Well that didn't take long at all since Uber acquired Otto not too long ago. It's interesting to note how many precautions they took including a police escort, careful mapping, light traffic, and weather.
It's not really important. It's not as if road works are going to prevent the push for self driving. They'll work around it, it doesn't matter when they figure it out.
Otto's commercialization goals at this point don't include removing the human entirely. There'll still be a meat brain in the truck slowly deskilling but on standby ready to step in whenever higher level reasoning is needed to navigate.
Closest I've been to an autonomous drive is the brother in law's s60 Volvo. Car pulls back over the slightest dip in the road, kinda freaky how it will detect human-like movement and come to a halt.
I think the logical conclusion to self-driving is just turning our roads into digital rails.
So all this work on proprietary algos/hardware for self-driving are so much in vain.
This grey area of 'well yeah, it's 'self-driving' but you still need to be ready to take over at any second' won't fly for long. Either you're driving, or we have true self-driving cars and SMART ROADS to match, to the point where you can take a nap in the back seat.
I think you are confusing the current social and legal climate for self driving cars with what the technology can do in 5-10 years.
For example, if the law says "there must be a licensed driver ready to take control at all times" then it doesn't really matter what the technology can do.
So in the future, what happens when no one owns a car and we're all dependent on summoning a self-driving car to get any real distance from home?
Will we have internet arguments about the rights of people to go where they like?
Will the arguments become as fine-grained as "Well, yes, if you want to go to the rally to protest the cuts in UBI, you really should expect that Uber will send one, but it's very difficult and expensive to build out the system for such peak demand events. And ultimately, that just cuts into the funds available for UBI. Why not just register your complaint on the website at https://myvote.ubifunding.gov? Or you can just click the button on facebook."
Followed by blog posts about what a "Sunday drive" was and comments reminiscing how readers used to take drives just to explore and lamenting that this is no longer practical.
I'm all against surrendering autonomy to machines and the corporations who own them.
Protestors will probably be on the Federal "no-drive" list or the private one maintained by ChexSystems, so you can protest anywhere you want, as long as it is within walking distance.
It'll be funny when people are put on the list while away from home and have to figure out how to get 50 miles back to home when no vehicle will carry them.
From the car-free point of view, you already surrendered autonomy when you scaled your regular transport needs to the point where they can't be easily fulfilled by walking.
But sure, also less free in a certain, obviously very limited way: many people are never more than a few hundred yards away from their car. They get perfectly used to that state, but for someone used to transporting just their own person around (using whatever third party technology available), always having to return to the parking spot would feel like a ball and chain. This is arguably a much smaller limitation than reliance on third party transportation, but the thing is that on this level, freedom is entirely subjective. To a "minimalist living" advocate, freedom is being able to fit your life in a suitcase, to a stuff collector freedom is having every thing you ever had available just an attic dive away. Giving up a freedom you are used to have feels much bigger than gaining a freedom you have learned to do without. emacs vs vi.
>So in the future, what happens when no one owns a car
We will still own personal cars, for all the same reasons we do now. The percentage of ownership will drop, but I think most 2 car households will still own at least one car.
Millennials — especially the oldest ones — are these days buying cars in big numbers. They just had a late start.
Now the largest generation in the U.S., millennials bought 4 million cars and trucks in the U.S. last year, second only to the baby boomers, according to J.D. Power's Power Information Network, which defines millennials as those between 21 and 38 in 2015. Millennials' share of the new car market jumped to 28 percent. In the country's biggest car market, California, millennials outpaced boomers for the first time.[1]
Are there going to be any jobs left? It seems like there are a lot of jobs that involve driving. This technology has the potential to displace a very large number of workers.
The article cited 1.5 million jobs in the US trucking industry. That number seems low.
edit;
That number seems hard to define.
Of the 7.1 million people employed throughout the economy in jobs related to trucking activity, 3.4 million were
truck drivers in 2014. There are over 10 million CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) holders in the U.S., but
most are
not current drivers and not all are truck drivers. There are between 2.5 million and 3 million trucks on the road
today that require a driver to have some sort of CDL. Of those trucks, 1.
6
million are tractor
-
trailers. Of those
tractor
-
trailers, n
o more than 800,000 are used in OTR (i.e., non
-
local) operations.
That's a very pertinent question. I guess it falls on if you own a personal vehicle that you maintain until they become of age. Easy financing for personal autos may soon dissipate when the self driving car comes of age.
Learning to drive may become a bespoke thing in 30 years. You only learn because your father/mother/family is an enthusiast that kept a sports car or classic maintained.
The commercial pick up truck could hold out as the last non-autonomous vehicle. Maintenance and service will still be done by humans, for now.
It's quite a fair question - not seen the stats recently, but combined with lower barriers to other transport options, increased learning and insurance costs, and density in cities, the numbers now learning to drive in their teens and twenties has dropped massively [0]
There are entire mini economies in small rural towns off major interstates that are dependent on the inflow of truck drivers - gas stations, restaurants and diners, parts and tool shops. All these jobs would probably go, too.
Putting aside what s ridiculous, downright asinine comparison that was in comparison with our economy now -- what an extremely cold, unempathetic comment. People, lots of people, with families are going to lose their livelihood. Many are advanced in age, and have only known one thing their whole life. We have a responsibility to our fellow neighbor. A 50 year old truck driver is not going to pick up a coding boot camp and get hired as a tech worker, maybe a small handful but it's unrealistic.
> Putting aside what s ridiculous, downright asinine
> comparison that was in comparison with our economy now
> what an extremely cold, unempathetic comment.
You should read about the introduction of machines in 18th century England if you think that comparison is ridiculous, asinine or unsympathetic. Start with the Flying Shuttle and the Spinning Jenny.
Hint: there was no social security or unemployment benefits then.
As has been mentioned elsewhere - there were other un/low skilled industries that people could move sideways into once they'd been displaced. Automation affected vertical industries in previous "revolutions", whereas now automation is impacting a vast swathe of un/low skilled industries simultaneously.
And do you know how many starved, and how incredibly abysmal the conditions were for workers? Quality of living for the majority of people took a nosedive with the industrial revolution, and the pay-off took generations.
Yes, they had gas street lighting and coal fires, but they no longer had the freedom they'd enjoyed since the end of feudalism, and once more found themselves serfs - just this time ten to a room in disease ridden urban slums rather than in their peasants cottage in whatever village they'd been sucked up from.
Yeah, we're still here, but to assert that everything was positive is equally ridiculous. It took over a century for labour rights to start appearing, and for the system of governance to adapt to economic reality. Do you really want the same again?
Not this time we dont move people sideways and we do not create more jobs because robots are here to stay and only get better. Look at what Boston Dynamics is able to do right now. A few years down the road and we will have fully automated chains from planting to delivery all done by robots with minimal maintenance from humans.
Self driving cars will be the first indicator if we will move to utopia or dystopia.
Have you seen what assembly lines looked like in the past? With humans at each station? Now how do they look? While I haven't been alive for hundreds of years, I would imagine that each time a new innovation comes in to play, humanity panics and says this will put everyone out of work, then we find new things to occupy our time and move on to the next outrage.
I dont argue over the point that people will find something to do but our concept of work and income changes with this. A truck/cashier etc. wont be able to take a course and be a nurse next week.
UBI is one alley we can take.
We have to accept the fact that we wont have enough jobs for our growing population and part of what i am working on everyday is to do more with less by optimization and we cut into every area with technology from bottom to top. Human employment is expensive.
And never forget Google Minds win in GO was our Manhattan Project.
As you say, there have been multiple points in history where technological innovation obliterated the livelihood of whole categories of people, from dock workers to sailors to drivers.
Now, automated driving isn't in the "changes everything" category, no more than Diesel engines and containerisation changed everything. Yes, there are still areas which are feeling the impact from this change 50 years ago, but for the most part people moved on into other industries - the service industry in particular.
The thing is, the service industry is being eaten by automation. That does change everything, as without radical change there is not a further category of job for un or semi-skilled labour.
Within the current framework, UBI seems like a sane solution, although finding a way for people to be productive in a way that technology cannot and never can do better would be preferable. The thing is, I'm not certain there is any such thing even in the medium term - even creative and analytic skills are being assumed by AI. Not everybody can be a developer. Even developers will likely be substantially obsolete at some point - we are already at the point where silicon designs silicon with human intervention.
This is no small part of what's troubling the world right now - we have swathes of underemployment like we haven't seen before, and it shows in malcontentedness in the political process.
The other solution of course is to have a hell of a lot fewer humans, but that's unpalatable in terms of implementation.
It's interesting watching the economy contort in on itself in ever decreasing circles of mutation - it's something like Malthusian collapse, as we consume the available pool of productive purposes, leaving a hollowed out civilisation behind.
online shopping is a big one, self-serve kiosks, AI tier-one help desk, personal assistant technology built into every phone, fast food industry is actively developing automated replacements for line cooks, robo-investing, online learning courses, nearly the entirety of the transportation jobs.
Those are good examples; though it still feels like it's nibbling at the margins rather than eating the whole thing as seems poised to happen with trucking.
It would be interesting to see how many people are employed in various jobs and see what proportion are likely to be unnecessary in the near future; e.g. line cooks in fast food may be unnecessary (though I haven't seen anything to indicate that we're even close to that yet), but how many jobs does that represent? Are most line cooks employed at fast food chains, or are they employed at non-chain restaurants? And has that not happened to a large degree already with prep happening at central locations for many chains?
Same goes for self-serve kiosks; McDonalds has already started using them, but they're clearly not going to take over at any restaurant that has a waiter.
Maybe the lower prices enabled by automation will drive non-automated competitors out of the market such that restaurants with waiters will simply go out of business and be replaced by efficient chains, but that sort of goes against the human desire for variety. But maybe it will siphon off enough people that many restaurants that are barely scraping buy have to close.
I guess we'll see how things progress, but I feel like our current ability to do NLP & fine robotic movement is still too limited to displace a lot of humans. That and people's preference for interacting with other humans.
If we banned railroads, we could create a lot of truck driving jobs right now. We need a strong safety net, a guaranteed minimum income, job retraining programs, etc., but we don't need to smash up our railroads to create more trucking jobs.
I know you didn't suggest doing anything similar with future self-driving stuff. Just putting it out there, because a lot of people in the public (not in this thread) are. Same with things like coal-industry jobs displaced by solar.
Yes, and potentially driverless trucks are much more efficient than driven trucks, in terms of energy usage and human effort. Trains will probably still remain more efficient than either, I wasn't saying get rid of trains.
Truckers operate on the 14/11 rule currently. 14 hours from when you wake up, 11 hours from the start of driving. If they can throw that out a tractor trailer can log twice the hours in a 24 hour day than current regulations allow.
Not sure about US laws but in Europe there's mendatory rest periods for drivers. Drive n hours, sleep/rest m hours where m is relatively large. For an autonomous vehicle that time is reduced to zero (I'd assume)
I don't know what my reaction will be to a fully autonomous self-driving truck at a 4-way stop when we arrive at the same time. You have to decide who goes next.
I usually wave the other guy through if they appear to be in a hurry. Now, there is no other guy. Will the truck sit there and ignore me waving? And finally do the start-stop dance when I try to go?
(Or roll it's headlight eyes and mutter "humans..." when I do a rolling stop and flip it off?)
Well the laws for a 4-way stop aren't ambiguous. The autonomous vehicles will know the laws and try to follow them until one of us dumb meat-bags tries to go out of turn. Arriving at the exact same time is comparatively rare, and the computer will know who arrived first.
Even when arriving at the same time, yield to the vehicle to your the right. (in the US) If you are across from each other and one vehicle is turning, the turning vehicle yields. Not even that much code to write...
>Arriving at the exact same time is comparatively rare, and the computer will know who arrived first.
I recently moved to north america and heard that same 'what if everyone gets to the intersection at the same time' quandary. In Australia, the rules say the person to your right always goes first, regardless of who actually got there first. If you pull up and then a second after someone else pulls up to your right, they now go first instead.
It can be a little annoying in busy areas but I think that's also why we also have so many round abouts. I've always been curious if it's a written or unwritten rule in north america, the whole 'he who gets there first goes first' rule.
Drivers will observe that the software is probably very conservative and will always yield. Getting stuck behind one of these waiting at a busy junction may become a pain.
The owner or the liquor store I worked at required the drivers to do a lot. Heavy lifting and placing product. They are defacto employees. Owner of a liquor chain has great pull. From simple product placement, sales, etc.
Uber chose this market - but why a heavy perishable delivery.
> The owner or the liquor store I worked at required the drivers to do a lot. Heavy lifting and placing product. They are defacto employees. Owner of a liquor chain has great pull. From simple product placement, sales, etc.
Uber chose this market - but why a heavy perishable delivery.
You nailed it yourself. It's heavy, so hard for people to move (easier for machines). It's perishable, so it benefits greatly from more frequent smaller deliveries, instead of rare large deliveries. If you don't have to pay a person to drive, you can do that. Additionally, the packaging is perfectly regular (cans or kegs, always the same size, made of a durable material).
> AB InBev said it could save $50 million a year in the U.S. if the beverage giant could deploy autonomous trucks across its distribution network.
Sweet words for AB InBev shareholders, not so sweet for the obsoleted truckers though.
Obviously this technology is inevitable, but I think that the authors of such technologies should also come up with political proposals on what to do with the displaced people.
Politicians should start acting now and figure out how to respond to these changes. And that should be done on a global scale, because technology is very fast to spread across borders.
> Obviously this technology is inevitable, but I think that the authors of such technologies should also come up with political proposals on what to do with the displaced people.
Why would you want computer scientists and engineers doing that? Do you think they have some special expertise in labor politics too?
What would help here is the same thing that would help in other industries that have gone down the tubes: temporary monetary support ala unemployment insurance, retraining programs, maybe moving stipends to relocate to areas with more jobs. Basically, social safety nets.
Disagree. Yes, there's still a lot of work to do before we have real viable self-driving vehicles, and I think Tesla's goal of end of 2017 is unrealistic, but there's so much money and effort behind it now from so many different companies, personally I'd be shocked if we didn't have self-driving cars by 2025.
Yes, but for self-driving cars, the problem seems more surmountable. We already have cars that can drive in real traffic without intervention a large % of the time. There are plenty of edge cases, but they don't seem insurmountable.
You could drive a semi (pun-intended) through that caveat. Driving is all about edge cases; bad weather, bad roads, bad visibility, poor signage, poorly maintained cars.
I wouldn't be so sure. Personally, I think trailer trucks will be the first things that go driverless. Sure, we may be 10 years away still, but that's not very long. There will likely be just as many (or more) truckers in 10 years as there are now.
Though I think the fears of job displacement are still (a bit) overblown. This type of thing won't happen overnight. It will start with a few companies, some drivers will move to other companies, others will get different jobs.
Truck companies could earn some brownie points with the public by offering to train their old drivers to work on the autonomous trucks.
Has anyone ever discussed taxing computer labor -- e.g. companies can pay (via tax) AIs to drive trucks at 80% of a human wage. Companies get safer drivers, save costs, and the government gets a cash influx to help all the new jobless truck drivers.
Interesting proposal. I think it'd take a lot of fine tuning to work as desired though.
You'd have to make the tax low enough to still retain a significant benefit for the company, but high enough to aid in providing a social safety net. You'd also have to ensure that it's hard to get around this legislation without making it so broadly applicable that AI research and development are penalized.
> I think that the authors of such technologies should also come up with political proposals on what to do with the displaced people.
Did the inventors of automobiles have to deal with all the farriers and people who tend to horses?
...or when milkmen were obsolete?
...or when switchboard operators were obsolete?
...or when telegram operators were obsolete?
(I could go on all week)
History is full of instances where certain job roles are no longer needed and are obsoleted. This is a good thing, it means we're moving forward and progressing.
I wish everyone wasn't so afraid of jobs, but that's the consequence of being up to your eyeballs in debt.
Best to avoid the narcissism of the present when you can.
The industrial revolution was far more disruptive than what we are currently experiencing, albeit paced slower. The idea that way can't learn nearly everything we need to know about current change from observing the past strikes me as very naive. People, after all, are just people.
The automobile inventors didn't have to deal with it, but somebody did.
It's unfortunate that Smith was particularly weak in this area (or rather, that so many people have followed him in hand waving about it) but the consequences of displaced jobs is something that a society absolutely, unavoidably, has to deal with. You only get to choose if you approach it with a realistic plan, or not.
You're not even close to a realistic comparison. As a percentage of jobs overall, people working with horses, milkmen, switchboard operators, etc didn't amount to the sheer enormity of the jobs that will be obsoleted or displaced by self driving vehicles.
There is no comparison in history to make. Nothing has happened like this before. Never.
The closest you could get would be something like the aftermath of WW2 in Europe or maybe some devastating plagues but even that isn't a good comparison because those removed the people entirely; dead people don't need to be fed or swayed from starting a violent revolution.
It's not just the truckers or cab/bus drivers. It's all the industries that support them. Those will disappear too.
Just think of all the truck stops we have in the US and the amount of money that truckers spend at these places to sleep, take showers, get wifi, etc. Those will go away too.
The motels where travelers sleep at midway points in their travels will lose all that business. The auto body shops that rely on people making mistakes while driving will lose all that business too.
You're vastly underestimating the disruption if you're bringing up switchboard operators and milkmen.
That switch from farming to industry was not some sort of beautiful utopia. It was dangerous & violent & chaotic. It also took hundreds of years.
There is at least the possibility that the automated future will be as dangerous & violent & chaotic. It could be much worse as we will have less time to adapt.
Heh. This reminds me of Toffler's books, like "The Third Wave". He thought - in the 70s! - that the amount of information that people had to absorb was too much and people would soon be unable to adapt.
It's as if you think it would be better for millions of people to spend massive amounts of their lives away from their families, living extremely unhealthy sedentary lifestyles, eating truck stop and gas station "food" and operating massive machines that cause many deaths every day of the year.
You actually think it's a good thing that millions of people spend their time this way!
We have the ability to make the world better. We have the ability to eliminate the need for thinking, feeling, living humans to whittle away their lives sitting in trucks and being away from their families.
Yes, technology is going to force us to question to role of "work" in society, and if it's more important to earn lots of money while being away from your family and living and extremely unhealthy life, or if it's more important to earn less money, and have more time with family and healthy living.
Yes, the world is about to change - and keep changing - and it's going to change whether you resist it or not.
An excellent point. Clearly they should spend their life sedentary in low rise office parks surrounded by cars in suburban San Francisco, operating a network of increasingly smaller machines that serves to siphon the wealth from the rest of world into their increasingly greedy pockets.
>You actually think it's a good thing that millions of people spend their time this way!
I think you're putting words in riskable's mouth. What the comment actually said is that you were vastly underestimating the disruption in comparing it to milkmen, etc. There wasn't any judgment whether it was a good thing or not.
The percentage of Americans employed as farmers in the US far exceeded that of trucker drivers. Yes there was disruption, but those people didn't permanently go on to be the underclass unemployed of society. They and their descendants went on to more fruitful activities. The thing is, at the time, you couldn't imagine what those activities would be.
Oh, you mean all the farmers and factory workers that made up the Midwest, which are now overwhelmingly trump supporters, largely because of the destruction of all economic opportunity in their region?
Sorry, I should have reserved my comment for a day when I am not recovering from a sinus infection :) Farming, in the midwest at least, was a dying but still widely practiced profession up into the early 80's. This also includes meat farming. The farm consolidation really got into the swing of things in the mid 80's. Add in the decimation of the auto and steel (and supporting industries) and you see a period from 1960 - 1990 that had an unprecedented level of people forced out of work due to automation and lost jobs.
The Trump comment was tossed in because it's been easy to forget about this stuff as a coastal living millenial, and the recent Trump phenomenon has brought it back to the forefront.
> You actually think it's a good thing that millions of people spend their time this way!
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said that. I was pointing out that the amount of disruption was being vastly underestimated.
Always remember that what's better for most can be the opposite for some. If that some is big enough there's going to be big problems. How big is hard to say but if we know it's coming and we do nothing our wounds will be self-inflicted.
> You actually think it's a good thing that millions of people spend their time this way!
Regardless of what they do, if that helps them take care of their families, people will do it with a sense of pride.
Young men are sent to war - to die - for the same reasons.
Purpose. That's what they get from it.
That's why they call it 'hard work'.
But I think you're fighting the wrong crowd here - most of us here understand that this inevitable and the world will evolve towards these new technologies.
But it is dangerous to ignore the ripple effects that it might cause in society, so we might as well start thinking about the potential solutions.
I grew up watching my parents and grandparents work guaranteed employment in companies that would keep them on for life, treat them well, offer promotions and actually come good with retirement on time and the amount promised. What a world we had in the 70s 80s and 90s.
I have never lived under that delusion. I know work is not guaranteed, I know companies will always "downsize", I know I am an expense to be eliminated and I know my retirement will continue to be pushed back, and that I'll only get a fraction of what I was promised if it ever comes.
That is the reality of the world I live in.
Anyone that doesn't accept that reality is not living in the real world.
< I grew up watching my parents and grandparents work guaranteed employment in companies that would keep them on for life, treat them well, offer promotions and actually come good with retirement on time and the amount promised. What a world we had in the 70s 80s and 90s.
If you watched that, you enjoyed a phenomenal amount of privilege. That is much more of a marketing pitch about the past than anything that actually existed. In fact, in macro terms (even adjusting for statistical differences) the 2000s were much better for employees than the 70s, 80s and early 90s.
I remember my grandparents being laid off a lot, and the plant moving right before they retired while raiding the pension fund on the way out. I remember the company declaring bankruptcy and not paying their disability obligations so the tax payer had to.
That was during the supposed good years you mention. The coming years are going to yield dramatic changes to what jobs even mean, and at least in the US, we've spent the last 30 years making our society more dependent on people working for a big company not less.
In light of that, it seems prudent to me at least, to give some thought to how we transition whole industries to not need workers.
I love this nostalgia for the good old days. Life in the US during the 1970's sucked hard. Google "general malaise". Line-ups for gasoline, double digit inflation with no economic growth, post-Vietnam. People thought the US' days as a superpower were numbered.
> History is full of instances where certain job roles are no longer needed and are obsoleted.
Yeah, exactly, and we get to learn from history. That's part of moving forward and progressing. We can't ignore consequences just because similar things have happened before.
Savings from autonomous trucks... 0.11% of revenue.
I'm not sure what the margins for InBev's products look like, probably pretty decent, so it's not a low margin business. 0.11% of revenue is pretty good in terms of cutting costs, but I would have thought it would be bigger.
I suspect that what will happen initially is that a human driver will be tasked with getting the truck to and from the nearest highway entrance, with the autopilot taking it from there. This is similar to how ships operate, with local pilots guiding the ship in and out of harbors and the ship's captain handling the at sea portion of the journey.
Also, and only half in jest, Budweiser? In Colorado? Regardless of my opinion of their beers I would have expected a delivery of Coors instead.
So do self driving vehicles have to be licensed, such as passing a safety test? Or is the fact a licensed driver is in the vehicle good enough? That requirement is not good enough as student drivers still need a learners permit.
Especially in the US even a fairly simple "hybrid" self driving truck could probably provide some savings. Automate the long straight roads and let the driver take over for everything else. Depending on the route the sleep schedules could be met during the automated driving part. I guess that's what they meant with the sentence about saving 50kk/year even in the current form.
As an aside, the article mentioned that the driver was sleeping in the back...I'm sure that's no accident. However I doubt that's a safe thing to try (and only possible in these very artificial circumstances) even with a good warning/wakeup system in place it takes too long to get from the back to the front and react.
I don't think that the driver would be in the truck once this tech is finalized. If they needed a driver for a "last mile" scenario the truck would probably pull over to let them on. The only savings is if you only have 2 hours for a human instead of 20.
The driver wasn't sleeping "while the truck driver hung out back in the sleeper cab". Sleeping will not make much sense for such a small trip and during a test.
Article mentions the driver was hanging out in the sleeper cab. Long term them may be able to sleep or completely tune out in the back, but for now it was a stunt. I bet there were clear instructions on the driver's behavior. The article mentioned a "police cruiser in tow", but from pictures its not clear where or what function they played. For all we know, the police ensured no one came within 200ft in front or back, and the driver was told to take the wheel as soon as a car violated this zone. This is all hypothetical... but you can see how with coordinated effort they can set the scenario for safety.
With the hours of service reform passed a few years ago, drivers are required to have so many off-duty hours and so many sleep hours per week and day. Being able to go off-duty or log sleep while the truck is traveling means higher fleet velocity, which means higher fleet utilization, which means higher revenue.
A truck with a single driver has to sit idle (or off in California) a large part of the day. Capital costs don't take a break during those hours.
Just think about how retarded our entire thinking on transportation has been.
We first tamed a massive, powerful animal, placed a piece of leather on its back, and prayed that it didn't get too moody and threw us off.
Now we strap ourselves into a piece of metal which 99.99% of us can't even begin to understand, then barrel down roads at 80mph while praying that the guy in the other lane isn't drunk/sleepy/high
These days you have a mass of computers adjusting said ICE every nanosecond to stay within certain emissions regulations etc.
Damn it, when someone can hack the cars steering via the internet connected entertainment system, the engine is the least complicated part of the package.
Now we strap ourselves into a piece of metal controlled by an AI which 99.99% of us can't even begin to understand, then barrel down roads at 80mph while praying that the AI in the other lane isn't hacked/faulty/Tesla v0.1a
So ~now~ in the future we'll strap ourselves into pieces of metal which 99.99% of us can't even begin to understand, controlled by a box of metal and sand which 99.9999% of us can't even begin to understand, then barrel down roads at 80mph while praying that the sand box in the other lane doesn't commit to a course of action that will only be understood when the black boxes are inspected by humans after being extracted from the twisted wreckage ... and that seems more sane?
Remember, people gave us the space age - and also created oops-these-are-remotely-controllable-over-the-internet vehicles. At the scale we are talking one of two things will happen:
1. This will become a huge phenomenon with everyone rushing around every barrier set up by lawmakers (the Internet of (swiftly moving) [heavy] Things)
2. This will be locked down hard by lawmakers and quickly turn into an industry as heavily regulated as aircraft manufacture and only a handful of players will have access to the market, resulting in slower growth and penetration into the entire market.
2 weeks is actually very small amount of time. The route needs to be established once, and pareto principle applies - with 20% of effort 80% of goods will be moved in self-driving trucks.
And when road construction starts, it'll need to be remapped. When it snows/rains, it might need to be remapped. Clear weather on perfect roads isn't exactly an earth shattering accomplishment.
Early auto laws required somebody with a flag and horn to walk ahead of the car to warn horse riders they were coming. Doesn't mean the car couldn't operate autonomously anyway. These unnecessary obstacles will go away once folks become more comfortable with auto drivers.
The amount of "disruption" the coming automation is going to cause is staggering I think.
If you haven't seen it, I highly highly recommend watching this video[0] - "Madam Sandi tells your future" (by Sandi Metz) It's all about change, and how when the step changes come, and they will, you need to be ready to adapt.
In can see a way where unions can make a comeback.
Lately I socialized driverless with people in my daily routine. None -even the tesla owner brother - would get into a driverless car. Safety and trust is mentioned.
Now we have workers potentially displaced. Some in unions. Some not. But associating with a union for the sake of perceived safety could be a real winner. These drivers under "x" union do not have unsafe driverless vehicles.
The union is to protect workers wages and rights (they won during agreement)
Union is a five letter word. Everyone drives. Its freedom. I think one positive PR decision for a union would be to sew together the uncertainty of driver less vehicles on the Eisenhower highway system built for defense with traditional non union population.
"Our drivers Are safe. Keep the Eisenhower interstate system for safe drivers. "
Interesting question to pose for people here: In 2015 38,300 people were killed on U.S. roads, and 4.4 million were seriously injured - if automation saves those lives, but puts others out of work, is that not what we want? Shouldn't we prioritize life over employment?
Yes, my idea of a safety net is family plus basic income.
However, crucially, there are thousands of important and hard problems out there available to anyone with a roof over his head, food and internet access.
Anyone who doesn't find a hard problem to work on, and this includes those in employment with excellent safety nets, is going to go bad sooner or later (drugs, sociopathy, crime, mental illness, suicide, etc).
> Anyone who doesn't find a hard problem to work on, and this includes those in employment with excellent safety nets, is going to go bad sooner or later (drugs, sociopathy, crime, mental illness, suicide, etc).
Most people don't need hard problems to work on to find purpose or self-actualization. Most are happy to grind away on tedious takes that take time but are not mentally challenging, or care for children or an elderly parent(s). This should be fine under a basic income model.
Provide for everyone, let people who want to work on hard problems work on them.
One cannot simply "grind away" at a tedious task or a task capable of being automated. Unlike a hard problem, it cannot occupy the mind persistently and meaningfully.
Tobacco could be banned. It wouldn't be a popular decision, but it could be done.
It seems that governments in many countries are playing the long game when it comes to an eventual tobacco ban. The first step is to require stern warnings on packaging of tobacco products. The next step is to include graphic pictures along with the warnings. Where I live, these warnings and graphic pictures take up most of the package surface on cigarette packs.
I suppose the next step would be to ban branding from tobacco packages so the only thing on the package is the warnings and images.
The end goal of this, I think, is to slowly erode public support for tobacco products. Then, when the eventual ban comes, the public response will be more of a whimper than an outcry.
I don't necessarily like legislation that bans people from choosing to do something, but I think there's a decent case for it in countries with publicly funded health care, where tobacco uses costs everyone, and not just the individual who chooses to use it. I enjoy freedom of choice, but I'm no libertarian. It seems to me that in any reasonably sized society, you end up needing to find a balance of tradeoffs between individual liberty and the well-being of society. The tricky part is finding that balance. The line between what's allowed and what isn't can feel capricious and arbitrary to anyone stuck on the wrong side of it.
I wonder if governments might try a similar tactic on route to eventually banning human-driven vehicles. Start with warnings, escalate to graphic images and video. Eventually, you might get to the point where the majority of people see anyone who doesn't use a self-driving vehicle as a selfish barbarian.
> I don't necessarily like legislation that bans people from choosing to do something, but I think there's a decent case for it in countries with publicly funded health care, where tobacco uses costs everyone, and not just the individual who chooses to use it.
Bingo. While I am in favour of individual liberties, smoking is not one of them if I am required to subsidize the healthcare that smokers will inevitably need.
Thanks for the link. I'm in Toronto, and I'd heard that plain packaging was being considered, but I didn't realize the the gov't had committed to it.
Since I don't know any smokers, and places that sell cigarettes aren't allowed to display them in a visible location, I haven't really even seen what cigarette packages here look like for the past couple of years.
Bingo. While I am in favour of individual liberties, smoking is not one of them if I am required to subsidize the healthcare that smokers will inevitably need.
That's a slippery slope. Are we going to ban fatty or high sugar foods next? How about extreme sports? Motorcycles?
You pay for the outcomes of all those activities as well.
I'm not sure about bans, but I wouldn't be surprised to see warning labels becoming required on foods that are tasty but terribly unhealthy. It might be a way to change behavior slowly over time.
Activities with a high risk of physical injury are more difficult. For things like extreme sports, the relatively small number of participants might mean that the net increase in health care costs in negligible.
For activities like motorcycling that have relatively large numbers of participants, mandatory supplemental medical insurance is an option. It's probably already a good idea to have it right now, even when you aren't required to.
This is another slippery slope, though. If motorcyclists are required to have extra insurance to cover medical expenses, they'll inevitably ask "why us, and not skydivers, scuba divers, etc?". It would be difficult to know where to draw the line.
> don't necessarily like legislation that bans people from choosing to do something, but I think there's a decent case for it in countries with publicly funded health care, where tobacco uses costs everyone, and not just the individual who chooses to use it.
Couldn't a government put the taxes on tobacco products into the budget of their public health care, so that those who smoke tobacco products end up using more of their money and overall contributing more to make up for their own costs?
No, instead of actually pricing in costs, we need to simply make those costs go away. It worked so well with Prohibition and the War on Drugs, so why not this time?
"I wonder if governments might try a similar tactic on route to eventually banning human-driven vehicles."
I'm certain it will be even faster and more expedient than tobacco, especially if manufacturers of self-driving cars pick up the insurance bill for the cars they make. Eventually, the insurance rates for non self-driving cars should be unaffordable and if that's not enough, penalties for causing accidents should be ramped up until it's no longer feasible to have a human drive on public roads (they will have to be more than just monetary to prevent rich people from being assholes and driving regardless). At some point most manufacturers will cease making human-driven cars except as expensive toys for the rich.
Not only is there a decent case for this, I don't see any other alternatives. If people want to continue to drive manually, there will be race tracks and private courses where they can do whatever they want. Otherwise, making driving on public roads illegal is the only way I can see us getting close to the zero fatalities line that's ideal.
Retraining has been this sort of ludicrous dogma for awhile, especially since the 90's when the Clinton administration seemed to be obsessed with it. I keep thinking this year will be the year this fiction finally dies.
The solution involves real jobs with living wages, not sending former factory workers to sit in de facto community college seminars three nights a week for free.
Wake up people, the United States is a post-industrial society. We cannot manufacture things and pay people living wages to do it. We want things cheap and we want them now. Sorry.
I'd rather pay these people to be on welfare for the rest of their lives than try to bring manufacturing jobs back to the USA.
I know I'm going to be the jerk here so I'll say maybe we don't need jobs? Maybe we need a better distribution of the wealth created? I know folks don't want to touch that idea with a 10 foot pole but it's a legitimate question. I'm not saying we need state socialism but maybe we do need some kind of socialism to handle these permanent changes to the economy because automation isn't going to stop just at blue collar skilled jobs. You got legal staff, financial advisors, and many more kinds of work that's on the chopping block once the automation schema is figured out for them (plus/minus time for insurance companies to figure out liabilities). Just shifting us into another bullshit job like marketing or legal isn't going to fix the underlying problem in that work is seen as an end in itself rather than a means to an end (to feed/cloth ourselves). Once we remove the myth that we need to work to live (work in the sense of working in a cubicle or around a table in an office 8-5 and commute to/from said office five times a week) then we can talk about what we should do next.
There's really no reason we can't have an advanced society with reasonably compensated skilled manufacturing jobs. The Germans and the Swiss have demonstrated as much, for example.
Once you take it as fact that it's "impossible" for workers to have rights and a proper social contract in the modern global economy you start acting accordingly and become blind to the fact that it's not inevitable at all. It's important to recognize that our policies towards the working class in this country are deliberate political choices borne of the way power and influence works in our political system, not laws of nature.
I think you're missing my point which is that no one should have to have a job to work or to live. Work isn't just 8-5 cubicle or factory setting nonsense. Cleaning your laundry is work. Cooking is work. Telling a story is work. Carving wooden figurines is work. But they don't have to be jobs. They don't have to follow an 8-5 schedule. And most importantly, the benefits of that work doesn't have to be majoratively sold at a discount to capitalists. To have housing, food, or medical care shouldn't come with the condition of repetitive drudgery. If a machine can do the drudgery then get the human out of it as soon as possible. This isn't entirely utopian either considering many kinds of work in textiles and plastics have been automated away. The same goes for building electronics to a point where all most people are tasked with is QA or packing (hell, I've seen machines replace people in packing and warehouse work). What has to change is our legal and social dynamics around who owns the wealth of production. Once we socialize the capital we can discuss whether or not we should have drudgery for it's own sake.
So you're a 50 year old truck driver. High School education, no college, but a damn good driver. What exactly do you think he's going to retrain? A few weeks at a bootcamp and he'll be a rock star coder, pulling in the $60k/year he made working his ass off on the road?
Please. Less simplistic "solutions" that have continually failed workers.
It's worked for every other industry that was displaced by technology, but This Time It's Different? The US was over 70% farm labor in the 1800s, where do you think those truck drivers came from?
Edit: also, one hardly needs to be a rockstar to make $60k/year as a coder. If you can write a coherent select in VBA you can make that.
Where do you get that it's worked in every other industry? Using the Industrial Revolution/Farming revolution is not even applicable since jobs shifted from one manual job to another.
And again, you think a 50 year old truck driver, who hasn't done any schooling 32 years, is going to be able to do SQL statements. And find a job at that age. I'd love to think that, but the IT industry has shown huge levels of ageism, and isn't exactly overflowing with entry-level jobs.
It depends on how much the system costs. A system licensed to drive without supervision takes your max weekly long haul hours on the $150,000 tractor-trailer from 70 to 168 hours (obviously you won't ever get 168 hours with loading/unloading). So if you can retrofit for $50,000 or $75,000, you do it as soon as you possibly can.
12 million people make a living from transportation industry. Thats quite a number to compensate for. Plus this will apply to other industries too like the maritime shipping industry.
Hypothetically, yes, but these kinds of choices are rarely so binary. For example, we have an opioid/heroin crisis that killed 40,000 people in 2014, driven
in no small part by the erosion of meaningful economic opportunity for lower class whites. How much will this problem be multipled by growing automation?
I wouldn't say the US is in any position to make the choice of prioritizing life over jobs, not yet anyways; there's still no way to live without a job.
Market forces will decide, of course, but I suspect we won't be saving lives with autonomous cars. Just differing the time, place and means of death.
If you read people's comments carefully, I think you'll find that almost no one is proposing to stall self-driving trucks for the sake of jobs.
But it does raise questions about worker displacement that are very interesting, and not just from a social-justice-warrior brigading perspective. I imagine this will happen much faster than the textile industry changed. Am I wrong there? That alone makes it fascinating.
Social scientists have been paying attention to a recent spike in suicide among white, middle-aged Americans [1], and economic distress is often often put forward as a cause. This is exactly the group that the automation of these kinds of blue-collar jobs could hurt the most. The introduction of this kind of technology could have very real consequences in terms of public health, human suffering, etc., albeit in a more indirect way.
I wish that the process of getting regulatory approval for this kind of tech could be explicitly tied to addressing some of these second-order consequences: no self driving cars until 1) the technology is assured to be safe on the roads and 2) there is a plan to help the huge number of human beings who are in danger of being made obsolete by it to adapt somehow.
There are always winners and losers, and those on the losing end need to be supported through the transition. If we save some huge amount of labor costs employing the truckers plus the medical costs (normally spent on the 4+ million seriously injured people each year) that frees up quite some money for trucker early retirement or job retraining, based on age.
Especially since this shock is likely to occur faster than a lot of other transitions like in automation on farms, textiles, docks, mines, or factories...
This is why it's really, really important to have an effective safety net for catching unemployed and re-training them in a technologically advanced society, as it's getting really difficult to predict where and how fast change will occur.
I know very little about the technology in self driving vehicles, but why was the driver/monitor of this truck allowed to sit in the sleeper compartment and not in the drivers seat like the uber self driving cars in pittsburgh?
The trucking industry is huge (say 1.5 million truckers alone, plus rest stops etc), and it will largely have disappeared as a result of this. Uber may want drivers in the cab now, but when it's reliable enough, I imagine it makes sense to just have drop-off points for the last few miles.
In some sense it will be among the biggest economic transformations in recent history. There have been far bigger ones, but I can't think of one that has happened in the short timeframe expected of self-driving trucks. I don't think this point is controversial.
At the same time, I've been very curious to see the overall economic impact, especially with displacing such a huge percentage of the US workforce. Interestingly, there's already a shortage in truckers per wikipedia. I found this fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trucking_industry_in_the_Unite...
I imagine that people going into trucking see the writing on the wall. It will put a lot of truckers out of business, but the turnover is already crazy high, with many truckers already leaving the business entirely.
This could be a very interesting case study on how to manage worker displacement effectively. I don't think anyone here is seriously advocating paying more money and lives for goods just to keep trucking jobs up (although more and more on HN one has to write 'defensively' to curb misinterpretation, i.e. I feel compelled to shout that I think this is a good idea). But it would be interesting to see where truckers are getting new jobs already, and whether those industries could use more. Are truckers leaving the industry going back into some other industrial job, back to school, unemployment?
If truck driving is already a high turnover job, there won't be displacement of a nature that gets political attention. Firms just won't hire new truckers to replace the ones that leave. Trucking will be in transition a long time. The first self driving trucks will be fully attended. Then maybe they are unattended, but only on highways. Self driving in the city is likely years away.
This wouldn't be like shutting a factory or mine where people have worked for years and where they hoped to retire from. By the same token, you see self checkout machines everywhere, parking garages without manned booths, automatic toll roads, self-serve kiosks at restaurants, and self-serve gas with pay at the pump. No one ever paid any attention to displacement from those jobs because they are high turnover anyway.
What if, say, the trucking industry loses 50% of its jobs/salary in 5 years? That's a lot of displacement even in an industry with high turnover (I don't know if those numbers are realistic, but I do think there will be faster and more massive displacement than self-serve checkout and automatic toll roads).
What I'm curious about is whether whatever industries truckers are heading to now can accommodate that many more workers without problems. Just because there's a high turnover doesn't necessarily mean that wherever truckers are heading now could handle 10x the influx of employees without funny consequences.
Trucking is a high turnover job largely because drivers are in such high demand. It is very easy, even lucrative, to job hop. Signing bonuses, new trucks, better pay.
Truckers and delivery workers are a club so to speak. Usps waves to UPS drivers. Teamsters are safe and polite driving - wise to other big rigs
Do not underestimate the disrupted's ability to disrupt the disrupter. I can so see where driver delivery drivers block driver less vehicles. And disrupters can become quite cleaver
People always talk about people messing with self driving vehicles but personally I don't see it happening. A self driving truck will have so many sensors to make sure you do nothing illegal and will be more patient than you and keep going while you are asleep. They can try but it's unlikely that they will have any effect long term.
>I can so see where driver delivery drivers block driver less vehicles.
Can't stop stupid. Delivery drivers taking time out of their schedule to mess with a computer... that isn't paid by the hour. Sure, be vindictive. You'll feel real good for the next 5 minutes.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadSo...if new roadworks appeared anywhere on that 120 mile stretch of road that morning, the truck would not be able to deal with it I assume?
But it would be irresponsible to make roadworks appear and not make that information available for those that need it.
I'd assume roadworks are usually planned and can be checked beforehand especially when attempting bold experiments for the first time.
edit: removed sass
Oh, and future, you scare me - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cvm-yDrWIAAottR.jpg:large
So all this work on proprietary algos/hardware for self-driving are so much in vain.
This grey area of 'well yeah, it's 'self-driving' but you still need to be ready to take over at any second' won't fly for long. Either you're driving, or we have true self-driving cars and SMART ROADS to match, to the point where you can take a nap in the back seat.
For example, if the law says "there must be a licensed driver ready to take control at all times" then it doesn't really matter what the technology can do.
Will we have internet arguments about the rights of people to go where they like?
Will the arguments become as fine-grained as "Well, yes, if you want to go to the rally to protest the cuts in UBI, you really should expect that Uber will send one, but it's very difficult and expensive to build out the system for such peak demand events. And ultimately, that just cuts into the funds available for UBI. Why not just register your complaint on the website at https://myvote.ubifunding.gov? Or you can just click the button on facebook."
Followed by blog posts about what a "Sunday drive" was and comments reminiscing how readers used to take drives just to explore and lamenting that this is no longer practical.
I'm all against surrendering autonomy to machines and the corporations who own them.
So if we are rationing it more in the future, something more went wrong than Uber.
It'll be funny when people are put on the list while away from home and have to figure out how to get 50 miles back to home when no vehicle will carry them.
But sure, also less free in a certain, obviously very limited way: many people are never more than a few hundred yards away from their car. They get perfectly used to that state, but for someone used to transporting just their own person around (using whatever third party technology available), always having to return to the parking spot would feel like a ball and chain. This is arguably a much smaller limitation than reliance on third party transportation, but the thing is that on this level, freedom is entirely subjective. To a "minimalist living" advocate, freedom is being able to fit your life in a suitcase, to a stuff collector freedom is having every thing you ever had available just an attic dive away. Giving up a freedom you are used to have feels much bigger than gaining a freedom you have learned to do without. emacs vs vi.
We will still own personal cars, for all the same reasons we do now. The percentage of ownership will drop, but I think most 2 car households will still own at least one car.
The only difference with my generation is that the age of things like starting a family or buying a house has jumped up a few years.
Now the largest generation in the U.S., millennials bought 4 million cars and trucks in the U.S. last year, second only to the baby boomers, according to J.D. Power's Power Information Network, which defines millennials as those between 21 and 38 in 2015. Millennials' share of the new car market jumped to 28 percent. In the country's biggest car market, California, millennials outpaced boomers for the first time.[1]
[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/everything-we-thought-about-m...
edit; That number seems hard to define. Of the 7.1 million people employed throughout the economy in jobs related to trucking activity, 3.4 million were truck drivers in 2014. There are over 10 million CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) holders in the U.S., but most are not current drivers and not all are truck drivers. There are between 2.5 million and 3 million trucks on the road today that require a driver to have some sort of CDL. Of those trucks, 1. 6 million are tractor - trailers. Of those tractor - trailers, n o more than 800,000 are used in OTR (i.e., non - local) operations.
Source [http://www.trucking.org/ATA%20Docs/News%20and%20Information/...] Page 4, footnote 6
Learning to drive may become a bespoke thing in 30 years. You only learn because your father/mother/family is an enthusiast that kept a sports car or classic maintained.
The commercial pick up truck could hold out as the last non-autonomous vehicle. Maintenance and service will still be done by humans, for now.
[0] http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-2279619/Numb...
Hint: there was no social security or unemployment benefits then.
Yes, they had gas street lighting and coal fires, but they no longer had the freedom they'd enjoyed since the end of feudalism, and once more found themselves serfs - just this time ten to a room in disease ridden urban slums rather than in their peasants cottage in whatever village they'd been sucked up from.
Yeah, we're still here, but to assert that everything was positive is equally ridiculous. It took over a century for labour rights to start appearing, and for the system of governance to adapt to economic reality. Do you really want the same again?
Sometimes a downvote is really an upvote because it confirms the distance at hand
Self driving cars will be the first indicator if we will move to utopia or dystopia.
We have to accept the fact that we wont have enough jobs for our growing population and part of what i am working on everyday is to do more with less by optimization and we cut into every area with technology from bottom to top. Human employment is expensive.
And never forget Google Minds win in GO was our Manhattan Project.
As you say, there have been multiple points in history where technological innovation obliterated the livelihood of whole categories of people, from dock workers to sailors to drivers.
Now, automated driving isn't in the "changes everything" category, no more than Diesel engines and containerisation changed everything. Yes, there are still areas which are feeling the impact from this change 50 years ago, but for the most part people moved on into other industries - the service industry in particular.
The thing is, the service industry is being eaten by automation. That does change everything, as without radical change there is not a further category of job for un or semi-skilled labour.
Within the current framework, UBI seems like a sane solution, although finding a way for people to be productive in a way that technology cannot and never can do better would be preferable. The thing is, I'm not certain there is any such thing even in the medium term - even creative and analytic skills are being assumed by AI. Not everybody can be a developer. Even developers will likely be substantially obsolete at some point - we are already at the point where silicon designs silicon with human intervention.
This is no small part of what's troubling the world right now - we have swathes of underemployment like we haven't seen before, and it shows in malcontentedness in the political process.
The other solution of course is to have a hell of a lot fewer humans, but that's unpalatable in terms of implementation.
It's interesting watching the economy contort in on itself in ever decreasing circles of mutation - it's something like Malthusian collapse, as we consume the available pool of productive purposes, leaving a hollowed out civilisation behind.
Feels like arguing with the tide.
He's got a viewpoint, and no interest in changing it.
It would be interesting to see how many people are employed in various jobs and see what proportion are likely to be unnecessary in the near future; e.g. line cooks in fast food may be unnecessary (though I haven't seen anything to indicate that we're even close to that yet), but how many jobs does that represent? Are most line cooks employed at fast food chains, or are they employed at non-chain restaurants? And has that not happened to a large degree already with prep happening at central locations for many chains?
Same goes for self-serve kiosks; McDonalds has already started using them, but they're clearly not going to take over at any restaurant that has a waiter.
Maybe the lower prices enabled by automation will drive non-automated competitors out of the market such that restaurants with waiters will simply go out of business and be replaced by efficient chains, but that sort of goes against the human desire for variety. But maybe it will siphon off enough people that many restaurants that are barely scraping buy have to close.
I guess we'll see how things progress, but I feel like our current ability to do NLP & fine robotic movement is still too limited to displace a lot of humans. That and people's preference for interacting with other humans.
I know you didn't suggest doing anything similar with future self-driving stuff. Just putting it out there, because a lot of people in the public (not in this thread) are. Same with things like coal-industry jobs displaced by solar.
They say "more frequent schedules" . How ?
I usually wave the other guy through if they appear to be in a hurry. Now, there is no other guy. Will the truck sit there and ignore me waving? And finally do the start-stop dance when I try to go?
(Or roll it's headlight eyes and mutter "humans..." when I do a rolling stop and flip it off?)
I recently moved to north america and heard that same 'what if everyone gets to the intersection at the same time' quandary. In Australia, the rules say the person to your right always goes first, regardless of who actually got there first. If you pull up and then a second after someone else pulls up to your right, they now go first instead.
It can be a little annoying in busy areas but I think that's also why we also have so many round abouts. I've always been curious if it's a written or unwritten rule in north america, the whole 'he who gets there first goes first' rule.
How did the returns (kegs etc) get back into the truck and spoils too?
Who unloaded back at the distributor?
Uber chose this market - but why a heavy perishable delivery.
You nailed it yourself. It's heavy, so hard for people to move (easier for machines). It's perishable, so it benefits greatly from more frequent smaller deliveries, instead of rare large deliveries. If you don't have to pay a person to drive, you can do that. Additionally, the packaging is perfectly regular (cans or kegs, always the same size, made of a durable material).
Sweet words for AB InBev shareholders, not so sweet for the obsoleted truckers though.
Obviously this technology is inevitable, but I think that the authors of such technologies should also come up with political proposals on what to do with the displaced people.
Politicians should start acting now and figure out how to respond to these changes. And that should be done on a global scale, because technology is very fast to spread across borders.
Why would you want computer scientists and engineers doing that? Do you think they have some special expertise in labor politics too?
What would help here is the same thing that would help in other industries that have gone down the tubes: temporary monetary support ala unemployment insurance, retraining programs, maybe moving stipends to relocate to areas with more jobs. Basically, social safety nets.
You could drive a semi (pun-intended) through that caveat. Driving is all about edge cases; bad weather, bad roads, bad visibility, poor signage, poorly maintained cars.
Though I think the fears of job displacement are still (a bit) overblown. This type of thing won't happen overnight. It will start with a few companies, some drivers will move to other companies, others will get different jobs.
Truck companies could earn some brownie points with the public by offering to train their old drivers to work on the autonomous trucks.
If I'm ever in an accident with a self-driving truck, they'll probably stack the jury with internet-enabled toasters. =(
You'd have to make the tax low enough to still retain a significant benefit for the company, but high enough to aid in providing a social safety net. You'd also have to ensure that it's hard to get around this legislation without making it so broadly applicable that AI research and development are penalized.
Did the inventors of automobiles have to deal with all the farriers and people who tend to horses?
...or when milkmen were obsolete?
...or when switchboard operators were obsolete?
...or when telegram operators were obsolete?
(I could go on all week)
History is full of instances where certain job roles are no longer needed and are obsoleted. This is a good thing, it means we're moving forward and progressing.
I wish everyone wasn't so afraid of jobs, but that's the consequence of being up to your eyeballs in debt.
Not even close.
We're talking about tens of millions of people potentially loosing their jobs worldwide due to such 'progress'.
This can lead to uprisings, revolutions and bloodshed - a lot of suffering - which can be prevented if the transition is well planned.
'Global reach' cuts both ways, both through positive and negative consequences.
The industrial revolution was far more disruptive than what we are currently experiencing, albeit paced slower. The idea that way can't learn nearly everything we need to know about current change from observing the past strikes me as very naive. People, after all, are just people.
It's unfortunate that Smith was particularly weak in this area (or rather, that so many people have followed him in hand waving about it) but the consequences of displaced jobs is something that a society absolutely, unavoidably, has to deal with. You only get to choose if you approach it with a realistic plan, or not.
There is no comparison in history to make. Nothing has happened like this before. Never.
The closest you could get would be something like the aftermath of WW2 in Europe or maybe some devastating plagues but even that isn't a good comparison because those removed the people entirely; dead people don't need to be fed or swayed from starting a violent revolution.
It's not just the truckers or cab/bus drivers. It's all the industries that support them. Those will disappear too.
Just think of all the truck stops we have in the US and the amount of money that truckers spend at these places to sleep, take showers, get wifi, etc. Those will go away too.
The motels where travelers sleep at midway points in their travels will lose all that business. The auto body shops that rely on people making mistakes while driving will lose all that business too.
You're vastly underestimating the disruption if you're bringing up switchboard operators and milkmen.
Or say how we went from 98% of people farming to 3%.
You think truck drivers going from 5% to 1% is a bigger jump?
There is at least the possibility that the automated future will be as dangerous & violent & chaotic. It could be much worse as we will have less time to adapt.
This was twenty years before the web.
It's as if you think it would be better for millions of people to spend massive amounts of their lives away from their families, living extremely unhealthy sedentary lifestyles, eating truck stop and gas station "food" and operating massive machines that cause many deaths every day of the year.
You actually think it's a good thing that millions of people spend their time this way!
We have the ability to make the world better. We have the ability to eliminate the need for thinking, feeling, living humans to whittle away their lives sitting in trucks and being away from their families.
Yes, technology is going to force us to question to role of "work" in society, and if it's more important to earn lots of money while being away from your family and living and extremely unhealthy life, or if it's more important to earn less money, and have more time with family and healthy living.
Yes, the world is about to change - and keep changing - and it's going to change whether you resist it or not.
I think you're putting words in riskable's mouth. What the comment actually said is that you were vastly underestimating the disruption in comparing it to milkmen, etc. There wasn't any judgment whether it was a good thing or not.
[0] http://www.usda.gov/factbook/art/fig31.jpg
The Trump comment was tossed in because it's been easy to forget about this stuff as a coastal living millenial, and the recent Trump phenomenon has brought it back to the forefront.
Sorry for the initial snarky comment!
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said that. I was pointing out that the amount of disruption was being vastly underestimated.
Always remember that what's better for most can be the opposite for some. If that some is big enough there's going to be big problems. How big is hard to say but if we know it's coming and we do nothing our wounds will be self-inflicted.
Regardless of what they do, if that helps them take care of their families, people will do it with a sense of pride.
Young men are sent to war - to die - for the same reasons.
Purpose. That's what they get from it.
That's why they call it 'hard work'.
But I think you're fighting the wrong crowd here - most of us here understand that this inevitable and the world will evolve towards these new technologies.
But it is dangerous to ignore the ripple effects that it might cause in society, so we might as well start thinking about the potential solutions.
I have never lived under that delusion. I know work is not guaranteed, I know companies will always "downsize", I know I am an expense to be eliminated and I know my retirement will continue to be pushed back, and that I'll only get a fraction of what I was promised if it ever comes.
That is the reality of the world I live in.
Anyone that doesn't accept that reality is not living in the real world.
If you watched that, you enjoyed a phenomenal amount of privilege. That is much more of a marketing pitch about the past than anything that actually existed. In fact, in macro terms (even adjusting for statistical differences) the 2000s were much better for employees than the 70s, 80s and early 90s.
I remember my grandparents being laid off a lot, and the plant moving right before they retired while raiding the pension fund on the way out. I remember the company declaring bankruptcy and not paying their disability obligations so the tax payer had to.
That was during the supposed good years you mention. The coming years are going to yield dramatic changes to what jobs even mean, and at least in the US, we've spent the last 30 years making our society more dependent on people working for a big company not less.
In light of that, it seems prudent to me at least, to give some thought to how we transition whole industries to not need workers.
I love this nostalgia for the good old days. Life in the US during the 1970's sucked hard. Google "general malaise". Line-ups for gasoline, double digit inflation with no economic growth, post-Vietnam. People thought the US' days as a superpower were numbered.
Yeah, exactly, and we get to learn from history. That's part of moving forward and progressing. We can't ignore consequences just because similar things have happened before.
[1] https://blog.transplace.com/2015/02/an-aging-truck-driver-wo...
Savings from autonomous trucks... 0.11% of revenue.
I'm not sure what the margins for InBev's products look like, probably pretty decent, so it's not a low margin business. 0.11% of revenue is pretty good in terms of cutting costs, but I would have thought it would be bigger.
Also, and only half in jest, Budweiser? In Colorado? Regardless of my opinion of their beers I would have expected a delivery of Coors instead.
As an aside, the article mentioned that the driver was sleeping in the back...I'm sure that's no accident. However I doubt that's a safe thing to try (and only possible in these very artificial circumstances) even with a good warning/wakeup system in place it takes too long to get from the back to the front and react.
A truck with a single driver has to sit idle (or off in California) a large part of the day. Capital costs don't take a break during those hours.
Just think about how retarded our entire thinking on transportation has been.
We first tamed a massive, powerful animal, placed a piece of leather on its back, and prayed that it didn't get too moody and threw us off.
Now we strap ourselves into a piece of metal which 99.99% of us can't even begin to understand, then barrel down roads at 80mph while praying that the guy in the other lane isn't drunk/sleepy/high
That's not very charitable. I don't think the basics of an internal combustion engine are that hard for anyone to understand.
Damn it, when someone can hack the cars steering via the internet connected entertainment system, the engine is the least complicated part of the package.
Remember, people gave us the space age - and also created oops-these-are-remotely-controllable-over-the-internet vehicles. At the scale we are talking one of two things will happen:
1. This will become a huge phenomenon with everyone rushing around every barrier set up by lawmakers (the Internet of (swiftly moving) [heavy] Things) 2. This will be locked down hard by lawmakers and quickly turn into an industry as heavily regulated as aircraft manufacture and only a handful of players will have access to the market, resulting in slower growth and penetration into the entire market.
This was a great publicity stunt, but there's a huge difficulty cliff between toy problems and actual driving in traffic in real-life conditions.
If you haven't seen it, I highly highly recommend watching this video[0] - "Madam Sandi tells your future" (by Sandi Metz) It's all about change, and how when the step changes come, and they will, you need to be ready to adapt.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOM5_V5jLAs
In can see a way where unions can make a comeback.
Lately I socialized driverless with people in my daily routine. None -even the tesla owner brother - would get into a driverless car. Safety and trust is mentioned.
Now we have workers potentially displaced. Some in unions. Some not. But associating with a union for the sake of perceived safety could be a real winner. These drivers under "x" union do not have unsafe driverless vehicles.
The union is to protect workers wages and rights (they won during agreement)
Union is a five letter word. Everyone drives. Its freedom. I think one positive PR decision for a union would be to sew together the uncertainty of driver less vehicles on the Eisenhower highway system built for defense with traditional non union population.
"Our drivers Are safe. Keep the Eisenhower interstate system for safe drivers. "
However, crucially, there are thousands of important and hard problems out there available to anyone with a roof over his head, food and internet access.
Anyone who doesn't find a hard problem to work on, and this includes those in employment with excellent safety nets, is going to go bad sooner or later (drugs, sociopathy, crime, mental illness, suicide, etc).
Most people don't need hard problems to work on to find purpose or self-actualization. Most are happy to grind away on tedious takes that take time but are not mentally challenging, or care for children or an elderly parent(s). This should be fine under a basic income model.
Provide for everyone, let people who want to work on hard problems work on them.
Note also that one cannot merely look after children, because they need to see a greater purpose in what you do.
We saw a similar question. It is a human choice. I have not heard anyone suggesting that driver cars would be banned. They could not ban tobacco.
It seems that governments in many countries are playing the long game when it comes to an eventual tobacco ban. The first step is to require stern warnings on packaging of tobacco products. The next step is to include graphic pictures along with the warnings. Where I live, these warnings and graphic pictures take up most of the package surface on cigarette packs.
I suppose the next step would be to ban branding from tobacco packages so the only thing on the package is the warnings and images.
The end goal of this, I think, is to slowly erode public support for tobacco products. Then, when the eventual ban comes, the public response will be more of a whimper than an outcry.
I don't necessarily like legislation that bans people from choosing to do something, but I think there's a decent case for it in countries with publicly funded health care, where tobacco uses costs everyone, and not just the individual who chooses to use it. I enjoy freedom of choice, but I'm no libertarian. It seems to me that in any reasonably sized society, you end up needing to find a balance of tradeoffs between individual liberty and the well-being of society. The tricky part is finding that balance. The line between what's allowed and what isn't can feel capricious and arbitrary to anyone stuck on the wrong side of it.
I wonder if governments might try a similar tactic on route to eventually banning human-driven vehicles. Start with warnings, escalate to graphic images and video. Eventually, you might get to the point where the majority of people see anyone who doesn't use a self-driving vehicle as a selfish barbarian.
We're already going in that direction here in Canada:
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/05/31/well-consult-...
> I don't necessarily like legislation that bans people from choosing to do something, but I think there's a decent case for it in countries with publicly funded health care, where tobacco uses costs everyone, and not just the individual who chooses to use it.
Bingo. While I am in favour of individual liberties, smoking is not one of them if I am required to subsidize the healthcare that smokers will inevitably need.
Since I don't know any smokers, and places that sell cigarettes aren't allowed to display them in a visible location, I haven't really even seen what cigarette packages here look like for the past couple of years.
That's a slippery slope. Are we going to ban fatty or high sugar foods next? How about extreme sports? Motorcycles?
You pay for the outcomes of all those activities as well.
Activities with a high risk of physical injury are more difficult. For things like extreme sports, the relatively small number of participants might mean that the net increase in health care costs in negligible.
For activities like motorcycling that have relatively large numbers of participants, mandatory supplemental medical insurance is an option. It's probably already a good idea to have it right now, even when you aren't required to.
This is another slippery slope, though. If motorcyclists are required to have extra insurance to cover medical expenses, they'll inevitably ask "why us, and not skydivers, scuba divers, etc?". It would be difficult to know where to draw the line.
They also banned the display of tobacco products back in 2012 - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tobacco-displays-in-shops...
Couldn't a government put the taxes on tobacco products into the budget of their public health care, so that those who smoke tobacco products end up using more of their money and overall contributing more to make up for their own costs?
/s
I'm certain it will be even faster and more expedient than tobacco, especially if manufacturers of self-driving cars pick up the insurance bill for the cars they make. Eventually, the insurance rates for non self-driving cars should be unaffordable and if that's not enough, penalties for causing accidents should be ramped up until it's no longer feasible to have a human drive on public roads (they will have to be more than just monetary to prevent rich people from being assholes and driving regardless). At some point most manufacturers will cease making human-driven cars except as expensive toys for the rich.
Not only is there a decent case for this, I don't see any other alternatives. If people want to continue to drive manually, there will be race tracks and private courses where they can do whatever they want. Otherwise, making driving on public roads illegal is the only way I can see us getting close to the zero fatalities line that's ideal.
The solution involves real jobs with living wages, not sending former factory workers to sit in de facto community college seminars three nights a week for free.
Wake up people, the United States is a post-industrial society. We cannot manufacture things and pay people living wages to do it. We want things cheap and we want them now. Sorry.
I'd rather pay these people to be on welfare for the rest of their lives than try to bring manufacturing jobs back to the USA.
The United States is the world's second largest manufacturer.
> We cannot manufacture things and pay people living wages to do it.
It's important to recognize this statement as highly political dogma rather than neutral fact.
Of course we can. We just often choose not to, as a matter of public policy.
So yes, we can manufacture things. We just can't pay people to do it. Not if we want to afford these nice shiny new things.
Once you take it as fact that it's "impossible" for workers to have rights and a proper social contract in the modern global economy you start acting accordingly and become blind to the fact that it's not inevitable at all. It's important to recognize that our policies towards the working class in this country are deliberate political choices borne of the way power and influence works in our political system, not laws of nature.
Please. Less simplistic "solutions" that have continually failed workers.
Edit: also, one hardly needs to be a rockstar to make $60k/year as a coder. If you can write a coherent select in VBA you can make that.
And again, you think a 50 year old truck driver, who hasn't done any schooling 32 years, is going to be able to do SQL statements. And find a job at that age. I'd love to think that, but the IT industry has shown huge levels of ageism, and isn't exactly overflowing with entry-level jobs.
Only 15 years till retirement.
I feel quite certain there will still be a lot of "human" driven vehicles on and off the road in 15 years, even if self-driving really takes off.
We just need to make sure no "new" drivers are going into the business.
I wouldn't say the US is in any position to make the choice of prioritizing life over jobs, not yet anyways; there's still no way to live without a job.
Market forces will decide, of course, but I suspect we won't be saving lives with autonomous cars. Just differing the time, place and means of death.
But it does raise questions about worker displacement that are very interesting, and not just from a social-justice-warrior brigading perspective. I imagine this will happen much faster than the textile industry changed. Am I wrong there? That alone makes it fascinating.
I wish that the process of getting regulatory approval for this kind of tech could be explicitly tied to addressing some of these second-order consequences: no self driving cars until 1) the technology is assured to be safe on the roads and 2) there is a plan to help the huge number of human beings who are in danger of being made obsolete by it to adapt somehow.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-...
Especially since this shock is likely to occur faster than a lot of other transitions like in automation on farms, textiles, docks, mines, or factories...
This is why it's really, really important to have an effective safety net for catching unemployed and re-training them in a technologically advanced society, as it's getting really difficult to predict where and how fast change will occur.
In some sense it will be among the biggest economic transformations in recent history. There have been far bigger ones, but I can't think of one that has happened in the short timeframe expected of self-driving trucks. I don't think this point is controversial.
At the same time, I've been very curious to see the overall economic impact, especially with displacing such a huge percentage of the US workforce. Interestingly, there's already a shortage in truckers per wikipedia. I found this fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trucking_industry_in_the_Unite...
I imagine that people going into trucking see the writing on the wall. It will put a lot of truckers out of business, but the turnover is already crazy high, with many truckers already leaving the business entirely.
This could be a very interesting case study on how to manage worker displacement effectively. I don't think anyone here is seriously advocating paying more money and lives for goods just to keep trucking jobs up (although more and more on HN one has to write 'defensively' to curb misinterpretation, i.e. I feel compelled to shout that I think this is a good idea). But it would be interesting to see where truckers are getting new jobs already, and whether those industries could use more. Are truckers leaving the industry going back into some other industrial job, back to school, unemployment?
This wouldn't be like shutting a factory or mine where people have worked for years and where they hoped to retire from. By the same token, you see self checkout machines everywhere, parking garages without manned booths, automatic toll roads, self-serve kiosks at restaurants, and self-serve gas with pay at the pump. No one ever paid any attention to displacement from those jobs because they are high turnover anyway.
What I'm curious about is whether whatever industries truckers are heading to now can accommodate that many more workers without problems. Just because there's a high turnover doesn't necessarily mean that wherever truckers are heading now could handle 10x the influx of employees without funny consequences.
Do not underestimate the disrupted's ability to disrupt the disrupter. I can so see where driver delivery drivers block driver less vehicles. And disrupters can become quite cleaver
Can't stop stupid. Delivery drivers taking time out of their schedule to mess with a computer... that isn't paid by the hour. Sure, be vindictive. You'll feel real good for the next 5 minutes.