>> What those new jobs for truck or delivery drivers might be is “not currently foreseeable.”
I wonder if the same thing has been said about other professions that have been more or less wiped out in the past? I would guess the answer is "yes"
And then the next logical question is "So what did all those people end up doing?" Maybe that's how we being to answer the question of what all the truck, taxi and delivery drivers can be doing when those jobs are gone?
Or do those jobs just get phased out as people leave them? Like people who quit for whatever reason are just not replaced by other people, they get replaced with the bots (or whatever we call the things that are replacing people here).
[Added thought] Maybe the answer is found in how secretaries were replaced? They were recently the most popular jobs in many states, and now are not.
Most of these folks will be phased out but likely might never find work again. Things are different this time. There are multiple regions in the United States and the world solely focused on disrupting entire industries by automating them.
In the past, the speed of automation was slower giving time for people to adapt. Going forward, things will be swift and I am not sure what these people will do.
I think that is precisely why the White House is weighing in on this. Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems to be the only branch of the US legislature that is willing to look at the real issues that will cause much pain for US citizens in the future (instead of bickering about religion, climate change denial etc.)
Just a nit, President Obama heads the Executive branch of the US Federal government, with the other two branches being the Judicial branch (Supreme Court of the USA), and the Legislative branch (Congress).
Presuming that the replacement jobs all show up (which I'm bearish about), the thing about any kind of new job is that (IMO) they will be disposable.
To survive we need food, shelter, clothing, and medicine. Food production has been automated, distribution is about to be. Clothes washing was automated, production is about to be. Medical diagnostics is about to be automated, though it will take a while for a nurse's job to be. Shelter is going to be (IMO) automated in the next few decades.
Whatever replacement jobs are going to arrive will be completely disjoint from actual needs. Everyone's going to be pet manicurists, metaphorically.
One huge problem with that that I can see is if there's an economic contraction and everyone tightens their belts at the same time, there's going to be a snowball effect as everyone gets rid of their unnecessary luxuries, which now employs 99% of the workforce. It will hit rock bottom when we realize that the only things that we really need are all now provided by robots and the %1 of people still employed.
Secretaries still exist, but the job's divided into two broad categories. Receptionists, who don't make much, and executive secretaries who make middle class salaries. The latter do well because they assist people who are powerful. They generally need college-level writing skills, a diplomatic personality, and some management skills.
I think they just broke stuff.
I am talking about harvesting for resources to construct my slum on top of the junkyard of robot parts.
It's not going to cause a problem. The uber robot can auto-claim on its robo-insurance which is less than regular insurance because they don't crash as much. They just have to wait around for their auto tow truck who is having a crazy busy week.
Amazon Go will be worse. There are a lot more retail workers than drivers. The technology is closer to fruition: Amazon has a working autonomous store, but we are still a long way from fully autonomous vehicles.
The hardware requirements for any store that wants to adopt Amazon's tech are minimal: some cameras, an entry gate and possibly some pressure pads under the shelves.
Even if Amazon doesn't license out their tech -- and they would be foolish not to -- you can be sure that Google and Microsoft are working on their own versions. The market is staggeringly big.
Hmmm...I would respectfully disagree :). While it would most certainly impact stores by reducing cash clerks etc. people would still be required for warehousing/monitoring etc. A lot of high volume retailers/grocers already have a self-checkout station, if they had wanted more automation, they would probably just increase the number of these stations.
Also, anything more than a basic grocer would still want real people to help people with purchasing etc.
> A lot of high volume retailers/grocers already have a self-checkout station, if they had wanted more automation, they would probably just increase the number of these stations.
I mean, this is a great example against your point (imo). Those self checkout stands, sure they do employ a staffer to monitor, but each of those stands is basically a line that doesn't have to be employed by a dedicated staffer.
They managed to potentially drastically reduce the number of required staffers via self checkouts. I say potentially, because 1 self checkout doesn't inherently equal one checkout clerk, but you get where i'm going with this.
If my safeway can fire the 6 clerks i regularly see staffing the checkout lines, and hire 1 to monitor.. that's still a drastic layoff.
And what about all the manual labor involved? I'm sure it won't be all robots stocking shelves, so mostly stockers can remain employed for the time being, but i'm sure at least a few employees who specialize in managing stock will be laid off as well.
Just because it's not 100% layoff doesn't mean it's any less serious, imo. We're slowly decreasing the available job market simply put. Where are these people going to go?
Not to mention the fact, back in the 80's/90's you go to walmart and every single aisle was open. Now pretty much any store I go to--there's maybe 3-4 open checkouts, and ALL self-checkouts are a go. Lines just are a lot longer, but it's not like people are going to stop shopping because of it. So they've cut a lot of jobs EVEN though there's a need for more workers at the registers
I'm not saying that all retail jobs will go... yet. But the number of employees per store will go down, and since there is a large absolute number of retail workers, it will still be bad.
Secondly, once people get used to shopping at stores where they don't have to line up to pay, the new experience will become expected by consumers.
So there is a double effect whereby stores who adopt the new tech will save money on payroll, and stores that don't will lose some business.
The advice part of a storekeeper's job is the easy one to automate.
If we get rid of all the manual labor that humans do, why wouldn't we move the advice-givers to remote offices and improve their utilization? A call center to tell you where the milk is or which wine goes with your recipe might sound bad, but consider that you'd never wait another second to talk to a clerk, and everything would get even cheaper as more and more of the basic questions for the call center get moved onto intelligent bots.
You realize Amazon has an warehouse system run by robots, so there's a major flaw there..why do we need people to stock or work in a warehouse when that too can be automated? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quWFjS3Ci7A
Amazon Go is not much of a change from an existing store where there are self-serve checkouts in terms of staffing. The huge staff cuts have already happened in most supermarkets.
Yeah, Amazon go seems like more of a boon for customers who don't have to check themselves out anymore. Go in to a CVS in the city and there will be one employee at an empty register and four self checkouts with a short line.
Interesting side note. I overheard staff talking at a local grocery store with a good number of chains. Now, i'm not sure to the extent of this (ie all chains or just those in my state), but they had to actually remove self checkouts.
Why? They were being targeted to test stolen credit cards and it was costing the company a pretty penny having to deal with all those fraud checks/etc.
Not a detraction from your point - i just found it interesting. "Automation" seemed great there, but they were having difficulty managing how it was being used.
I wonder what might happen with the upcoming automation(s) in a similar manner?
Self-checkout also doesn't work terribly well in grocery stores because there's a lot of slow fumbling around things like weighing produce and bagging. I've also seen self-service discontinued in some grocery stores that put it in.
I find it somewhat odd that another category of stores that often aren't a great match for self-checkout--big box home improvement stores--seem to have adopted it so broadly, at least around where I live.
Self-checkout seems to be one of those things that become popular or not based on fashion rather than necessarily good reason.
As I mentioned, at least in the Northeast US, it seems to be particularly popular in big box home improvement stores (Home Depot, Lowes) even though it's problematic for a lot of purchases there. OTOH, I basically never see it in supermarkets here even though it's almost ubiquitous in London markets (albeit smaller stores with less fresh/un-barcoded produce).
I'm curious where you're experiencing so much self-checkout. The vast majority of stores I go to have, at most, a single self-checkout lane.
Personally, I think if Amazon Go can follow through on its promise we'll see a drastic reduction in retail employment. The problem with existing self-checkout systems is that they're incredibly clunky and frequently require staff support/intervention. I've literally never had a successful self-checkout where everything worked properly.
I think it would be hard to argue that we are a long way from fully autonomous vehicles, since millions of miles have already been driven by autonomous vehicles. What remains is mostly regulatory hurdles, psychological hurdles, and fine tuning.
Don't underestimate the difficulty of those hurdles. Driverless cars are a technology that will be directly responsible for human deaths. We as a society don't have a legal or ethical framework to deal with that sort of thing yet. Driverless cars could very well be the first deployment of autonomous robots within the general public, that is significant.
> What remains is mostly regulatory hurdles, psychological hurdles, and fine tuning.
I think this is too optimistic. Self-driving cars only work because they are in the minority. Can you imagine a city full of current state-of-the-art self driving cars and it not turning into a traffic chaos?
In particular, I think that self-driving cars cannot work fully autonomously without communicating with other cars or the road infrastructure. And I am not aware of any effort to create a cross-vendor car-to-car communication protocol.
There are trivial cases where pure autonomous following of traffic rules will lead to deadlock (or other issues). Take these two simple examples: 1) 4 cars arrive at the same time in a four-way intersection without signals or yields 2) on a three lane road, two cars from the outer lanes try to switch to the middle lane at the same time.
These are by no means difficult problems (I'm sure there are more difficult cases too), but they must be solved and so far they're not being worked on.
You think you're smarter than a team of Googlers and that you can just think of something they haven't thought of in 10 years of development?
1) They have a random the 4way stop delay which means one of the cars will be the first to start moving again.
2) They would just both abort, then retry at a later time. It's very unlikely that the situation could repeat again on a retry unless you think perfect symmetry can be achieved in physical world:)
Add to that, car to human-driven-car, and car to human (police officer, traffic coordinator) communication.
Sometimes the communication needs to be complex (I.e. Verbal). I've had a few instances when I've had to negotiate to unblock a traffic deadlock, mostly when a two way lane is constricted to one vehicle only due to parked cars, or a HGV which is too big to drive past. In London this happens quite frequently.
I really cannot think how an autonomous car, with no human inside, could handle these scenarios.
Driving millions of miles is easy if you are driving circles around a test track. Which is not quite what current self-driving cars are doing, but they aren't driving on arbitrary roads in all conditions either.
I am exited about autonomous cars, but I'm not convinced they are as ready as various companies want us to believe.
The number of miles is not what matters, but the number of trips in which a human driver can be reliably replaced by a robot. It doesn't matter how far the vehicle can go; what we care about is the degree of confidence we can have that the vehicle will reach its destination without incident.
Designing for the unexpected edge cases is harder than designing for the normal cases. In accordance with Cargill's ninety-ninety rule, we can expect that the "fine tuning" you mention will be turn out to be a very big job.
As an extreme demonstration, consider the fact that you could rack up a million "autonomous" miles in a matter of months, using vehicles capable of nothing more than "lane keeping assist" and "adaptive cruise control" - just set 'em loose on a NASCAR loop and run them around in circles until this artificial example's point has been proven.
That store, deviod of clerks, seems like a shoplifter's dream to me.
The advert's buzzwordy, bullshitty, vague explanation of the tech hints that they're not super confident themselves about how well it will face up against shoplifters.
Everyone in the world will benefit from a substantial consumer surplus from not having to pay the wages of every driver involved in the supply chain of products bought and sold.
Of course, the subset of people who got fired will not have a great time, but the rest of us will benefit hugely, and hopefully our taxes will help cushion their blow with re training assistance and other benefits.
Is that necessarily how it works? I'm no economics expert, but what compels the savings to be passed back to consumers, versus just being reaped as additional margin?
Edit: I'm assuming less competition, since the barrier to entry for a fully automated trucking company would be higher than a traditional human driven fleet.
Yes, an autonomous truck company could temporarily lower their prices, thereby killing all their competitors, and then increase their prices to an unreasonable point.
This is the Luxottica[1] model employed in the eyewear market. I think it is reasonable to consider that a similar situation could develop in the shipping industry, given a sufficiently disruptive + monopolized offering.
It has to be better than existing logistics in some way or it won't get used. That could mean it's more reliable, but it probably also means it's at least a bit cheaper.
You're right that the majority of the savings probably wouldn't be realised by consumers until there is more than one player, though. On the other hand, given how many companies are attempting this, that seems like it will happen quite quickly.
My answer is... no? Why would that be the case? Those people don't necesarrily have any right to that money. They /arguably/ have a right to a job/food/housing, but that is a whole other discussion.
Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.
> Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.
It's interesting that yours is one of a couple of replies that say stopping progress would be a bad thing. But the OP didn't suggest stopping. There's no reason why you can't progress technically while also considering the human impact of what you're doing. Yes, you might move slower, but humanity will be better off as a result.
> Those people don't necesarrily have any right to that money.
And (simplified) the CEO of Uber is somehow entitled to receive the incomes of millions of truck drivers combined, even though all he did was just raising a lot of money, and be in the right place at the right time?
> Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.
That was not what I said. But it wouldn't be absurd if it was grossly unfair.
In the United States, these types of questions usually boil down to how you define freedom and liberty, i.e., should citizens be "free" to automate the majority of the current workforce? Should they "have the liberty" to profit monetarily from activities that cause destruction to the environment?
No. Technological progress should raise all boats if handled correctly. But refusing progress because some boats will be raised higher than others is not a good solution. It's also not even "fair" if your notions of fairness include proportionality instead of just equity.
For the most part savings from labor should reduce prices and in the aggregate, "all of us" do share in the benefit. Now obviously there is no guarantee of that, but competition will likely result in a good portion of savings passed to the customer (e.g. if FedEx drops prices UPS will have to do so as well).
I think that's a very positive view of our possible near-future. What if Fedex doesn't drop its prices, and UPS doesn't either? They profit, we continue to pay. You see this today with airlines whose ticket prices stubbornly refuse to drop despite oil prices plunging. Competitors coordinating to preserve their profit is a very real thing.
I think there's a solid chance that Amazon will help drive down delivery prices, at least on the consumer end.
If they can use automated deliveries to lower their UPS/FedEx/USPS costs, and to help them beat Brick and Mortar prices, you can bet that they'll take full advantage of it.
Retail stores to would likely deliver some of the savings to customers because they have to compete with Amazon and other online retailers.
Orchestrating a conversion from human fleet to AI-fleet is going to be a serious investment. Developing AI vehicles that are reliably safer than humans by a good margin (5-10%) is hard, but so will the work of ripping everything out that has gone into supporting human drivers and adding everything that needs to support AI drivers.
Even if the vehicles themselves can be converted in an afternoon and have a switch flipped so you feed it a delivery route and it just works, you still need coordination and communication capabilities that are different from humans. Plus any mechanisms for automatically loading cargo and coordinating the AI vehicles to queue up to be loaded.
The AI technology itself represents a serious investment (although I many delivery companies are not doing their own, but really just waiting on someone else), but infrastructure, conversion, and execution are also serious investments. It's really difficult for me to stomach that the profit from an autonomous fleet would be unfairly allocated.
> Another question is: who will be getting their money?
Everyone. The vast swathes of humanity who use transportation services (deliveries, taxis, etc.) will see the cost of said services decreased.
Fairness is an arbitrary and stupid metric. If we give every American $10 and 5 Americans $1,000 that's obviously "unfair" but also obviously to the benefit of everyone.
> In the long run, shouldn't technological progress benefit us all equally?
I'm not sure that fairness is a stupid metric, even though it is often an irrational one. Humans are evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to unfairness, and unfairness outside of acceptable ranges leads to a lot of human misery (envy) and poor decision-making (e.g. Communism). I think engineering a society that humans enjoy or at least tolerate is easier than engineering humans.
Also, I think the relative numbers matter here. If every American receives $100, but 100 Americans receive $100 billion, which they then use to engage in zero-sum competition (status, political power, mates, land), you may experience a net decrease in utility.
In a long enough timeframe, most of our jobs will become obsolete; the question is how long? As a programmer I am not worried, as AI isn't really smart enough to interpret the crap I am asked to build.
Barring major infrastructure and cultural changes, or general purpose ambulatory robots, delivery trucks will still need humans on board to handle the delivery (and pickup) part. No self-driving car is delivering to the seventh floor, and I'm certainly not operating the lift gate myself for LTL pallet deliveries.
That's a pretty fair part of the commercial fleet, though vehicles with self-mobile cargo (taxis) or dedicated handlers on each end (long haul) are quite amenable to automation.
So last-mile service is becoming last-yard service. That's a good way to think of it because these will be subsistence jobs, or slightly below. Employees will no longer need a commercial license, or even a clean driving record.
>>Barring major infrastructure and cultural changes, or general purpose ambulatory robots, delivery trucks will still need humans on board to handle the delivery (and pickup) part.
Sure, but those humans won't be needed during the vast majority of the trip. The truck can make a pit stop at a "last mile" facility to pick up the human loaders/unloaders (who can be minimum wage temps).
I think we're going to see some innovating in the mailbox and/or the front door as well. I mean who really wants to accept a package when it could be automated.
> delivery trucks will still need humans on board to handle the delivery (and pickup) part. No self-driving car is delivering to the seventh floor
Good point.
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
I think one of the first things that will happen with self driving trucks will be that we essentially get around the limit on how long a truck driver can be on the road without a break since they will be able to sleep in the truck.
That might be the end state for the foreseeable future, but as others have said that person no longer needs to be a driver, just someone to load and unload.
At some point we'll begin to ask the question of whether it's worth paying someone to travel around with the truck, or if we'd prefer the cost savings. If you're a white collar place ordering heavy equipment you'll probably just pay the guy, but if you're a warehouse you already have a pile of people who can handle that.
this claim that because a robot can't do 100% of a job, they won't take over that job seems to pop up in every discussion about automation.
If the only thing you need a human for is to handle the delivery from the ground floor to the seventh floor, or to roll a pallet onto the back of the truck, you've eliminated 99% of the job. and if you've eliminated most of the work the job requires, that means you need a lot fewer people, and they need less skill and training and will be paid less.
one junior staffer in every office being tasked to go down to the loading bay and check for packages after lunch each day is not a major infrastructure change.
I recommend also watching Mark Blyth's brief overview[1] of how this problem has already affected the political landscape over the last several decades. Significant changes need to be made immediately to handle the changes technology is forcing on the economy.
In short: Silicon Valley is going to drive a lot of job losses in the not too distant future. There's a very real danger that will blow back as mass unemployment drives people to extremes, unless people start thinking very seriously about what this new world is going to look like, and how the vast majority of the country will earn a living.
I really hate the idea that everyone needs to work. I get paid a lot as a software engineer to write stuff. Over the years, I've just seen so much money poured into tech that makes people buy more tech or that does nothing but license intellectual property.
I quit my job for 11 months in 2015 and flew around the world; backpacking off my savings:
It was the happiest time of my life. I'm planning on getting some funding sources for next time (Pateron, grants for OSS projects, etc.) and see if I can make it longer next time. I'd rather just make enough, making content and tech that I like and find useful, supported by peers, than working the the current tech world.
Reynolds envisioned a world like this in his book Army of Davids. I think he painted an overly rosy outlook and neglected to realize how difficult it is to start small businesses or how little time people have after their day jobs to work on things. (You can kinda glaze over those things when you're a UT professor).
The answer doesn't have to be that everyone has a job. It could be universal basic income. It could be any array of things.
But the question is, does Patreon, OSS grants and the like scale to the entire population of a country? My instinct is "no". Yet it's likely that a lot of people will be looking for alternative means by which to live life within our lifetimes, and no-one is really looking for broadly applicable answers.
There's only one (more or less) answer - you can't have a few people owning the output of the machines. The wealth will have to be spread out - whether that's thru some form of Socialism/Communism that doesn't exist yet or not, I don't know.
But once you get to more or less full automation, the only people who would make money under the current system would be the owners - there wouldn't need to be any workers.
I would highly recommend reading Debt the First 5000 Years. It goes into the history of debt, money and slavery (which are all very closely related to war).
I think things will change dramatically if we can solve energy scarcity. Much of our wealth in society is based around the availability of resources. What people forget about with 3D printers is they still need oil; and you can't (easily) print circuit boards. Humanity needs something on the level as replicator technology from Star Trek.
I want to believe, but I don't think that type of alchemy is feasible; at least not until we solve the energy problem. A breakthrough in LENR or tokamak fusion reactors could change the world dramatically.
I'm visualizing a future world where a million more homeless people are truck-hopping rather than train-hopping. You summon a delivery robo-truck by stealing all the goods off a shop shelf. It's a bit like calling for a sand worm in Dune.
Can't afford Uber? Just hang onto the roof of one.
That idea came up in conversation among some friends just a couple of days ago! As soon as we have reliable robo-taxis, we're going to have teenagers (and drunk adults) reinventing "train surfing".
No they're not. Silicon Valley is hyped and is just an exercise in transition of American business culture and economic classism to reign in "disruptive technology". That is the only "innovation".
More so, there's nothing revolutionary about Silicon Valley. It's 150% marketing hype. Just looking at their direction, they are just not in the position to do anything of real value during the next revolutionary phase.
The only thing they have revolutionized is the acceptance and availability of very in-depth and sophisticated surveillance and the availability of massive amounts of surveillance data for the government and their intelligence/advert agencies.
This may not be unprecedented, and hence may not be worse overall than other historical changes in employment. Yes, eventually all delivery driving of people and things will be able to be replaced by machines. But it doesn't exist today to do it safely and reliably in all cases.
Imagine if the technology did exist today to do safely and reliably in all cases. It would still take a huge capital investment and turnover of equipment to replace or refit all the human driven vehicles. It would be hard to do in a decade. So imagine it takes another five to ten years to drive the cost down and work out the kinks with weather and construction and so on and ten years to do the actual replacing. Keep in mind the existing equipment and labor will get cheaper as it starts to get replaced, slowing the transition. It seems it like the whole transition could take twenty years.
So in twenty years a major job category is going to get wiped out. Like lamplighters, stable hands, textile workers etc. The US has had twenty year periods where 10% of the population has quit farming (https://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf).
This will be a big change, but it may not be a worse change than some that have happened in the past.
I still don't think driverless tech is even there yet. What Uber is doing in San Francisco is a little scary. I'm waiting for the first fatality.
Autonomous vehicles will also not solve the transportation problem. A hundred automated trucks still doesn't come anywhere near the efficiency of three freight engines pulling the same load. Even if every car was autonomous on the Interstate, you might get rid of gridlock but you'd still have a lot of people moving very slowly; well under the theoretical maximum capacity for single lane transport.
OTR trucking is about speed and flexibility, not cost. I would love to see more freight shipped via train, but at the same time I'm very much liking 2 day Prime delivery.
I think you fail to understand the depths of human fears regarding technology. Computer-driven automobiles are billed as a safer alternative. But if they yield even a small number of fatalities, it will likely be seen as a huge failure.
The fears are not of technology but of loss of control. What you describe is similar to how some are afaid of flying in an airplane yet readidy drive a car, despite the latter having several orders of magnitude more probability for death.
You'd be surprised what people can reconsider when there's a financial incentive. Drastically higher insurance costs for human drivers will likely be one such incentive.
There are plenty of people who will just fail to see the financial incentive, even after it's become obvious to people like you and I. Unless the cost becomes truly debilitating (and, granted, at some point it probably will) they won't change.
Don't underestimate how stubborn people can be, especially if they're Americans who feel their freedom is being threatened.
The cost of personally owned vehicles is already out of reach of lots of urban Americans; for them, differences in the cost of on-demand rentals (taxi, etc.) will be quite noticeable and have significant effect.
Suburban and rural residents will rely on personally owned, human driven cars longer, sure.
There are already trains that people get on that don't have a person operating them directly. Many people get on them without even thinking about about what is steering them.
Technology - especially the technology required for a network of self-driving cars- creates the possibility of catastrophic failure. A multi-car pileup is a tragedy, a multi-highway pileup is a catastrophe.
Also, losing control is generally psychologically unpleasant. I'm not sure we should exclude this from the cost/benefit ledger.
I have a feeling tech companies behind self driving cars are going to lobby strongly for "nobody goes to jail, and also cap the liability payout to something really small".
Fatal accidents often don't result in someone being jailed (fatal accidents that involve something like DUI do, and if there is an analogous human choice to deliberately cripple the self-deiving system of a vehicle that results in a fatality, the person linked to that act would likely be just as jailable as a DUI driver.)
Well obviously trucks or buses can't compare on a per lane basis. But that's not a fair comparison. There's a street to almost every house but not a rail road track. If the railway tracks were as dense as streets you'd end up with much of the same problems and restrictions. You'll always need a truck of some sort to distribute goods from a railway station to a house. And I doubt you will come out on top if you have the added costs and time of transferring goods from trains to trucks.
>And I doubt you will come out on top if you have the added costs and time of transferring goods from trains to trucks.
Except we do that for road transport as well, because a van isn't very efficient over long distances, and a lorry can't maneuver easily in many environments.
Of course there will be fatalities from autonomous vehicles.
At some point though, maybe right away even, they will be fewer than human drivers, which cause around 30,000/year in the US. Humans fall asleep, get distracted, display poor judgement, chemical abuse, and medical problems. Autonomous will have none of these but might introduce a few new ones.
Technical innovation moves and concentrates the savings to the top of the chain.
Technical innovation is a capital expenditure that pays off large returns in the long term.
Technical innovation permanently removes/drastically minimizes OpEx for those willing to put up with significant capital expenditure (in building the Technology in the first place): but once done, those jobs are gone.
It made mining, telephone, retail, manufacturing etc companies drastically minimize their dependence on human labor. These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.
Next up is transportation.
Most governments dont want to be bothered with transportation and run it inefficiently.
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
Electric (and autonomous) vehicles are going to be the next PC era that is going to change the world for decades and build the new billionaires.
I am curious if anyone has done an analysis to see how much of the capital expenditures going to automation goes to labor vs profits/return on capital.
I could definitely see the case that almost none of it is going to labor in the end, but it would be interesting to see a real study.
> These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.
This is only true for the first innovators. Competition means that these 'saleries' will just disappear rather than going directly to the bottomline. Exchange value (~ the price) shrinks as you replace human labour, as Karl Marx would already have told you. ;)
And that's not even a bad thing. It's good that people don't have to waste their lives in mines etc. The crucial question is how we as a society deal with this.
Well, the problem then becomes "what do all these folks who have no 'value' to a society do to that society when they realize have no 'value'".
That's probably also a problem from a "purely functional standpoint", but it's compounded by folks who think there is some kind of natural law that says "value" === "economic productivity" when that's only true for a subset of societies.
> Isn't that an old fashioned way of thinking about people in societies headed for more and more automation?
That's the capitalist way of thinking about people. Old fashioned or not, it dominates the lives of most people on the planet, and the value of most lives can be summed to a precise monetary amount - that being the value of the labor extracted from them by society over their lifetime, as determined by the market.
We should be considering what to do about the likelihood that most people made redundant by automation will simply be left valueless to society. No one seems to actually be trying to use automation to build a utopia and free everyone from the struggles of work. Rather, automation is allowing the elite to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of supporting society through compensating human beings for work.
The "functionalist" truth is not that these individuals add no value, it's that they generally add negative value. When you're unemployed with no job prospects and unable to support yourself or your family, chances are you are now "functionally counterproductive" to society (crime, homelessness, etc). Any ethical society (a society which does not kill or imprison people for this reason) should, from a "functional" standpoint, do its best to make these people productive again.
Theoretically yes we should make them functional again.
But re-spilling takes longer than expected, doesn't happen very successfully across the board and is effectively a huge hole in that theory.
And that's if the people are close enough to the skill domain to manage the jump.
Side note- people underestimate how variables govern human learning,
Native ability, language skills, previous success with studies, self discipline, presence of children, health, spare time, non competing obligations, nutrition.
We are all - even the exceptional among us - essentially earning dividends on the long history of human advancements to this point. Society should compensate people from whom it has taken the opportunity to hunt/gather/homestead as part of the cost of developing a complex civilization. The question is what is the best form for this compensation to take.
Society exists for the benefit of the humans who comprise it.
With a sufficiently complicated system involving sufficient capex to get started, you can avoid having to compete with anyone but the companies who started around the same time as you, at least for several years. Startups try to build network effects into their products to build this up - many businesses invest lots in physical infrastructure.
You might not be able to get away with charging twice what a taxi used to cost, but you can certainly make a very healthy margin, and healthier still as you buy up competitors.
I don't follow this line of thinking. If automation implodes labor markets, no one has money to buy goods/services produced by robots. What exactly is there to be concentrated at the top? I feel you're underestimating the potential for radical change. Remember, we've only been a predominantly "capitalist" system for ~150 years (when the term began referring to a framework for economic management. Prior it was a noun referring to individual capital owners, for the most part.) It's not set in stone it'll survive.
I can see autonomous vehicles imploding things like Taco Bell too. We have fast-food burrito making machines. Why can't we have a rover delivering food, avoiding going on the road? Or why go to Walgreens for Preparation H at 1AM when a rolling pharmacy can drop them off? They can roll up, I'll walk out and swipe a phone or card and get the stuff I requested. Bookmobile's for every thing are a possibility. Wouldn't necessarily need to go to Amazon Go.
Once this technology becomes mainstream, what's to stop people rolling their own local autonomous services for their communities (after another 10-20 years of smoothing out kinks)? Only accepting deliveries from bulk producers?
What's to stop an autonomous Car2Go like network of cars moving about to pick up passengers as needed? Thus imploding automobile sales, but reducing load on infrastructure, saving communities a shit ton of time and money?
Above all, what's to stop the world from skinning capitalists in the streets if they insist they own everything we invented, and oops, no more money to buy things. Excuse us while we take advantage of your outputs. Millennials are already feeling pushed to the periphery, with gloomy prospects around wages, and debt. Populist anger is in the open right now. As things continue to go autonomous, I have a hard time thinking we'll just adapt it all to our current way of life.
"Our recent research casts doubt on the hypothesis that technology-driven developments were a major factor behind rising inequalities in advanced countries.
Let me start with some facts about jobs. Both the European Union and the United States are characterised by strikingly similar labour force developments. In both regions, there has been a decline in the number of jobs for workers with low levels of educational attainment over the past 25 years. Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous increase in jobs for workers with tertiary education, and this is the only job category that expanded after 2008, even in several countries that were hit hard by the recent global and European financial and economic crises. While underemployment, when a worker takes a job for which they are over-qualified, is a prevailing phenomenon, it tends to be temporary.
If a greater share of jobs are only open to tertiary-educated workers, it could contribute to increasing inequality, if tertiary-educated workers earn ever more, relative to lower educated colleagues. Data shows that this has been the case in the United States and China, and to a much more limited extent in Germany. However, exactly the opposite has happened in many other countries during the past two decades, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden and Japan. In these countries the so called ‘skills premium’ has actually fallen."
At the extreme, a drastic decline in incomes, through unemployment or wage reduction, would eliminate the need for trucks altogether, because there would be no money to drive demand for goods.
I don't think so - the machines will serviced by machines.
It's easier to design machines that can be easily maintained by machines than to design machines that can replace humans.
> The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and self-employed weavers in the 19th century that used the destruction of machinery as a form of protest.
I think that once the robots take enough jobs such that the anti-automation movement reaches a critical mass (and it won't take 100% of the jobs to do that, prob not even 50%) then we'll start seeing these sorts of things happen.
Sabotage of driverless cars will be trivial to carry out and very expensive to deal with... some forms may not have adequate protection under criminal law yet, which will require cooperation with legislators and law enforcement to address (good luck with that Uber).
I'm thinking things like finding and intentionally exploiting environmental cues that driverless cars use to make decisions (releasing plastic bags into intersections?) or else using directed radio interference to prevent them from communicating with homebase to know where to go next.
Some of these may be protected already by FCC or EPA or state-level equivalents, but will enforcement be up to the task? Is the FCC prepared to monitor and enforce local signal interference for corporations? Is a $500 littering fine enough to dissuade individuals and groups from continuing in "civil disobedience"?
My core point is that if anyone thinks people are going to take this lying down then they don't know human beings. Everyone is only 3 missed meals away from doing "whatever it takes" and that's even less if it's your kid(s) that are missing the meals.
If nothing is in place when the layoffs come then it'll take no time for former workers to organize and take matters into their own hands... within that election cycle the organization will be co-opted by some other ideology which conflates their anger at losing their job to automation with race, class, political affiliation, etc.
I've worked for a medical laboratory as a courier for eleven years. I don't think all of these jobs will be completely wiped out, for several reasons hit on by people in this thread.
Many of the things I do on a daily basis can be automated, (I know because I've been able to automate parts of my job), but other parts will prove to be such a high bar, it will be twenty years before they will be cost effective and/or the technology is created. I worry more about low cost, easy to use scanning technologies displacing my job more than I do automated vehicles, at least in the near term.
Retraining those of us who want it really wouldn't be as daunting a task as it sounds. I've been able to listen to thousands of hours of audio while I drive, both audio books and university classes, and I encourage my coworkers to do the same.
Most of us understand that this line of work will be disrupted at some point. Places like Uber will lead the front of the change. Business like where I am at, where I handle hazardous materials, and places like ups, which have unions blocking automation, will take quite a bit longer in switching over to autonomous vehicles.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] thread[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
I wonder if the same thing has been said about other professions that have been more or less wiped out in the past? I would guess the answer is "yes"
And then the next logical question is "So what did all those people end up doing?" Maybe that's how we being to answer the question of what all the truck, taxi and delivery drivers can be doing when those jobs are gone?
Or do those jobs just get phased out as people leave them? Like people who quit for whatever reason are just not replaced by other people, they get replaced with the bots (or whatever we call the things that are replacing people here).
[Added thought] Maybe the answer is found in how secretaries were replaced? They were recently the most popular jobs in many states, and now are not.
In the past, the speed of automation was slower giving time for people to adapt. Going forward, things will be swift and I am not sure what these people will do.
To survive we need food, shelter, clothing, and medicine. Food production has been automated, distribution is about to be. Clothes washing was automated, production is about to be. Medical diagnostics is about to be automated, though it will take a while for a nurse's job to be. Shelter is going to be (IMO) automated in the next few decades.
Whatever replacement jobs are going to arrive will be completely disjoint from actual needs. Everyone's going to be pet manicurists, metaphorically.
One huge problem with that that I can see is if there's an economic contraction and everyone tightens their belts at the same time, there's going to be a snowball effect as everyone gets rid of their unnecessary luxuries, which now employs 99% of the workforce. It will hit rock bottom when we realize that the only things that we really need are all now provided by robots and the %1 of people still employed.
Dunno but I will be stealing the tyres off Auto-Ubers to make my tyre shack/mansion in shanty town.
It's not going to cause a problem. The uber robot can auto-claim on its robo-insurance which is less than regular insurance because they don't crash as much. They just have to wait around for their auto tow truck who is having a crazy busy week.
The hardware requirements for any store that wants to adopt Amazon's tech are minimal: some cameras, an entry gate and possibly some pressure pads under the shelves.
Even if Amazon doesn't license out their tech -- and they would be foolish not to -- you can be sure that Google and Microsoft are working on their own versions. The market is staggeringly big.
Also, anything more than a basic grocer would still want real people to help people with purchasing etc.
I mean, this is a great example against your point (imo). Those self checkout stands, sure they do employ a staffer to monitor, but each of those stands is basically a line that doesn't have to be employed by a dedicated staffer.
They managed to potentially drastically reduce the number of required staffers via self checkouts. I say potentially, because 1 self checkout doesn't inherently equal one checkout clerk, but you get where i'm going with this.
If my safeway can fire the 6 clerks i regularly see staffing the checkout lines, and hire 1 to monitor.. that's still a drastic layoff.
And what about all the manual labor involved? I'm sure it won't be all robots stocking shelves, so mostly stockers can remain employed for the time being, but i'm sure at least a few employees who specialize in managing stock will be laid off as well.
Just because it's not 100% layoff doesn't mean it's any less serious, imo. We're slowly decreasing the available job market simply put. Where are these people going to go?
Secondly, once people get used to shopping at stores where they don't have to line up to pay, the new experience will become expected by consumers.
So there is a double effect whereby stores who adopt the new tech will save money on payroll, and stores that don't will lose some business.
If we get rid of all the manual labor that humans do, why wouldn't we move the advice-givers to remote offices and improve their utilization? A call center to tell you where the milk is or which wine goes with your recipe might sound bad, but consider that you'd never wait another second to talk to a clerk, and everything would get even cheaper as more and more of the basic questions for the call center get moved onto intelligent bots.
Why? They were being targeted to test stolen credit cards and it was costing the company a pretty penny having to deal with all those fraud checks/etc.
Not a detraction from your point - i just found it interesting. "Automation" seemed great there, but they were having difficulty managing how it was being used.
I wonder what might happen with the upcoming automation(s) in a similar manner?
I find it somewhat odd that another category of stores that often aren't a great match for self-checkout--big box home improvement stores--seem to have adopted it so broadly, at least around where I live.
As I mentioned, at least in the Northeast US, it seems to be particularly popular in big box home improvement stores (Home Depot, Lowes) even though it's problematic for a lot of purchases there. OTOH, I basically never see it in supermarkets here even though it's almost ubiquitous in London markets (albeit smaller stores with less fresh/un-barcoded produce).
Personally, I think if Amazon Go can follow through on its promise we'll see a drastic reduction in retail employment. The problem with existing self-checkout systems is that they're incredibly clunky and frequently require staff support/intervention. I've literally never had a successful self-checkout where everything worked properly.
So "largest" may simply be an artifact of said binning.
And driving in non-inclement weather. And driving in places that aren't meticulously mapped by Google. And being able to refuel themselves....
I'm not denying the accomplishments of current autonomous vehicles, but there is still a ways to go technically.
I think this is too optimistic. Self-driving cars only work because they are in the minority. Can you imagine a city full of current state-of-the-art self driving cars and it not turning into a traffic chaos?
In particular, I think that self-driving cars cannot work fully autonomously without communicating with other cars or the road infrastructure. And I am not aware of any effort to create a cross-vendor car-to-car communication protocol.
There are trivial cases where pure autonomous following of traffic rules will lead to deadlock (or other issues). Take these two simple examples: 1) 4 cars arrive at the same time in a four-way intersection without signals or yields 2) on a three lane road, two cars from the outer lanes try to switch to the middle lane at the same time.
These are by no means difficult problems (I'm sure there are more difficult cases too), but they must be solved and so far they're not being worked on.
Sometimes the communication needs to be complex (I.e. Verbal). I've had a few instances when I've had to negotiate to unblock a traffic deadlock, mostly when a two way lane is constricted to one vehicle only due to parked cars, or a HGV which is too big to drive past. In London this happens quite frequently.
I really cannot think how an autonomous car, with no human inside, could handle these scenarios.
I am exited about autonomous cars, but I'm not convinced they are as ready as various companies want us to believe.
Designing for the unexpected edge cases is harder than designing for the normal cases. In accordance with Cargill's ninety-ninety rule, we can expect that the "fine tuning" you mention will be turn out to be a very big job.
As an extreme demonstration, consider the fact that you could rack up a million "autonomous" miles in a matter of months, using vehicles capable of nothing more than "lane keeping assist" and "adaptive cruise control" - just set 'em loose on a NASCAR loop and run them around in circles until this artificial example's point has been proven.
As I understand it, grocery stores employ more people back-of-house and in areas like the deli counter, than they do at cash registers.
The advert's buzzwordy, bullshitty, vague explanation of the tech hints that they're not super confident themselves about how well it will face up against shoplifters.
And then: is that fair?
In the long run, shouldn't technological progress benefit us all equally?
Of course, the subset of people who got fired will not have a great time, but the rest of us will benefit hugely, and hopefully our taxes will help cushion their blow with re training assistance and other benefits.
Edit: I'm assuming less competition, since the barrier to entry for a fully automated trucking company would be higher than a traditional human driven fleet.
1 - http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/sticker-shock-why-are-glasses-...
You're right that the majority of the savings probably wouldn't be realised by consumers until there is more than one player, though. On the other hand, given how many companies are attempting this, that seems like it will happen quite quickly.
Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.
It's interesting that yours is one of a couple of replies that say stopping progress would be a bad thing. But the OP didn't suggest stopping. There's no reason why you can't progress technically while also considering the human impact of what you're doing. Yes, you might move slower, but humanity will be better off as a result.
And (simplified) the CEO of Uber is somehow entitled to receive the incomes of millions of truck drivers combined, even though all he did was just raising a lot of money, and be in the right place at the right time?
> Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.
That was not what I said. But it wouldn't be absurd if it was grossly unfair.
When globalization was pushed, the government passed laws to help retrain workers. Maybe it was just a band-aid, but, it was something.
Perhaps the government should intervene to direct some of the automation toward producing free housing.
If they can use automated deliveries to lower their UPS/FedEx/USPS costs, and to help them beat Brick and Mortar prices, you can bet that they'll take full advantage of it.
Retail stores to would likely deliver some of the savings to customers because they have to compete with Amazon and other online retailers.
Technical innovation moves and concentrates the savings to the top of the chain.
I expanded in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230336
Even if the vehicles themselves can be converted in an afternoon and have a switch flipped so you feed it a delivery route and it just works, you still need coordination and communication capabilities that are different from humans. Plus any mechanisms for automatically loading cargo and coordinating the AI vehicles to queue up to be loaded.
The AI technology itself represents a serious investment (although I many delivery companies are not doing their own, but really just waiting on someone else), but infrastructure, conversion, and execution are also serious investments. It's really difficult for me to stomach that the profit from an autonomous fleet would be unfairly allocated.
Will that happen?
Likely not-- I'm guessing the top brass will use all the capital saved up to buy the fleet and then release all the drivers.
I think that is the role of the government: redistribute rent on scenarios where markets won't do it.
In any case technology is only an enabler, not a conscient agent.
Everyone. The vast swathes of humanity who use transportation services (deliveries, taxis, etc.) will see the cost of said services decreased.
Fairness is an arbitrary and stupid metric. If we give every American $10 and 5 Americans $1,000 that's obviously "unfair" but also obviously to the benefit of everyone.
> In the long run, shouldn't technological progress benefit us all equally?
No?
That's a pretty fair part of the commercial fleet, though vehicles with self-mobile cargo (taxis) or dedicated handlers on each end (long haul) are quite amenable to automation.
Sure, but those humans won't be needed during the vast majority of the trip. The truck can make a pit stop at a "last mile" facility to pick up the human loaders/unloaders (who can be minimum wage temps).
Good point.
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
I expanded in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230336
Add an automated forklift to the automated truck?
That might be the end state for the foreseeable future, but as others have said that person no longer needs to be a driver, just someone to load and unload.
At some point we'll begin to ask the question of whether it's worth paying someone to travel around with the truck, or if we'd prefer the cost savings. If you're a white collar place ordering heavy equipment you'll probably just pay the guy, but if you're a warehouse you already have a pile of people who can handle that.
If the only thing you need a human for is to handle the delivery from the ground floor to the seventh floor, or to roll a pallet onto the back of the truck, you've eliminated 99% of the job. and if you've eliminated most of the work the job requires, that means you need a lot fewer people, and they need less skill and training and will be paid less.
one junior staffer in every office being tasked to go down to the loading bay and check for packages after lunch each day is not a major infrastructure change.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI#t=792
http://www.recode.net/2016/12/19/13600538/silicon-valley-gro...
In short: Silicon Valley is going to drive a lot of job losses in the not too distant future. There's a very real danger that will blow back as mass unemployment drives people to extremes, unless people start thinking very seriously about what this new world is going to look like, and how the vast majority of the country will earn a living.
I quit my job for 11 months in 2015 and flew around the world; backpacking off my savings:
http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/
It was the happiest time of my life. I'm planning on getting some funding sources for next time (Pateron, grants for OSS projects, etc.) and see if I can make it longer next time. I'd rather just make enough, making content and tech that I like and find useful, supported by peers, than working the the current tech world.
Reynolds envisioned a world like this in his book Army of Davids. I think he painted an overly rosy outlook and neglected to realize how difficult it is to start small businesses or how little time people have after their day jobs to work on things. (You can kinda glaze over those things when you're a UT professor).
But the question is, does Patreon, OSS grants and the like scale to the entire population of a country? My instinct is "no". Yet it's likely that a lot of people will be looking for alternative means by which to live life within our lifetimes, and no-one is really looking for broadly applicable answers.
But once you get to more or less full automation, the only people who would make money under the current system would be the owners - there wouldn't need to be any workers.
Ya, some form of Stalinist USSR, Maoist China or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.
I think things will change dramatically if we can solve energy scarcity. Much of our wealth in society is based around the availability of resources. What people forget about with 3D printers is they still need oil; and you can't (easily) print circuit boards. Humanity needs something on the level as replicator technology from Star Trek.
I want to believe, but I don't think that type of alchemy is feasible; at least not until we solve the energy problem. A breakthrough in LENR or tokamak fusion reactors could change the world dramatically.
Can't afford Uber? Just hang onto the roof of one.
As a (presumably) well-paid tech worker, it's really very achievable. Most engineers could do it in under a decade if they tried.
More so, there's nothing revolutionary about Silicon Valley. It's 150% marketing hype. Just looking at their direction, they are just not in the position to do anything of real value during the next revolutionary phase.
The only thing they have revolutionized is the acceptance and availability of very in-depth and sophisticated surveillance and the availability of massive amounts of surveillance data for the government and their intelligence/advert agencies.
Imagine if the technology did exist today to do safely and reliably in all cases. It would still take a huge capital investment and turnover of equipment to replace or refit all the human driven vehicles. It would be hard to do in a decade. So imagine it takes another five to ten years to drive the cost down and work out the kinks with weather and construction and so on and ten years to do the actual replacing. Keep in mind the existing equipment and labor will get cheaper as it starts to get replaced, slowing the transition. It seems it like the whole transition could take twenty years.
So in twenty years a major job category is going to get wiped out. Like lamplighters, stable hands, textile workers etc. The US has had twenty year periods where 10% of the population has quit farming (https://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf).
This will be a big change, but it may not be a worse change than some that have happened in the past.
Autonomous vehicles will also not solve the transportation problem. A hundred automated trucks still doesn't come anywhere near the efficiency of three freight engines pulling the same load. Even if every car was autonomous on the Interstate, you might get rid of gridlock but you'd still have a lot of people moving very slowly; well under the theoretical maximum capacity for single lane transport.
I wrote a post describing this:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
But we're well past the first fatality in a human-driven Uber.
Don't underestimate how stubborn people can be, especially if they're Americans who feel their freedom is being threatened.
Suburban and rural residents will rely on personally owned, human driven cars longer, sure.
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
Except we do that for road transport as well, because a van isn't very efficient over long distances, and a lorry can't maneuver easily in many environments.
At some point though, maybe right away even, they will be fewer than human drivers, which cause around 30,000/year in the US. Humans fall asleep, get distracted, display poor judgement, chemical abuse, and medical problems. Autonomous will have none of these but might introduce a few new ones.
Technical innovation is a capital expenditure that pays off large returns in the long term.
Technical innovation permanently removes/drastically minimizes OpEx for those willing to put up with significant capital expenditure (in building the Technology in the first place): but once done, those jobs are gone.
It made mining, telephone, retail, manufacturing etc companies drastically minimize their dependence on human labor. These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.
Next up is transportation.
Most governments dont want to be bothered with transportation and run it inefficiently.
New companies are capitalizing on this to establish future oligopolies: https://www.quora.com/What-controls-help-ensure-the-growing-...
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
Electric (and autonomous) vehicles are going to be the next PC era that is going to change the world for decades and build the new billionaires.
I could definitely see the case that almost none of it is going to labor in the end, but it would be interesting to see a real study.
This is only true for the first innovators. Competition means that these 'saleries' will just disappear rather than going directly to the bottomline. Exchange value (~ the price) shrinks as you replace human labour, as Karl Marx would already have told you. ;)
And that's not even a bad thing. It's good that people don't have to waste their lives in mines etc. The crucial question is how we as a society deal with this.
Or any system for that matter?
I may not personally support such a view, but from a purely functional stand point, you are about as much value as you earn and can therefore afford.
That's probably also a problem from a "purely functional standpoint", but it's compounded by folks who think there is some kind of natural law that says "value" === "economic productivity" when that's only true for a subset of societies.
Your value is that you're human being. Let the machines be enslaved to producing goods and services for the humans.
That's the capitalist way of thinking about people. Old fashioned or not, it dominates the lives of most people on the planet, and the value of most lives can be summed to a precise monetary amount - that being the value of the labor extracted from them by society over their lifetime, as determined by the market.
We should be considering what to do about the likelihood that most people made redundant by automation will simply be left valueless to society. No one seems to actually be trying to use automation to build a utopia and free everyone from the struggles of work. Rather, automation is allowing the elite to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of supporting society through compensating human beings for work.
But re-spilling takes longer than expected, doesn't happen very successfully across the board and is effectively a huge hole in that theory.
And that's if the people are close enough to the skill domain to manage the jump.
Side note- people underestimate how variables govern human learning,
Native ability, language skills, previous success with studies, self discipline, presence of children, health, spare time, non competing obligations, nutrition.
From a purely functional standpoint, most income isn't earned - it's derived from rents.
There is a good case to be made for redistribution of rents equally and only allowing income to be earned, though.
You might not be able to get away with charging twice what a taxi used to cost, but you can certainly make a very healthy margin, and healthier still as you buy up competitors.
I can see autonomous vehicles imploding things like Taco Bell too. We have fast-food burrito making machines. Why can't we have a rover delivering food, avoiding going on the road? Or why go to Walgreens for Preparation H at 1AM when a rolling pharmacy can drop them off? They can roll up, I'll walk out and swipe a phone or card and get the stuff I requested. Bookmobile's for every thing are a possibility. Wouldn't necessarily need to go to Amazon Go.
Once this technology becomes mainstream, what's to stop people rolling their own local autonomous services for their communities (after another 10-20 years of smoothing out kinks)? Only accepting deliveries from bulk producers?
What's to stop an autonomous Car2Go like network of cars moving about to pick up passengers as needed? Thus imploding automobile sales, but reducing load on infrastructure, saving communities a shit ton of time and money?
Above all, what's to stop the world from skinning capitalists in the streets if they insist they own everything we invented, and oops, no more money to buy things. Excuse us while we take advantage of your outputs. Millennials are already feeling pushed to the periphery, with gloomy prospects around wages, and debt. Populist anger is in the open right now. As things continue to go autonomous, I have a hard time thinking we'll just adapt it all to our current way of life.
Let me start with some facts about jobs. Both the European Union and the United States are characterised by strikingly similar labour force developments. In both regions, there has been a decline in the number of jobs for workers with low levels of educational attainment over the past 25 years. Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous increase in jobs for workers with tertiary education, and this is the only job category that expanded after 2008, even in several countries that were hit hard by the recent global and European financial and economic crises. While underemployment, when a worker takes a job for which they are over-qualified, is a prevailing phenomenon, it tends to be temporary.
If a greater share of jobs are only open to tertiary-educated workers, it could contribute to increasing inequality, if tertiary-educated workers earn ever more, relative to lower educated colleagues. Data shows that this has been the case in the United States and China, and to a much more limited extent in Germany. However, exactly the opposite has happened in many other countries during the past two decades, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden and Japan. In these countries the so called ‘skills premium’ has actually fallen."
http://bruegel.org/2016/12/explaining-inequality/
After all, someone has to take care of those machines, no?
We know what people have done in the past when this sort of thing has happened - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
> The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and self-employed weavers in the 19th century that used the destruction of machinery as a form of protest.
I think that once the robots take enough jobs such that the anti-automation movement reaches a critical mass (and it won't take 100% of the jobs to do that, prob not even 50%) then we'll start seeing these sorts of things happen.
Sabotage of driverless cars will be trivial to carry out and very expensive to deal with... some forms may not have adequate protection under criminal law yet, which will require cooperation with legislators and law enforcement to address (good luck with that Uber).
I'm thinking things like finding and intentionally exploiting environmental cues that driverless cars use to make decisions (releasing plastic bags into intersections?) or else using directed radio interference to prevent them from communicating with homebase to know where to go next.
Some of these may be protected already by FCC or EPA or state-level equivalents, but will enforcement be up to the task? Is the FCC prepared to monitor and enforce local signal interference for corporations? Is a $500 littering fine enough to dissuade individuals and groups from continuing in "civil disobedience"?
My core point is that if anyone thinks people are going to take this lying down then they don't know human beings. Everyone is only 3 missed meals away from doing "whatever it takes" and that's even less if it's your kid(s) that are missing the meals.
If nothing is in place when the layoffs come then it'll take no time for former workers to organize and take matters into their own hands... within that election cycle the organization will be co-opted by some other ideology which conflates their anger at losing their job to automation with race, class, political affiliation, etc.
/speculation