequality is a real and growing problem, and I believe is a much bigger impediment to human progress than a basic income would be.
What about the millions of incredibly intelligent minds who could be earning the big bucks on Wall Street, but instead are toiling away 7 days a week in research labs at universities, surviving only off the small budget they're allocated? Are they working to survive, or are they surviving just to work?
What about the millions who would love to further their education, but instead have to work two jobs to support a family?
Personally, I come from a lower income background and would never have had the opportunity to go to university if it wasn't for the generous social support my country has.
Humans are inherently enterprising creatures. Yes, a basic income will enable some to sit around and do nothing. But those people have already found ways to do that, and why should we stop them? The people who truly want to change the world are not going to be impeded by some cash handed to them.
Sure. But you can ship a truckload of boxes across the country. The driver part of the cost is a buck a box? Which is something sure but not a deal breaker.
Out of touch is right! Even in Manhattan you can easily live fine on $40k with savings left over, at least if you have no dependents or health financing problems (eg expensive health condition coupled with bad insurance). In most of the USA, a $20/hr job with benefits counts as a good job.
In many of the places where these truckers live, that's solidly middle-class wages, also. Costs are significantly, significantly cheaper when a good single-family home costs 80-100k.
The typical fast food employee makes around 20K/yr, and most cooks can only command up to 30-40K without certifications. The constant supply and ease of training cooks (not chefs) keeps these wages depressed.
Trucking wages are not the greatest, but it feeds your family and pays the bills. The cost savings may be small but coming from a small town where 1/4 of the working population has class 3 and class 1 licenses operating these machines. It's a middle class lifestyle for these communities.
Why, when they can collude (implicitly or explicitly) and keep the profits high for both of them? It's much more profitable to put someone out of business through methods other than competition.
> If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today.
We might even be in a better place than we are today. There would be even more entrepreneurship and labor would have more bargaining power when entering new industries.
Nothing about UBI prevents there from being new opportunities created. If anything, it provides for more potential for those opportunities by encouraging people to leave shitty low-productivity jobs to start their own thing or to search for a higher productivity job.
I agree that it's debatable, mostly because we don't have good empirical evidence about UBI.
However, it can be reasoned about. I have two arguments:
1. It is hard to start a company while working for someone else, particularly if you're working in a low-wage job. There is definitely evidence for this phenomenon, as unemployment leads to more entrepreneurship. [0]
2. It is hard to start a company while starving. Starting a company requires a longer time horizon than finding a job. Hence, if there isn't a adequate social support in place, I think a lot of people will prioritize finding a job over starting a company. This is born out in some empirical studies. [1]
Can we get a televised debate between you and yummyfajitas ?
I agree with both of you, though one is for and other against UBI.
I suggest a compromise. A linear increase in ubi from 0 to sustainable. I think going straight to sustainable is a little too drastic all of a sudden. It's like if we invented teleportation. That would destroy trucking faster than AI. But it would be chaos too.
> Can we get a televised debate between you and yummyfajitas ?
Call the networks. :)
> A linear increase in ubi from 0 to sustainable.
I agree that going straight to UBI would be impractical, both politically and economically. My preferred approach would be a step function: we eliminate one entitlement program at a time, and replace it with a corresponding amount of UBI.
Retraining a farmer's kid to be a riveter on a bridge construction project in the late C18/early C20 is a whole lot more feasible than retraining a 40yo professional driver for the jobs opened up by their obsolescence, such as rocket surgery and brain engineering.
> Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.
> It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"
This is incredibly fanciful look at the future. The population cannot grow AND lose jobs to machines. Disruption is having its own variant of Moore's Law, in that, we are disrupting more industries at a faster rate.
UBI, or some form of which, will not only be necessary, but likely inevitable. The improvement of humanity you speak of is in fact a humanity that will survive on creativity, not labour. Labour is done.
Additionally, capitalism doesn't care about "expanded industries" any more than Moore's Law cares about engineers who made their career in the 1980s.
The transition is necessary, and it will be hard, and it won't happen without social security. It's a complete fantasy to see it happening any other way.
The difference though is that the changes are happening at a rapid pace. It used to happen across generations so people could adapt but now things happen at a pace that you cannot guarantee what you started at will still be needed in 5-10 years time.
American Population in 1850: 23 million.
American Population today: 319 million.
American Farmers in 1850: 14.72 million.
American Farmers today: 6.38 million.
And this is with several major wars in between.
Basically we've gotten just better than twice as efficient in farming labor in 160 years (this is measured in man-hours worked). The value of that labor is what has changed. Farming itself is more efficient and we can feed 10 times as many people via refrigeration and shipping.
> If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today.
that's simplistic - people generally don't want to be unemployed. if they get enough money to (barely) scrap by it takes a lot of weight off their shoulders, because they know they wont starve without their jobs. but having a job that fulfills you and income that enables you to save money is a big part of being happy. the (healthy) unemployed i know are mostly young people and every single one of them is constantly applying for jobs, even though they're able to pay rent, food and the occasional treat on unemployment benefits.
It isn't that simple. The robots will never be a drop-in replacement for all the various tasks that a "driver" actually does. Driving, negotiating the vehicle down the road, isn't the entire job.
(1) People will still be needed for inspections and maintenance, however that will be done. Much of that is now covered by drivers (the little things) and cannot be automated.
(2) Insurance companies may demand that a human, a certified driver, at least ride in the truck as backup/security and to deal with awkward situations.
(3) Boarder crossings will still need humans.
(4) Hazmat loads will still need humans on board for safety reasons.
(5) Winter driving. I have yet to see any autodrive system capable of attaching chains or deicing a clogged brake line.
(6) Automation will open up new areas for drivers. By driving shipping costs down, more trucks may hit the road, requiring more people for the jobs listed above.
It may be a wash. The concept that every driver can/will be replaced by an autodrive bot is naive.
> the things you mentioned are not strictly what a driver does.
They are according to the drivers I know. Long haul truckers are not like pilots. They are much more involved with their rigs. They are actually responsible for maintenance. They are the ones talking to the cops when/if they hit an inspection station.
It's not that every single driver will be gone - just a lot of them will be. There used to be a lot of jobs at stables, horse shoe replacement, etc. Today there are a lot of jobs changing oil, mufflers, tune-ups etc, that will go away with the switch to electric cars, but one big truck can carry a lot more freight than a big wagon train, and it needs less human labor. EVs will still need work, they are designed and made by humans (at least for a while, ha ha) so they can break like anything else. But you will need fewer humans probably.
I heard a story on NPR last night where an insurance company was planning for new businesses, because they expect there to be less need for them with less human drivers and a lot fewer accidents. Not next year, but in 10 years.
Just like one truck can do a lot more transportation than a wagon train with 10 hourses. You have some jobs taking care of trucks, but fewer than took care of horse trains. Horses didn't travel as far, so you needed a lot more places for them to stop and feed and water. I think it will hollow out the middle of the us even more. I'm not crazy about that, I'm from that middle of the country that already has continued to hollow out even without robot cars.
> Today there are a lot of jobs changing oil, mufflers, tune-ups etc, that will go away with the switch to electric cars.
But that isn't much of an issue with big rigs, nor with cars generally. The engine/powertrain isn't a big maintenance item on new cars. Engine internals are a very evolved and reliable bit of kit. It's the other things like brakes, wheels, control systems and electrics are the source of most maintenance costs. Those aren't going away with a shift to electrics. Some things will transfer over (air filtration) and new things will appear (battery systems maintenance) and, looking at teslas, powertrain maintenance will still be a thing.
With autodrive, there will be a host of systems that now need new maintenance. And, given that the driver isn't there to fix the little things on the spot, there may be an increase in demand for mechanics that can travel to locations.
Lastly, any switch to autodrive may radically increase trips to the mechanic. Plenty of cars drive around with engine warning lights on permanently. If you know what the problem is, sometimes you just live with it. Just look at the number of cars with blown headlights. An autodrive system might not be so willing to tolerate faults. We may have to keep the vehicles to a higher standard, increasing maintenance needs. (Also a great day for parts manufacturers.)
Those points are all very weak. You seem to be in denial that the vast number of automotive jobs are going to be eradicated even when they are reskilled to cater for the newer systems that are coming.
And you seem to have converted to a tech that has yet to see the road. Come back when we have some actual labour data, not speculation. I've seen many automotive techs come (FI, antilocks, engine management, collision avoidance, onstar) each with warnings about diminished labor costs, warnings mostly from people who couldn't change their own brake pads. Yet little has changed.
Vox writers should be more worried than drivers. Driving a car, dealing with other users on the road, making regulators happy are all difficult problems.
Meanwhile, I have already seen Reddit bots which summarise submissions. How far off are from one that will rehash 2-3 articles and toss in an infographic (created elsewhere)?
Kinda already happening, see: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-used-to-write-apocalypse-...
"the practice of article spinning, in which the same human-written article is quickly reorganized and reworded to create one or more additional “new” articles. (This is often done by software that has a built-in spintax that replaces keywords in the text with synonyms.)"
I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, truck driving is an "old man's job". The average age of a truck driver here is 47, apparently. Automated trucks probably won't get here in time to dovetail with the natural retirement of these drivers...
Yeah, I've been thinking lately as well, why are we doing that? I mean as a society? (I recall a phrase said by someone, that we are consciously building a future nobody wants to live in.) What exactly are we getting from that?
Ultra-rich, namely car companies owners and shareholders, will become even more rich. (Why are they doing it, by the way, don't they have enough super-cars, mansions, yachts already?)
What am I getting from it? Basic goods will become 7% cheaper? Who needs that? I am happy with current prices.
And then dozens if not hundreds of millions people worldwide will lose their jobs and even more the very means for their existence. What will be the impact on their families, communities?
I may be terribly wrong but it seems like yet another round of value extraction by a small cohort of ultra-rich from general society.
There are technologies that are genuinely useful, like space exploration, scientific projects, disease fighting, urban development, planetary computer network, and so on.
And there are "comfort gimmicks" like refined sugar (and sugary drinks), tobacco, toasters, etc. that produce effects from which people living consciously and healthy would want to get rid of. And that are propelled only by "economic factors". Which are a paperclip maximizer.
In what way is this different than the industrial revolution? Are we, as a world, wallowing in relatively more people starving and in poverty than ever before? Why is this different?
And, of course, it all is just a food for thought, doesn't necessarily mean we need to prohibit sales of self-driving vehicles (except for special technical applications).
But still we have to understand that it's our conscious effort, not just the "natural force of Progress". As a society we should intervene and regulate things, and make that decision to steer the economic trends in ways harmonious with society's needs. As a related thought, I think, Jaron Lanier puts it nicely: https://youtu.be/XdEuII9cv-U?t=11m37s
One more time, it's not in reality a "natural force". It's company owners and their severely overworked cliques consciously plan to put hundreds of millions people out of jobs to become personally more prosperous and they tell you that it's a "natural force".
> But still we have to understand that it's our conscious effort, not just the "natural force of Progress".
Thank you, yes.
That so many people in the 'intelligentsia' seem to think it all happens automatically is a really dangerous meme. It is a big part of why so many TED talks are kind of fraudulent.
Society has to fix complex problems, but first the people in it have to recognize problems are actually real instead of pretending everything's great. The risk of being 'glamoured' (like the bewitching of the Lords and Ladies in Terry Pratchett's books) is real. You have to either acclimate in places that that live outside of the narrative (the flyover states, the continent of Africa), or use your imagination. Otherwise you risk being in an optimism bubble with your contemporaries, much as people bemoaning the world tend to wind up in bars together. It is super important to understand that reversals in fortune occur starting at the peripheral of an economic system rather than at the heartland, at the city. That is why whole countries are going into disrepair while almost nobody in the West notices. They just think it is shit because it was always (relatively) shit in the 3rd world or in the 'stix', but it is at the peripheral that things start to break down, that models start to not correspond to reality!
It is certainly worth talking about how to make things better, but all the stats I've ever seen indicate that the global incidence of poverty has been decreasing, not increasing.
> According to the most recent estimates, in 2012, 12.7 percent of the world’s population lived at or below $1.90 a day. That’s down from 37 percent in 1990 and 44 percent in 1981.
If you look back at it, they were on the wrong side of history/argument.
Automation is going to keep going, no matter what, and it is mostly a good thing. Yes, we might have few years of uneasy adjustment times, but things will sort themselves out on the long run.
Think of it, one modern excavator is much better than 50 people digging ditches. One operator with one machine replaced 50 manual workers, yet the world didn't end, but I think it got better over time*
*Whoever protects manual labour vs machines, hasn't lived through deep poor communism. Most eastern Europe didn't have the capital or means to have productive machines in the workplaces, and they replaced them with human labour. Over time the stark differences between west and east became very apparent.
Viewed from another perspective the Luddites were self employed, worked from home, and set their own hours. They didn't want to work 8 to 8 in a dangerous factory for a rich guy.
"One central fact about the global economy lurks just beneath the year’s remarkable headlines: Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth."
We can extend our duration of economic success for a very long time, but not for forever. At some point we go dark.
It has happened to every civilization in history, slowly or suddenly, primitive or sophisticated, for what appears to be about a million different reasons.
I don't know whether this time it is 'The Big One', but it is folly to assume it shall never occur because we're more sophisticated than before. The same was true of every civilization before us.
Other than the Net I don't think there's a single institution we have that some other former civilization had in some way on a smaller scale.
7% cheaper, repeated over and over is meaningful. 1n 1900, people had to spend 43% of their income on food, now it is 13%. They spent 12% of their income on clothing, now it is 4%. Basic goods getting cheaper particularly helps poorer people.
Basic materials e.g. timber, nails, screws, stuff you use to build houses, have all become more expensive recently, despite a dramatic decline in house production (in my country at least).
Seems like few people are talking about this and it really annoys me.
No, things are not getting better and better. Many trends are going into reverse but are not being talked about.
They were getting better and better. Most of those trends stop in the early 70s or after 2008, especially basic needs like medicine and shelter.
usually people took about trends that is seen in decades, not 'recently' where recently here means a couple of years. If you look at food expenditure as a percentage in the 90s and now, there has been progress.
No, of course, no. Goods becoming cheaper means people who sell goods at "adequate prices" will go out of business. Namely, local manufacturers, family businesses, people who pay decent sick leaves, people who obsess over sustainability. Your desire to save that 10% on a pack of potato chips means that instead of a neighboring guy who works in this shop for his entire life, who smiles to you, who knows what you want, you get these cold supermarkets with miserable people working like robots to make ends barely meet. Cheap things mean children working in China to make junk that goes to waste pretty soon, etc. Our obsession with unthoughtful saving means we're stealing pennies from our own future.
The only people who really benefit from innovation are entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders. The majority of the population are actually worse off because of innovation (at least this is the case right now - The value is just not trickling down).
The worst part of this will come when even highly educated people start losing their jobs to machines... We will have a situation where entrepreneurs, investors and company shareholders will earn massive incomes while many of the world's smartest people (who fell through the cracks of the system) will struggle to make ends meet - I think many engineers already feel that this starting to happen now.
Money used to go mostly to employees, but as employees become less valuable in the workplace, it will go mostly to shareholders (owners of capital). This is why tax on income is making increasingly less sense - We need a tax on capital holdings instead.
When you consider the massive role that luck plays in becoming a successful entrepreneur, it does bring into question the fairness of the entire system.
The balance is shifting; we are moving from an economic system which not so long ago seemed 'mostly fair' to one which is becoming 'mostly unfair'. Maybe something like Universal Basic Income would be a good first step.
What we have now is no longer capitalism, it's increasingly an Oligopoly.
The majority of the population now don't starve when there's bad weather, have indoor plumbing, healthcare, don't die from playing tennis without socks.
What do we need money for now, and why? Houses mostly, because a) hand built, and b) scarcity.
Everyone directly benefits from most innovations. Even this one will see the 318 million people directly benefit from drastically lower transportation costs to their goods, where ~2 million will need retraining, or likely transitioning into related jobs.
I used to be a truck driver and before and even during, I worked the dock. The only difference between me and the guys on the dock was I could always pass a pee test, I'd spent 5 minutes studying the CDL test manual, and I spent an hour passing both parts of the CDL test which was about as difficult as 6th grade spelling tests. And cheaper truck transport will increase the demand for dock workers.
I'm skeptical about the timelines of these reports. Certainly we'll never see all 1.8 million drivers lose their jobs overnight. These guys are predicting auto-truck apocalypse in 5-10 years, and we still don't have a single commercial system on the road that's capable of even lightening the load on a driver, much less replacing him. I think truck automation will go in 2 ways at the same time, and we can watch the progress of each:
Systems to ease the strain on independent drivers. Ones that can cruise on the highway without supervision indefinitely, but need help with city streets, parking, maintenance, loading and unloading, keeping manifests, dealing with whatever company is loading and unloading the cargo, etc. They may need somewhat fewer of this class of driver, since the trucks will be able to run more continuously and there will be less need for second drivers and probably fewer trucks. Motels and truck stops will hurt some when the truckers can sleep while the truck drives instead of stopping. I think we're at least a decade away from this existing at all, much less being common.
Full automation for tightly integrated logistics chains. Maybe the Wal-Marts, Amazons, Fedexes, and other huge companies that own the entire logistics chain will be able to figure out how to use fully automated trucks, that can drive from one company facility to another, complete with parking and maneuvering, driving local streets, and letting other company systems handle the logistics of loading and unloading and keeping track of what items are where. I bet at least one of them will start experimenting with something like this in the next 5-10 years, but probably at least 20 years before it works well enough for them to cut down on the number of drivers they employ.
There will be job losses, but it will be slow and gradual. There should hopefully be plenty of time for the economy to adapt, and hopefully either create new jobs for all of these people to do, or move towards something like UBI. I think we'll have to have a massive cultural shift before anything like UBI would be considered or even possibly make sense.
I dunno. Even if "all" the first generation can do is freeway driving (and let's say, not even urban freeway, just "easy" rural portions of freeway) that seems like it still would make the vast majority of long-haul trucking jobs vanish -- just by definition of "long-haul."
If you ship something from New York to Chicago by truck and it takes 14 hours, maybe the first and last hour or so are getting in an out of the source/destination cities. That leaves 12 out of 14 hours where the truck can drive unattended, eliminating the need for about 12/14 of the truckers (or their work hours) that drive that route.
It depends on what proportion of truck drivers today mostly do long-haul as opposed to short haul. I have no idea.
I'm not deep into the freight industry, but I have a few acquaintances who are, and reportedly a lot of the actual shipments that take place are between unrelated companies who only moderately trust each other. The freight company is contracted by one or the other for the route, and usually the truck itself is owned independently by the driver, with the freight company providing the routes and organization of loads.
The truck owner isn't going to trust some random other driver halfway across the country to drive his truck, even if he trusts the auto-driver to navigate the freeway safely. The freight company isn't going to just trust the shipper and receiver to load and unload the right stuff properly and not disturb anything else on the truck. The shipper and receiver aren't going to just trust each other and the freight company to ship the right stuff to the right place - they all want somebody in the truck there who knows what's going on.
Basically, the drivers don't just drive, they're the glue that holds together a whole complex system. Even if we had a perfect auto-drive truck today, it would probably take decades to figure out systems that work well enough that shipments work right without somebody who knows what's going on in the truck. Like I said, I think the best we can hope for short-term is to take some of the load of actually driving off the drivers, leading to longer trips and fewer stops.
That's also why I said that the only companies in a position to really use auto-trucks are those who already have integrated logistics chains, where drivers who work for the company drive company-owned trucks between company warehouses to move goods that the company either already owns or has taken responsibility for tracking.
It's already happened. Those AIs are called compilers. Compilers get more powerful every year. If you took them away, there aren't enough people on the planet to do the same job with assemblers.
What happens is pretty straightforward - the more powerful the AI devtools get, the more is demanded of them. I look at programs I wrote 20, 30 years ago, and am bemused by how trivial they look today.
I'm calling a compiler an AI tool, because what is it other than you type in what you want the computer to do, and the compiler figures out how to do it?
There's no doubt that some programmer's jobs will start to disappear. Think about how many web devs/ html jockeys are no longer needed because word press or 100 other web publishing platforms are easy enough for non pgmrs to use. How long will a million programmers write custom software instead of just packaging apps? Today, places like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon have a lot of programmers writing custom apps. And lots of other companies - eventually I think we'll need fewer of them. Maybe as a software engineer, I could be retrained to do genetic engineering or dna analysis. But it's a lot easier for me than the guy making hamburgers at McDonalds.
I don't want anyone to lose their job, but this change of reduced labor based work is inevitable. Economic forces are hard to overcome. Just like coal has been wiped out by cheap natural gas - it wasn't a conspiracy.
Disclaimer: In 1997 I was cut off by a semi (in the middle of trying to pass him), who did NOT signal, on a 2 lane road (I-5 in California, speed limit was 85 or so), and ended up entering the ditch and rolling over 8 times and shattered my hand (it's fine now, but it took a while). The driver never stopped. I was lucky to walk away from that one.
Sorry, truckers, but your job can eat a bag of dicks.
Lest we forget, the only reason trucking is so huge is because train cargo wasn't maintained (conspiracists say the oil industry lobbied for trucking).
This comment, together with its parent, is a nice example of a false-choice. They both are built upon an assumption that there is some sort of total ordering between cargo transportation systems. Trains are better. No trucks are better. No trains are better.
In reality trains and trucks are part of an incredibly complex cargo transportation system in which the most appropriate transportation mode is dependent on the nature of the cargo, the geography of the source and destination, the infrastructure available, the current price of fuel, weather conditions, capacity constraints and on and on and on.
There is no total ordering of efficiency of transportation modes.
And they are cut off and break tested by 4 wheelers all the time. Lets crush all cars and make every person ride the bus?
Btw, cargo trains are very cute for big loads between huge industrial hubs. Which means according to your theory that most people and their job in every state can go fuck themselves. Also I suspect you'll be fine with your Amazon Prime taking 1-2 weeks to reach your door.
I'm surprised that in the land of (apparently ) limitless legal liabilities, so many people are bullish on self-driving cars, let alone self-driving trucks.
You should be highly concerned that the push towards this by big players is going to lead to laws where ultimately nobody will have to take up personal responsibility for accidents anymore.
its surprising this isn't mentioned more often. truck drivers do meth. its the only way for them to stay focussed and awake driving across country.
so, from both sides, we have drivers with long term substance abuse problems controlling really heavy metal whacked out of their skulls. and we have an economy which can only function by effectively ruining people's lives by turning them into machines.
if we were a remotely moral society we would be horrified
I THINK that truck driver on speed use is down since log book tampering has gotten harder over the years, but I am sure it is not perfect. If you can only work 11 hours a day and need a day off every 3 days of work, less incentive to speed.
There need to be more safety systems on trucks driven by people today. I was on I-80 in western Nebraska last weekend. The road was closed for hours after a distracted semi driver slammed into cars slowing down in a construction zone. 6 people were killed.
I get alerts for I-70 in Colorado. The number of semis that jack knife in winter is terrifying.
What I don't get is, if we're so close to this becoming a reality, why isn't the lower hanging fruit of train/locomotive automation already here?
That seems to be an order of magnitude simpler issue to solve, and yet we don't seem to be there yet. Granted, forms of automation have penetrated that industry - deadmans switches, automated signalling and such. But there's still a human at the helm of every freight loco.
Smaller scale urban light rail deployments seem to have got close to full automation, presumably due to being able to embed all the necessary elements into the end-to-end installation of the system (signalling, stock, cameras/sensors etc).
How can the kind of full automation that would put truck drivers out of work, arrive before the kind that would put train drivers out of work?
Well, if we talk about trains ... the future is already here. Humans where deemed unworthy to drive high speed trains so ETCS[1] takes over almost everything. The drivers are in cabin for the same reasons we still have pilots in airplanes - just in case.
At some point everyone gets phased out. The question we should be asking, is how do we prepare to transition people from one job to the next more quickly. Coal miners are a perfect example. They're largely stuck. They haven't the money to send their kids to school to do something else, nor do they have the $$ to do it themselves (and likely not the time either). We need to rethink (as a planet), how we deal with churn.
Is the answer an "Uber for robots"? Rather than an organisation owning all the robots, individuals could own a robot and rent it out though an online marketplace. It would be a continuation of the "owner/driver" model, without the need to actually be a driver.
Maybe the problem is that if it's a lucrative opportunity the group running the marketplace will want to keep all the profits for themselves, by owning the robots and locking out small players?
At scale, the value truckers provide is being a driver, not offer there trucks. Yes, there will be companies that provide logistics as a service, but it's hard to imagine a business based on a single robot.
Don't see it happening anytime soon. Self driving cars directly create convenience for the end user, and the public may be willing to accept a few crashes here and there in exchange for that convenience.
The first time an unmanned Fedex truck kills a family of 6 in a minivan people will decided they would rather pay a few cents more to have trucks driven by humans.
Robots might destroy jobs, but also create new jobs for us.
It's like innovative products - which might make some products obsolete but also makes space for more innovation and other products that would've not existed otherwise. :)
Entropy and diminishing returns from readily accessible energy sources will kick in at some point. My guess is it'll happen before the robots are more adaptable to changing road conditions than humans.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadThose two items right there are exactly why they are being automated (in addition to additional efficiencies and cost reductions). If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality.
What to do about the aftermath that affects actual people and families as pay is reduced or eventually eliminated over the next 10-25 years? Well, that's the new problem. Not one that the companies that employ truck drivers will be looking to solve, but the one everyone else has to cope with in some capacity -- whether directly affected by the reduced jobs, or indirectly affected by those now looking for work in their community.
So, if there were the same need for engineers than for truck drivers, even in aggregate, automation would be a lot less compelling.
Putting it more straightforwardly:100 engineers in California can automate several hundred thousands of jobs in the whole country.
Automation happens when you can replace 1.8 million drivers with 0.18 million engineers.
There's no shortage of useful things to build. It might be hard to think of things for 1.62 million people to build, but the good news is you and I don't have to think of those things ourselves right now. Those 1.62 million people will be thinking about it too.
I have a hard time accepting the reduction in the cost of production as "unfortunate reality". This process is a key element of economic development. Why, at this point in history, is it now 'unfortunate'?
I think there are some very difficult challenges associated with the macro-trends in our global economic system but I'm pretty sure that viewing productivity increases as "unfortunate" isn't very helpful towards dealing with these challenges.
The problem with mistaking this fear for a fact is that it often leads to an incorrect intervention. (I call this a WMD argument.)
We’d be much better served with much greater caution about what is actually, observably, measurably true. In this case, we’d have to discover the yet-unfound correlation between technical advance and employment rate.
That's more than Uber's latest valuation.
Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.
It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"
Imagine telling a farmer in 1850s America, when 64% of America farmed, that in 2016 only 2% of people would be farming! Imagine the distopian horror (1)! If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today.
Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors, leading to the enormous improvement in production, income and standard of living since then. If 64% of people still farmed, or 2% farmed and 62% were on UBI - who would have had the time or incentive to create computers, software, advances in healthcare, etc?
I'm not claiming the transition is easy for someone who's laid off - it can be an extremely tough process, but it's absolutely necessary for the improvement of humanity.
(1) http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-...
> sitting around
choose one
Surely some people will opt to not have a job at all, if they didn't need to worry about maintaining a minimum quality of life and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
And unless you have some hard data showing people on public assistance use their free time doing the unsung dirty work society needs, I don't believe it will magically start happening if we change the name of welfare to UBI.
Also, just because no one is willing to pay for what you do doesn't mean you are doing nothing. I think there will be a bunch of people doing different things than now and many anti-UBI people would call what they gonna do 'sitting around'.
The next problem is that no one seems to appreciate how incompatible it is with open borders in a world of nation-states. The latter is particularly telling since advocates of UBI are often advocates of less restrictive immigration across the world, yet they don't seem to see the problem. It's an indication of how ungrounded the discussion about UBI is right now.
Matter can't travel faster than c. Thermodynamics is a bitch.
These theories are as intractable as they are annoying. They are not proven beyond doubt. But before launching a venture in contradiction to them, evidence must be mounted. "It feels right" isn't a scientific basis for policy.
Trucking won't disappear overnight.
Automation makes sense for long haul highways, so truck drivers will shift to being last mile drivers.
Once there's enough driverless vehicles large trucks can signal smaller vehicles things like "I need to turn right so please leave me room in the left turn lane to my right". Frankly the tow truck industry needs some disrupting. At least here in Houston they are the most dangerous lawless drivers on the road and need to go.
Lots of industries and jobs pretty much disappeared overnight -- it took centuries or millennia for that to happen in the past.
It might not disappear overnight but it sure as hell isn't going to take 150 years!
Humans also have a tendency to always think "it'll stay the same as is right now".
I'm not saying it wouldn't quickly turn into 51% of the people voting themselves 100% of the money (which would quickly become worth nothing), but it isn't the worst idea out there.
Can you recommend any reading on this?
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-aren...
The EIC is on top of the programs Friedman wanted to replace.
So for many it is too small to matter either because they don't have dependents, don't work enough, or work too much. But it's actually a near damned perfect incentive to keep people working and trying to find better jobs while keeping them out of abject poverty. Likely the best anti-poverty tool the US government has blindly stumbled upon ever.
Neat to think about, but would take a miracle for most people to take seriously.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/04/matt-zwolinski/pragma...
These may or may not be the same people. I think it is important we understand in detail how humans become creative before large scale implementation of UBI.
Personally I believe UBI should be earned in some way, with some kind of duty/responsibility (that doesn't require coming into work everyday obviously e.g. having trained to be part of an armed response corp or a diaster response agency).
Presently Israel makes people train for the army for a year or two, which I believe is partially responsible for their high level of innovation. I believe the garages in the US serve a similar helpful function (in my country people don't have them, in the US they seem like a default).
Having people just work together is a very difficult but necessarily task and I believe obtaining UBI should require that.
I say so as a person who finds working with people quite difficult!
Does anybody remember the Decentralized Republic from the Diamond Age making people do random (strange) things together to string their society together?
How is that relevant? UBI doesn't propose to eliminate jobs (even stressful ones), just make them non-compulsory.
If you're saying that these people would simply not get a stressful job if they had UBI, hence they wouldn't perform at an high level, what about if they currently choose a non-stressful job? Doesn't your argument imply we should force people to take certain jobs, even against their will, so that they perform at an high level?
Presently Israel makes people train for the army for a year or two, which I believe is partially responsible for their high level of innovation.
There are 71 countries in the world with compulsory conscription, including Algeria, Austria, Austria, Azerbaijan, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, Finland, Georgia, Greece, Guatemala, Iran, Kuwait, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Norway, Paraguay, Russia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan.
Do you see them all as countries with high levels of innovation? Have you considered that the correlation may be spurious?
Having people just work together is a very difficult but necessarily task and I believe obtaining UBI should require that.
How do you account then for the existence of the Open Source community, a mostly voluntary collaboration between many thousands of inviduals often thought to be people with poor social skills? Not to mention all the volunteer-based non-profits, churches, events, etc?
> How is that relevant?
Well, people are motivated differently from each other and at different stages in their lives. Have you ever noticed some people intentionally generate stress? They do that because they require it to get themselves going. Stress isn't always a bad thing, that's mostly the continual low level stress that can hurt health.
> Doesn't your argument imply we should force people to take certain jobs, even against their will, so that they perform at an high level?
No. Some jobs deserve higher pay because they aren't pleasant but in the current environment they receive minuscule wages because people have no other options.
I am saying two things about the role of stress. One is that many, perhaps most people, have been 'coached' by workplace experience to endure stress. In a way they are institutionalized. The same thing occurs with schooling. It serves a purpose but that diminishes under UBI.
This means many maladaptive habits exist, like overly sensitive stress responses, that will take many years to break out of, perhaps even requiring a generational change before the full effects of UBI are evident.
Let's use an extreme example, consider the mental model of a member of ISIS. If you give them UBI, you change literally nothing about this person and their attempts to strap bombs to their bodies because their entire mental model was never aligned with optimizing their personal outcomes. Similarly many people are hardwired into existing mental models to such an extent that UBI may simply bounce off them. This is sometimes expressed by the inhabitants of urban ghettos as 'you can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the girl'.
The second thing is that most people really do currently require stress in order to operate. When they feel a tangible connection to 'survival mode', they get stuff done. Otherwise they risk stagnation. This is a simple fact that cannot be hand waved away.
Examine the lives of lottery winners if you want to see a full spectrum of irrational behavior. Only a few manage to become the improved human you want them to be. Look at the communities of those who subsist nearly entirely on welfare. There are whole housing estates in the UK where nobody has held a job in generations and it has caused immense harm.
It is interesting to note that once they become 'pensioners', they become quite a bit happier.
People like to have a solid justification for their existence. You have to provide for that, or allow them to provide that, regardless of what happens.
I think all this can be solved, but first it has to be thought about in depth.
> There are 71 countries in the world with compulsory conscription,
They are not all the same (and it doesn't have to be conscription). Some countries do it better than others. It is hard to explain with words but it is something you know when you see it. The US and Israel have it. Eritrea and Iraq do not. The soldiers of the USA and Israel are proud of their role and see themselves as part of a higher noble purpose. The soldiers of Eritrea and Afghanistan manifestly do not. We may be sure the first two groups will work well together in forming businesses.
Conscription or not, this is something that can be cultivated.
It is also a single factor, I was not using it as a universal explanation of everything innovation related. What I am saying is that people who work under short periods of severe stress make for good teams to do anything.
It is hard to do this convincingly artificially, corporate team building is mostly placebo in comparison, that's why I suggested the army but police or disaster response may work just as well.
> How do you account then for the existence of the Open Source community, a mostly voluntary collaboration between many thousands of inviduals often thought to be people with poor social skills...
First, the initial (expensive) investment in the self-driving trucks will offset the wage gains from not hiring truckers ----, so shipping costs will remain where they are mostly for the first few years at least until this is balanced.
Second, the "increased spending"/"creation of new jobs" effect might only be relevant if the shipping costs are a significant part of the final price of a product. From what I've seen, it's at most 10% (at most), and less for the average item. That's why we can have $1 stuff that comes all the way from China.
But, let's accept that this (reduced retail prices) will happen, there are other things I don't see working with this idea:
>Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.
Which, more likely than not, wont involve people with trucking skills.
And most likely wont involve domestic labor either, most things are made abroad (China, etc) anyway.
>It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"
That's because your whole job sector hasn't been deprecated when you're forty (or approaching)...
>Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors
That was in a time those other endeavours had a huge boom and needed tons of hands (and even so, millions of ex-farmers ended up getting the short stick).
We don't have an industrial revolution expanding the need for workers now, we have a software/automation revolution slowly decreasing workers demands sector by sector.
In fact we haven't had a need for more workers for quite a few decades -- what we did is inflate, as much as we can, the services sector to compensate for it instead. But there's only so many service type jobs really viable, plus automation also begins to eat into them, and with the squeezed middle classes pinching pennies its even bleaker for them (being non essential et al), even if decreased shipping costs turn out to mean a (huge and unrealistic) 10% more income.
Jobs are disappearing. They aren't "coming back" in greater numbers. And the new jobs, by and large, aren't for the previous workforce.
We already live in a world where many jobs are unnecessary. A large portion of government jobs are, essentially, welfare jobs. One of the systematic reasons of for the expansion of government is "job creation". Politicians will create jobs, but those jobs add nothing to society. We've got people pretending to work a job to collect a paycheck. It's welfare.
The industrial revolution replaced muscle with machine, but brainpower was still a required input. There was a clear shift: from doing the work to using a machine to do the same work, but faster. There was enough demand that things didn't collapse.
The current shift is replacing both muscle and brainpower. Outside of creative jobs, what is left for the human to do? Make the brain smarter? We are already entering into a time where the machine makes itself smarter without the advent of the human.
New jobs will be created, sure. But those jobs will not be for the 1.8 million truck drivers. Instead the government will likely end up soaking it up through one program or another. Tens of thousands will end up in welfare jobs. Hundreds of thousands will end up on long term disability. The numbers aren't small.
UBI is an inevitability. You've got some 40 million people on food stamps, about 9 million on disability. Millions more working pointless government jobs like directing people from one TSA employee to another. At what point to we recognize that the future does not look like the past?
UBI inevitability:
https://youtu.be/x5m1A7zoIcc
---
Market forces are inevitable. Human behavior is inevitable. The future does look like the past.
You are right that ongoing elimination of jobs is a problem leading to huge social unrest, and UBI fits the bill to be a good solution for this.
The only problem with UBI is that it is unsustainable and therefore impossible. The balance just doesn't check out. The mere retirement schemes are in grave danger of collapse; the money there are long spent. UBI is huge, and there is no way to get this kind of money from anywhere (even if you strip away all capital from the top 1% and send them to labor camps, as it was done elsewhere, the money from this will fuel $1000/month UBI for about 2 years tops).
Antigravity would be an excellent solution to our space travel challenges, but we don't know any way to make it work. It is exactly the same with UBI.
Honestly, I'm excited to see what happens as it will happen in my lifetime. 30 years ago we had the first general purpose computers. Look at where we are now. Today we have the first general purpose robots. Imagine where we will be in 30 years. It's hard to imagine.
Drivers, construction workers, doctors, lawyers—it's all going to be dramatically different 30 years from now. Forget the US. All those jobs making everything from iPhones to t-shirts will also be at risk. When you don't need specialized equipment and you can buy a robot that can make t-shirts for a few thousand dollars you don't need the human anymore.
If not UBI, then what? What do all these people do?
Guarding the robots.
Face it; self-driving cars and trucks are going to be a HUGE target of vandalism and theft at first, especially for people who're made unemployed by them and can't find other jobs.
You're gonna need other people to keep them safe, and carrying guns doesn't require a lot of retraining in the US at least.
Those soon-to-be-out-of-work drivers may very well be required to tag along with the upcoming robot-vehicles anyway, to sit in them as guards and protect them from the rioting Luddites.
Until we can make robotic clones of Arnold Schwarzenegger to automate this as well, that is.
Typically when people run out of unemployment, or approach retirement in the case of emergency services people, they find a sympathetic doctor to sign for disability pay.
There is no transition available for them to the "knowledge economy."
This only makes the press occasionally now, but wait until it inverts to an unsustainable 60/40 welfare/taxpayers.
> went into other endeavors
We are automating away entire classes of jobs, so this will require retraining. How, exactly, do you propose to send half[2] of the workforce to college for retraining in a highly technical field? Assuming this was even possible and assuming there will be jobs for all of these new programmers/etc, is this retraining cheaper than UBI or other plans? It is relatively easy for a farmer to learn another trade that requires primarily physical work. Retraining drivers for unautomatable technical work is a lot harder and more expensive.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
[2] Driving is the largest category of jobs. The next handful of job types (e.g. retail sales, various clerical work, customer service/support) are also being automated away. Together is very roughly half of all jobs.
TL;DR - just watch [1]
That's assuming that programming won't be one of the first categories of jobs to be automated away by AI. Think of the cost savings! But thankfully we don't have to worry about what all those poor programmers are going to do since it's progress for humanity.
Nursing, at least part of it, is about empathy and care. If someone is in the hospital getting robot heart surgery, someone has to help guide them through the practice. I do not see robot empathy in the next 50 years. Same reason I do not see robot counselors on the horizon ;)
If any conceivable software was free, required no human labor, and instantaneous: Would the world be a better or a worse place? (although I'd need to find something else to do)
If computers replace doctors, and I get better care for cheaper, aren't I better off?
...If every job was automated, and you can press a button to have robots make software or do medical tasks, that is the ultimate UBI for every person on earth. Everything is free, and then everyone can do whatever they want to fill their days.
P.S. - I want my own clothes-folding coffee-making robot.
P.P.S. - One tiny thing the video said, that is a piece of incorrect common wisdom: Auto insurance companies will not be helped by automated cars, they'll be hurt greatly. If accident rates decrease, premiums decrease, and so the insurance companies margins (and float) decrease, making less revenue and profits.
Doctors have a state-guaranteed monopoly that is created via lobbying. That is why, in many countries, doctors are extremely expensive -- even though most of the miracle of healing is done by medicine.
In the future it will probably be a doctor owning and "supervising" the machine. Patients use the machine (paying $XXX). A doctor will take 30 seconds to one minute to look at the results, sign it and your prescription and then charge you exactly the same as before.
The only way the general public will benefit is from more accurate prescriptions. But I sincerely doubt that the cost of a doctor's visit will be reduced significantly. But don't worry, the laws will the there for your own good.
PS: MYCIN was already developed in the 70ies, and showed higher accuracy than doctors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin
Some aging countries will face a severe loss in standard of living if they fail to automate huge parts of the economy. Presumably the worlds population will not continue to grow infinitely and at some point labor shortages will be a big problem.
One of the most destructive outcomes could come from poor government policy during an economic transition. Socialist or capitalist is one thing, but policies which are in direct opposition to another is another ( e.g. Venezuela, Zimbabwe.)
There are also big AI existential risk issues, but I think that is separate from the labor impact.
Maybe at some point people will just throw up their hands and start to embrace higher taxes on capital and UBI, but I'm not holding my breath.
As an analog to Wirth's law I'd suggest that in the transportation industry, technological advances in mitigating damage risk are offset by increased risk tolerance in seeking higher throughput / lower latency in the transport of goods and people.
So while the absolute accident rate will go down and the number of meatbag casualties will be reduced by automation removing human error, the _severity_ of catastrophic failure damaging _property_ will increase due to the incentives to push more autos through the pipes in less time: extreme tailgating, hyper-dense cargo, excessive velocity, and bountiful heterogeneity.
Really this is about a transition from (mainly) insuring against loss-of-life to (mainly) insuring against destruction-of-property. Of course, humans will still die even in 'negligible' quantities. But an actuary's loss-of-life liability assessment doesn't need to discriminate between fatal blunt trauma and fatal atomization.
We've had technology replace mental labor before too.[0]
Spreadsheets democratized accounting and while making the work easier, also put a tax prep firm on every corner in the US. It vastly increased the number of people performing some sort of accounting. Some are small business owners that do it themselves, and can now hire a few extra employees.
We've had AI that can write beautiful music for ages, now it can duplicate the style of any composer,[1] but we largely don't care and still have pop stars. And composers.
The work Taylor Swift does for her millions of dollars probably involves layers of cultivating a story about a real person, responding correctly to paparazzi in different scenarios, and judging when to capitalize on interactions on Twitter between other celebrities. This probably sounds like I'm saying she's calculating, but really it has to be an enormous amount of instinct, because it's all probably not reducible to any series of tasks that can be enumerated or even perhaps knowable. Several people have tried to analyze her success, I'm not sure anyone actually understands it.[2][3]
More important for ordinary employees, we still have people compose film scores for some reason. Maybe because even if you can emulate other composers, someone has to decide which composer to emulate, which means having some ability to guess at another artist's as yet unexpressed artistic vision. Once you have the decades of training and experience to do all that, might as well write the thing yourself. Maybe recommendation engines could get there, but I'm not sure those work with novel creations, and I'm not sure we're even interested in perfecting those anymore for areas where they're proven (more or less) to work.[4]
Maybe the weird thing about mental assistants is that they expand the workforce, rather than reducing it. Robots are set up to run automatically, but all the AI we develop is driven by humans to solve day to day problems.
It's like if instead of robotics we built programmable exoskeletons or mechs. The number of employees would explode. There'd still be people building everything, inside the machines. That's what we're doing with computers in a lot of fields. Software is most often like a suit our brain wears to think faster or more reliably.
On the other hand, there are also examples of muscle jobs that haven't yet been perfectly replaced.[5]
The lack of a sewing robot (or ubiquitous clothes folding robots as another commenter mentioned) illustrates that we tend to overgeneralize. Some brawn problems are easy, and some are hard. Same for brain problems. Some problems will stick around, either stubbornly unable to be mechanized, or just not worth the cost.
Also, feedback systems kick in to ensure that labor force participation bounces between reasonable extremes. A lot of the recent downturn in the LFPR can be attributed to retirees.[6] It seems to be leveling off or even heading up again, but regardless the US rate remains well within historical norms.[7]
Sorry this turned out super long and rambly.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/episo...
[1] http://newatlas.com/creative-artificial-intelligence-compute...
[2] https://bl...
Perhaps we'd be in a better place today. We can't know for sure, without first experimenting.
Wealth inequality is a real and growing problem, and I believe is a much bigger impediment to human progress than a basic income would be.
What about the millions of incredibly intelligent minds who could be earning the big bucks on Wall Street, but instead are toiling away 7 days a week in research labs at universities, surviving only off the small budget they're allocated? Are they working to survive, or are they surviving just to work?
What about the millions who would love to further their education, but instead have to work two jobs to support a family?
Personally, I come from a lower income background and would never have had the opportunity to go to university if it wasn't for the generous social support my country has.
Humans are inherently enterprising creatures. Yes, a basic income will enable some to sit around and do nothing. But those people have already found ways to do that, and why should we stop them? The people who truly want to change the world are not going to be impeded by some cash handed to them.
it's not just income,it's the network the ghetto,the mindset,the culture...
it's just so hard to move up...of those stories? probably less then 10%
The article cites $40k average pay per driver. That's fast-food wages
Not really. That's basically $20/hour full-time.
Trucking wages are not the greatest, but it feeds your family and pays the bills. The cost savings may be small but coming from a small town where 1/4 of the working population has class 3 and class 1 licenses operating these machines. It's a middle class lifestyle for these communities.
[1] http://trucker.com/trucker-jobs/equipment-driver-pay-push-op...
decreased shipping costs will go into the pockets of the business owners as additional profits.
Since I'm already used to paying $X for that, why would you necessarily cut that out when you can keep it?
Just another possibility.
Relying on abstract economic theories about market efficiency is stupid when you're literally watching this happen all around us.
We might even be in a better place than we are today. There would be even more entrepreneurship and labor would have more bargaining power when entering new industries.
Nothing about UBI prevents there from being new opportunities created. If anything, it provides for more potential for those opportunities by encouraging people to leave shitty low-productivity jobs to start their own thing or to search for a higher productivity job.
That seems like a highly debatable statement.
However, it can be reasoned about. I have two arguments:
1. It is hard to start a company while working for someone else, particularly if you're working in a low-wage job. There is definitely evidence for this phenomenon, as unemployment leads to more entrepreneurship. [0]
2. It is hard to start a company while starving. Starting a company requires a longer time horizon than finding a job. Hence, if there isn't a adequate social support in place, I think a lot of people will prioritize finding a job over starting a company. This is born out in some empirical studies. [1]
[0] https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/rs394tot.pdf
[1] http://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/resources/2016/...
I agree with both of you, though one is for and other against UBI.
I suggest a compromise. A linear increase in ubi from 0 to sustainable. I think going straight to sustainable is a little too drastic all of a sudden. It's like if we invented teleportation. That would destroy trucking faster than AI. But it would be chaos too.
Call the networks. :)
> A linear increase in ubi from 0 to sustainable.
I agree that going straight to UBI would be impractical, both politically and economically. My preferred approach would be a step function: we eliminate one entitlement program at a time, and replace it with a corresponding amount of UBI.
What then?
You're not comparing apples to apples.
> It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"
This is incredibly fanciful look at the future. The population cannot grow AND lose jobs to machines. Disruption is having its own variant of Moore's Law, in that, we are disrupting more industries at a faster rate.
UBI, or some form of which, will not only be necessary, but likely inevitable. The improvement of humanity you speak of is in fact a humanity that will survive on creativity, not labour. Labour is done.
Additionally, capitalism doesn't care about "expanded industries" any more than Moore's Law cares about engineers who made their career in the 1980s.
The transition is necessary, and it will be hard, and it won't happen without social security. It's a complete fantasy to see it happening any other way.
The 62%, obviously.
Basically we've gotten just better than twice as efficient in farming labor in 160 years (this is measured in man-hours worked). The value of that labor is what has changed. Farming itself is more efficient and we can feed 10 times as many people via refrigeration and shipping.
that's simplistic - people generally don't want to be unemployed. if they get enough money to (barely) scrap by it takes a lot of weight off their shoulders, because they know they wont starve without their jobs. but having a job that fulfills you and income that enables you to save money is a big part of being happy. the (healthy) unemployed i know are mostly young people and every single one of them is constantly applying for jobs, even though they're able to pay rent, food and the occasional treat on unemployment benefits.
(1) People will still be needed for inspections and maintenance, however that will be done. Much of that is now covered by drivers (the little things) and cannot be automated.
(2) Insurance companies may demand that a human, a certified driver, at least ride in the truck as backup/security and to deal with awkward situations.
(3) Boarder crossings will still need humans.
(4) Hazmat loads will still need humans on board for safety reasons.
(5) Winter driving. I have yet to see any autodrive system capable of attaching chains or deicing a clogged brake line.
(6) Automation will open up new areas for drivers. By driving shipping costs down, more trucks may hit the road, requiring more people for the jobs listed above.
It may be a wash. The concept that every driver can/will be replaced by an autodrive bot is naive.
>The concept that every driver can/will be replaced by an autodrive bot is naive.
The premise is that the driver aspect will be removed, the things you mentioned are not strictly what a driver does.
They are according to the drivers I know. Long haul truckers are not like pilots. They are much more involved with their rigs. They are actually responsible for maintenance. They are the ones talking to the cops when/if they hit an inspection station.
I heard a story on NPR last night where an insurance company was planning for new businesses, because they expect there to be less need for them with less human drivers and a lot fewer accidents. Not next year, but in 10 years.
Just like one truck can do a lot more transportation than a wagon train with 10 hourses. You have some jobs taking care of trucks, but fewer than took care of horse trains. Horses didn't travel as far, so you needed a lot more places for them to stop and feed and water. I think it will hollow out the middle of the us even more. I'm not crazy about that, I'm from that middle of the country that already has continued to hollow out even without robot cars.
But that isn't much of an issue with big rigs, nor with cars generally. The engine/powertrain isn't a big maintenance item on new cars. Engine internals are a very evolved and reliable bit of kit. It's the other things like brakes, wheels, control systems and electrics are the source of most maintenance costs. Those aren't going away with a shift to electrics. Some things will transfer over (air filtration) and new things will appear (battery systems maintenance) and, looking at teslas, powertrain maintenance will still be a thing.
With autodrive, there will be a host of systems that now need new maintenance. And, given that the driver isn't there to fix the little things on the spot, there may be an increase in demand for mechanics that can travel to locations.
Lastly, any switch to autodrive may radically increase trips to the mechanic. Plenty of cars drive around with engine warning lights on permanently. If you know what the problem is, sometimes you just live with it. Just look at the number of cars with blown headlights. An autodrive system might not be so willing to tolerate faults. We may have to keep the vehicles to a higher standard, increasing maintenance needs. (Also a great day for parts manufacturers.)
Meanwhile, I have already seen Reddit bots which summarise submissions. How far off are from one that will rehash 2-3 articles and toss in an infographic (created elsewhere)?
Take your pick, or interpolate between them.
Ultra-rich, namely car companies owners and shareholders, will become even more rich. (Why are they doing it, by the way, don't they have enough super-cars, mansions, yachts already?)
What am I getting from it? Basic goods will become 7% cheaper? Who needs that? I am happy with current prices.
And then dozens if not hundreds of millions people worldwide will lose their jobs and even more the very means for their existence. What will be the impact on their families, communities?
I may be terribly wrong but it seems like yet another round of value extraction by a small cohort of ultra-rich from general society.
There are technologies that are genuinely useful, like space exploration, scientific projects, disease fighting, urban development, planetary computer network, and so on.
And there are "comfort gimmicks" like refined sugar (and sugary drinks), tobacco, toasters, etc. that produce effects from which people living consciously and healthy would want to get rid of. And that are propelled only by "economic factors". Which are a paperclip maximizer.
And, of course, it all is just a food for thought, doesn't necessarily mean we need to prohibit sales of self-driving vehicles (except for special technical applications).
But still we have to understand that it's our conscious effort, not just the "natural force of Progress". As a society we should intervene and regulate things, and make that decision to steer the economic trends in ways harmonious with society's needs. As a related thought, I think, Jaron Lanier puts it nicely: https://youtu.be/XdEuII9cv-U?t=11m37s
Second of all government intervention already does lots of cool things for us: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-06-19/who-creat...
But we don't appreciate it because we're being fooled into "libertarian dream" by rich who want to get rid of our control: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-...
One more time, it's not in reality a "natural force". It's company owners and their severely overworked cliques consciously plan to put hundreds of millions people out of jobs to become personally more prosperous and they tell you that it's a "natural force".
Thank you, yes.
That so many people in the 'intelligentsia' seem to think it all happens automatically is a really dangerous meme. It is a big part of why so many TED talks are kind of fraudulent.
Society has to fix complex problems, but first the people in it have to recognize problems are actually real instead of pretending everything's great. The risk of being 'glamoured' (like the bewitching of the Lords and Ladies in Terry Pratchett's books) is real. You have to either acclimate in places that that live outside of the narrative (the flyover states, the continent of Africa), or use your imagination. Otherwise you risk being in an optimism bubble with your contemporaries, much as people bemoaning the world tend to wind up in bars together. It is super important to understand that reversals in fortune occur starting at the peripheral of an economic system rather than at the heartland, at the city. That is why whole countries are going into disrepair while almost nobody in the West notices. They just think it is shit because it was always (relatively) shit in the 3rd world or in the 'stix', but it is at the peripheral that things start to break down, that models start to not correspond to reality!
For example, from: http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview
> According to the most recent estimates, in 2012, 12.7 percent of the world’s population lived at or below $1.90 a day. That’s down from 37 percent in 1990 and 44 percent in 1981.
If you look back at it, they were on the wrong side of history/argument. Automation is going to keep going, no matter what, and it is mostly a good thing. Yes, we might have few years of uneasy adjustment times, but things will sort themselves out on the long run.
Think of it, one modern excavator is much better than 50 people digging ditches. One operator with one machine replaced 50 manual workers, yet the world didn't end, but I think it got better over time*
*Whoever protects manual labour vs machines, hasn't lived through deep poor communism. Most eastern Europe didn't have the capital or means to have productive machines in the workplaces, and they replaced them with human labour. Over time the stark differences between west and east became very apparent.
This is a lie.
Sooner or later progress will stop, it is just a matter of when, not if.
All of human history illustrates this point. We are not about to be the exception.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12242525
The first paragraph reads:
"One central fact about the global economy lurks just beneath the year’s remarkable headlines: Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth."
We can extend our duration of economic success for a very long time, but not for forever. At some point we go dark.
It has happened to every civilization in history, slowly or suddenly, primitive or sophisticated, for what appears to be about a million different reasons.
I don't know whether this time it is 'The Big One', but it is folly to assume it shall never occur because we're more sophisticated than before. The same was true of every civilization before us.
Other than the Net I don't think there's a single institution we have that some other former civilization had in some way on a smaller scale.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-amer...
Basic materials e.g. timber, nails, screws, stuff you use to build houses, have all become more expensive recently, despite a dramatic decline in house production (in my country at least).
Seems like few people are talking about this and it really annoys me.
No, things are not getting better and better. Many trends are going into reverse but are not being talked about.
They were getting better and better. Most of those trends stop in the early 70s or after 2008, especially basic needs like medicine and shelter.
Real energy prices have been high since the existence of OPEC with only some relief very recently.
This isn't cherrypicking. That's half a lifetime.
If it's just to keep busy, then yeah, we should stop technological advancement.
vs
> And there are "comfort gimmicks" like ... toasters
???
One of these things is more important and useful to the ordinary person's life than the other, and it's not throwing computers at the stars.
Meaning all Americans get a 7% raise.
The worst part of this will come when even highly educated people start losing their jobs to machines... We will have a situation where entrepreneurs, investors and company shareholders will earn massive incomes while many of the world's smartest people (who fell through the cracks of the system) will struggle to make ends meet - I think many engineers already feel that this starting to happen now.
Money used to go mostly to employees, but as employees become less valuable in the workplace, it will go mostly to shareholders (owners of capital). This is why tax on income is making increasingly less sense - We need a tax on capital holdings instead.
When you consider the massive role that luck plays in becoming a successful entrepreneur, it does bring into question the fairness of the entire system.
The balance is shifting; we are moving from an economic system which not so long ago seemed 'mostly fair' to one which is becoming 'mostly unfair'. Maybe something like Universal Basic Income would be a good first step.
What we have now is no longer capitalism, it's increasingly an Oligopoly.
What do we need money for now, and why? Houses mostly, because a) hand built, and b) scarcity.
I used to be a truck driver and before and even during, I worked the dock. The only difference between me and the guys on the dock was I could always pass a pee test, I'd spent 5 minutes studying the CDL test manual, and I spent an hour passing both parts of the CDL test which was about as difficult as 6th grade spelling tests. And cheaper truck transport will increase the demand for dock workers.
The problem is the CDL, and the "schools" not the business.
Systems to ease the strain on independent drivers. Ones that can cruise on the highway without supervision indefinitely, but need help with city streets, parking, maintenance, loading and unloading, keeping manifests, dealing with whatever company is loading and unloading the cargo, etc. They may need somewhat fewer of this class of driver, since the trucks will be able to run more continuously and there will be less need for second drivers and probably fewer trucks. Motels and truck stops will hurt some when the truckers can sleep while the truck drives instead of stopping. I think we're at least a decade away from this existing at all, much less being common.
Full automation for tightly integrated logistics chains. Maybe the Wal-Marts, Amazons, Fedexes, and other huge companies that own the entire logistics chain will be able to figure out how to use fully automated trucks, that can drive from one company facility to another, complete with parking and maneuvering, driving local streets, and letting other company systems handle the logistics of loading and unloading and keeping track of what items are where. I bet at least one of them will start experimenting with something like this in the next 5-10 years, but probably at least 20 years before it works well enough for them to cut down on the number of drivers they employ.
There will be job losses, but it will be slow and gradual. There should hopefully be plenty of time for the economy to adapt, and hopefully either create new jobs for all of these people to do, or move towards something like UBI. I think we'll have to have a massive cultural shift before anything like UBI would be considered or even possibly make sense.
If you ship something from New York to Chicago by truck and it takes 14 hours, maybe the first and last hour or so are getting in an out of the source/destination cities. That leaves 12 out of 14 hours where the truck can drive unattended, eliminating the need for about 12/14 of the truckers (or their work hours) that drive that route.
It depends on what proportion of truck drivers today mostly do long-haul as opposed to short haul. I have no idea.
The truck owner isn't going to trust some random other driver halfway across the country to drive his truck, even if he trusts the auto-driver to navigate the freeway safely. The freight company isn't going to just trust the shipper and receiver to load and unload the right stuff properly and not disturb anything else on the truck. The shipper and receiver aren't going to just trust each other and the freight company to ship the right stuff to the right place - they all want somebody in the truck there who knows what's going on.
Basically, the drivers don't just drive, they're the glue that holds together a whole complex system. Even if we had a perfect auto-drive truck today, it would probably take decades to figure out systems that work well enough that shipments work right without somebody who knows what's going on in the truck. Like I said, I think the best we can hope for short-term is to take some of the load of actually driving off the drivers, leading to longer trips and fewer stops.
That's also why I said that the only companies in a position to really use auto-trucks are those who already have integrated logistics chains, where drivers who work for the company drive company-owned trucks between company warehouses to move goods that the company either already owns or has taken responsibility for tracking.
http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2016/03/get-ready-for-our...
I'm calling a compiler an AI tool, because what is it other than you type in what you want the computer to do, and the compiler figures out how to do it?
I don't want anyone to lose their job, but this change of reduced labor based work is inevitable. Economic forces are hard to overcome. Just like coal has been wiped out by cheap natural gas - it wasn't a conspiracy.
Other than the fact you don't really seem to get how hard it is to develop (This would be one to the highest levels of AI)
When developers are automated everyone else will also be unemployed, since it's developers who are doing the un-employing.
Disclaimer: In 1997 I was cut off by a semi (in the middle of trying to pass him), who did NOT signal, on a 2 lane road (I-5 in California, speed limit was 85 or so), and ended up entering the ditch and rolling over 8 times and shattered my hand (it's fine now, but it took a while). The driver never stopped. I was lucky to walk away from that one.
Sorry, truckers, but your job can eat a bag of dicks.
Lest we forget, the only reason trucking is so huge is because train cargo wasn't maintained (conspiracists say the oil industry lobbied for trucking).
In reality trains and trucks are part of an incredibly complex cargo transportation system in which the most appropriate transportation mode is dependent on the nature of the cargo, the geography of the source and destination, the infrastructure available, the current price of fuel, weather conditions, capacity constraints and on and on and on.
There is no total ordering of efficiency of transportation modes.
Btw, cargo trains are very cute for big loads between huge industrial hubs. Which means according to your theory that most people and their job in every state can go fuck themselves. Also I suspect you'll be fine with your Amazon Prime taking 1-2 weeks to reach your door.
I'm surprised that in the land of (apparently ) limitless legal liabilities, so many people are bullish on self-driving cars, let alone self-driving trucks.
You should be highly concerned that the push towards this by big players is going to lead to laws where ultimately nobody will have to take up personal responsibility for accidents anymore.
so, from both sides, we have drivers with long term substance abuse problems controlling really heavy metal whacked out of their skulls. and we have an economy which can only function by effectively ruining people's lives by turning them into machines.
if we were a remotely moral society we would be horrified
I get alerts for I-70 in Colorado. The number of semis that jack knife in winter is terrifying.
That seems to be an order of magnitude simpler issue to solve, and yet we don't seem to be there yet. Granted, forms of automation have penetrated that industry - deadmans switches, automated signalling and such. But there's still a human at the helm of every freight loco.
Smaller scale urban light rail deployments seem to have got close to full automation, presumably due to being able to embed all the necessary elements into the end-to-end installation of the system (signalling, stock, cameras/sensors etc).
How can the kind of full automation that would put truck drivers out of work, arrive before the kind that would put train drivers out of work?
Even just deskilling trucking offers the opportunity for bigger cost savings.
A single train driver moves 100x more stuff than a truck driver.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Train_Control_System
Maybe the problem is that if it's a lucrative opportunity the group running the marketplace will want to keep all the profits for themselves, by owning the robots and locking out small players?
The first time an unmanned Fedex truck kills a family of 6 in a minivan people will decided they would rather pay a few cents more to have trucks driven by humans.
It's like innovative products - which might make some products obsolete but also makes space for more innovation and other products that would've not existed otherwise. :)