Autonomous vehicles create new problems and solve none
More concerning is what comes after adoption of this technology. And this adoption almost surely will come, either due to dumping strategies, some government restrictions("Roads are Not for People" act) or, most likely, both. As a consequences, ability to find a job will loosen for majority of people. Of course, liberals(that will become only more popular, broken folk loves "free money to all" policies) will be happy to write all those people some money checks out of squeezing middle class pockets. Small businesses will not win either, since maintenance costs will be hardly much lower when summed up. The only winners -- are elites. Billionaire investors and bribed politicians.
I would be all for robots-for-business regulations. Probably, something similar to hiring folks from abroad. E.g. -- it's allowed to use robotic system for performing specific function(from the regulated whitelist of functions), only if no human applied for it in X months with salary =< X min. salaries.
Otherwise, future looks gloomy to me. Any opposite opinions?
44 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 91.8 ms ] threadRegarding b) -- it's unclear how much of current(and potential) workforce employed in this kind of work can successfully transition into other fields of work.
Not much better, probably slightly better than autonomous cars because the number of vehicles is smaller. But most people prefer to sit in their own cabin. Autonomous cars give you the best of both worlds. You can decide who you spend your time with or hear music as loud as you want, but are also free to do other things than driving. It's cleaner (or at least your own dirt), and you don't have to carry anything around, as you can store your stuff in the car.
Public transport can come in very different forms. If there's demand, PT operators can build private compartments, seats with increased comfort, etc.
Practically nobody would say something like “I’d like to share a cabin with strangers” or “I prefer to walk to a bus stop and wait there for the next vehicle” or “I like to carry my stuff around instead of just leaving it in the vehicle”.
Plus in most areas NIMBYs also block expansion. When I was in my teens attending community college back home, it was regularly discussed how there was work ongoing to expand our local public transit rail so it would reach the campus. At the time it was 3 hours on the bus (w/transfers) to reach campus so I had to get a ride or drive myself (~20 mins) to get there. ~10 years later the expansion still hadn't happened because people were fighting hard to block it.
This is the bit that worries me the most. If autonomous driving makes longer commutes comfortable then people will move out further and further. Even with EVs this will be a lot of extra energy used for transportation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
One could easily drive all trains remotely, like kids playing with a toy probably since electric trains exist.
We still prefer human drivers all over the world, except for some systems. Those need to be very small or closed to be safe enough. Having a driver and personal has many advantages especially for unforeseen events. Autonomous vehicles may have the advantages in safety when nothing unforseen happens, but they can cause catastrophic chain reaktions. As critical infrastructure autonomous driving vehicles are an easy target, play them the right radar sequence and they will stop moving or endanger others.
Actually I'm most doubtful about ships being autonomous. As they have big and complex machinery inside, with higher maintenance burden than any other type of transport. You can check plane after each flight and risk scenarios for cars and trains are not that critical. Send an other unit to pick broken one down. But ships spend weeks on seas, and everyone should work automatically? Seems bit dubious
You're talking about passenger cars? I'm agree that they're quite inefficient. But we don't need autonomous vehicles to solve that inefficiency. We already have perfect solution -- public transport.
Autonomous vehicles would provide a mechanism to extend the range of these services by reducing the costs of dwell time between rides and deadheading for pickups.
I agree that there are no laws of physics preventing it from occurring in the US.
It looks to me like mentality problem, not technology one. IMO, changing mentality of people(to refuse from excessive lifystyle/showing off) would be more beneficial for society in long term.
Drone allow deliveries to be much faster and more "parallel". In the future, instead of having 100 delivery people, you can have 10000 drones. Drones don't tire. One drone can probably do a 100 delivery runs in the time it takes a human to do 5.
And if there's a problem, why we need high tech solution for that? Bring more people/increase birth rate.
I suppose before cars were invented, you would argue that cars are useless because we already have horses and they have been getting us from A to B just fine for centuries, and there's no "data" to prove that there's any "throughput" or "speed" problem.
Maybe things take 5 days to deliver now. Maybe that's not a problem per se, but imagine if things arrive within an hour of ordering them.
> Bring more people/increase birth rate.
I'm all for increasing the birth rate, but not for the purpose of creating more "workers" to slave their time and physical labor away for "the economy".
Another one in my city : trash collectors. We have underground collecting containers for we have a RFID 'key' to deposit in.
Once in a while, after the sensor has called home to acknowledge it is 'full', one guy shows up with a specialized truck, lifts the container from the ground and empties it into the truck. And pooff : the jobs are gone.
Self checkout is another one.
The lowest paying jobs are also the easiest to automate. And even when employees are cheap, they are still expensive and a nuisance.
- personal cars are banned (at least from cities)
- infrastructures are completely redesigned for autonomous vehicles
- governments create fleets of public transportation autonomous vehicles you can summon at any point (from 1 seat vehicle to bigger vans)
I don't believe in the cohabitation between autonomous and human driven cars on the existing infrastructure
That's already done in some European countries. IMO, it's right direction. I'm not for banning personal transport entirely, but i think that maintenance of public roads should be done mostly from transport taxes(so tax increase is good).
The concept of new technology eroding the job market isn't new either. Unemployment levels in the UK are so significantly low currently, you would not seriously suggest that the introduction of factories or computers had permanently eliminated the requirement for human labour on a massive scale. Why would autonomous vehicles pose a more serious threat?
Even if the delivery vehicle ran on wheels on the roads, I'm sure it could be much lighter and energy efficient if it didn't need safely carry the driver around.
I'd say most of the "problems" you point at are not related at all to "autonomous vehicles", but to automation as a whole.
Economic disruption by automation does exist, but mostly due to our insistence of tying in the "right to live" with "participation in the economy".
There are real problems with autonomous vehicles. Primarily the amplification of existing negative externalizes of physical transport (Space, noise pollution, energy, waste, ...). Autonomous vehicles will cause an explosion in the (already insane) consumption of transportation.
I can't argue with that in numbers. But intuitively it's very different situations. In the past, only very rich households had dedicated personnel for such kind of tasks, so i guess it was not that big % of people doing that.
The impact of that automation was hard to overestimate, as all of a sudden there were nearly twice the number of workers available, As the economic system adjusted it was the end of being able to live on one full-time income for the average family. Those hours gained from household automation where swiftly recouped in mandatory wage earning for most.
Still, i'm not sure if any significant % of population was occupied in those jobs.
> As the economic system adjusted it was the end of being able to live on one full-time income for the average family.
By automation you mean industrialization of society? I maybe wrong, but industrialization only lead to urbanization, which separated older and younger generations which lead to "atomic family", still patriarchal in it's essence. Decay of which(as well as one full-time income per family) came only later in 20th century.
There were not many drivers either. But independent of drivers, shouldn't you also argue against dishwashers and washing machines? These are jobs that people could do manually. Low-wage jobs, so the cost of dishwashing and laundry shouldn't really matter, does it? Full-time drivers suffer serious health consequences, driving is a pretty bad job. I would assume dish washing is healthier. If we can confirm that, maybe we should automate driving and require manually dish-washing by professional dishwashers instead?
Anyway, as i see it, current situation is different to other similar historic ones. Maybe i'm wrong. But previously we had an abundance of low-skill jobs. Now all low-skill jobs are targets for automation.
I think that solutions like UBI are very detrimental to middle class. Since we see that higher class are very flexible in terms of tax-evasion. And i don't see how it can last for more than one generation of welfare people.
Not so much replacing existing solutions but providing one that couldn't have existed before. At least as far as things go right now.
Outside of that autonomous drones have made things like mapping and other aerial sensing problems quite a bit cheaper.
My personal take is that delivery people will be amongst the last jobs to be automated as there is a lot of complexity involved. Stuff like drone delivery seems to have issues with scaling and rather than reducing the number of employees moving them from delivery jobs to a fleet of technicians to keep the drones going.
From my perspective the thing happening here is companies off-loading work onto recipients. For example quite a few of the delivery companies here now take all parcels to drop boxes and expect the customer to go pick it up. I'm not particularly opposed to that as it's probably better all round. Similarly self-checkouts seem like an improvement despite labor shifting from paid employees to the customer.
In Europe we have severe shortages of track drivers. UK currently has random food shortages and fuel shortages, because EU drivers left the UK.
The fact is that people do not want to sleep on parking lots, have no shower access, irregular and long working hours etc. etc. Being a professional driver sucks as a way to spend your life.
There is a lot more enjoyable things to do.
This is a bit of an oversimplification of their position. They cared less about the machinery and more about the labor involved in using it: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
> E.g. -- it's allowed to use robotic system for performing specific function(from the regulated whitelist of functions), only if no human applied for it in X months with salary =< X min. salaries."
> They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.