I wish the author the best in navigating this quagmire. Economics always struck me as political wonks arguing policy using calculus instead of rhetoric.
What I immediately thought on reading the headline, without realizing we were diving into "robots are taking our jobs!" was this: how about people sitting at home driving our cars for us? If the packet was dropped or latency got high, the car would slow/stop/switch-to-auto-cruise. Badda boom, badda bing, you have the best of both worlds.
And it gets better. Since you're using real humans to drive, you can take the sensor input and match it up with the real-world driving patterns to try to tease out some edge case behaviors. It'd be like Uber with your own car.
A reasonable impulse. Yet I have the feeling that an expert driver with some emotional distance from the situation may do better than me in an emergency.
The argument being made here, while quite real and a possibility is irrational. But I guess humans are irrational.
This reminds me of a recent decision that was made by a fellow parent. They have 2 young kids. 1 in kindergarten and 1 in daycare. The oldest is a smart young girl. In fact she often gets bored during class because she already knows the material. Because of this she gets in a little trouble for goofing around.
Her parents came to the decision that because she knows the material and is goofing around, they are not going to work with their youngest as much as they did with her. That way he will be ready for kindergarten.
I feel this irrational decision shares the same thought process as deciding to pick cheaper manual labor over advanced technology. But I do understand that we may eventually need some jobs to keep all us busy and active. But lets now slow down our education to do so.
I have a young daughter and have come to the same conclusion; not to teach her too much before she starts school. My own parents, being teachers themselves, taught me as much as they could before I attended school. I remember being bored senseless in classes and, whilst doing great in tests, started to harbour a deep resentment against education from a young age. "Like, why is everyone forcing me to do this 100 times?! I get it already!" Gradually realising that the other kids hate your for being too smart didn't help.
I don't think you can call this irrational, it's just accepting of human behaviour.
How about, teach her at home, period? Then you don't have to stifle her just so the state can have an easier time domesticating her. Home schooling is for more than religious nuts these days.
Its a myth that home-schooling shorts social interaction. Its part of the curriculum like anything else. You manage it with outings, sports, music groups. Instead of dumping your child into a zoo for 5 hours a day to fend for herself, you can plan her socialization like you plan her dental hygiene for instance.
It's true that home-schooling does not necessarily short on social interaction, but I've met enough people who were home schooled and did poorly in social setting to wonder how many people do well at this aspect of it for their children.
Outings, sports, music etc. are great but not enough on their own. For a lot of people doing home schooling, it must be difficult to arrange for several hours most days in the company a largish group of children with varied backgrounds and personalities. Not having this can make it difficult for children to develop socially.
Hey, it's great if you manage to get your kids into several hours of group activities with a mixture of kids on the majority of days.
But in my experience, many parents who home school mostly fail on this "not hard" task. So maybe it is harder than you're making out? Or maybe my sample set isn't very good, it's not like I've done a broad study, I'm just taking this from families and adults (who were home schooled) that I know personally.
This may be a bit of unfair stereotype, but in my experience there are plenty of real world examples backing it up.
You don't have to be like the average. That's actually the point in the whole home-schooling thing. You can do it right. Its clearly not hard to join social groups; look at all the people already in those groups! They did it.
I'd not take the failings of some, as a condemnation of the whole practice. The only one who matters to you is you - can you do it? Start with a small step - join a group with your student, see if the quality of social interaction is different from their public school experience. How do you tell? You ask your student.
Pedantic: its a myth that 'home schooling' shorts social interaction. The only thing that shorts social interaction is ... failing to provide social interaction.
Or pedantic: it's an observation that "home schooling" correlates well with shorting social interaction. Why is left as an exercise to the interested reader.
Well, taking them out of school 'changes' social interaction, not home-schooling per se. I deny its 'shorting' anything.
Ok, its shorting the danger, bad hygiene and bad social interaction part. But done right its adding real social skills (teamwork, leadership, public service), keeping her healthier and demonstrating real social skills.
Because school, especially middle school, is not showcasing social skills you want her to learn. Cliques, ostracizing, bullying, humiliation are lessons to be sure. But they can stunt growth, particularly in the very young.
I am not trying to be offensive, but I have never ever understood how can home schooling possibly work. The sheer amount of knowledge that is covered at school seems like way too much for a parent or even two to teach. How can you give your child expert knowledge of physics, mathematics, history, biology, foreign language of choice and sports? Or do I understand how it all works wrongly? Where I come from home schooling is incredibly rare(partially because it's illegal, unless you have a disability).
Art, sports, machine shop - you turn to professionals for these. But for the rest, any well-educated adult is able to teach up to middle school for instance.
It becomes harder in high school. Many home-schooled students attend regular high school when they are ready for it. And they are ready years earlier than those in the state-sponsored track.
Don't imagine that the average parent can teach a class of 30 better than a trained teacher. Nor can they tutor a single student better. But neither of those things is happening.
The average parent can tutor a single student better than a trained teacher can teach a class of 30 (or 40). That's the tradeoff you have as a parent. And yes, you sure can do better.
Consider: if that teacher did nothing but give individual attention to students all day for 5 hours, your student would get 10 minutes of individual attention per day. You can do that in the first 10 minutes of your home-school day. You can do 10 times better than that. In fact home-school 'school days' are generally just an hour or two, during which the student progresses further than the public-school student does in 5 hours.
Oh yes I agree that if each teacher gave you their undivided attention it would have been fantastic. But while I could teach my child maths or physics quite well, I would not know nearly enough history or biology to even start. So I would need to stop working and consider education of my child to be my primary job. I think that's a massive sacrifice that's completely unnecessary, but hey, that's just my own opinion - maybe there are home-schooling parents who work full time at the same time,but I can't see it work. And if they are not working,but staying home to teach their children then the net benefit to society is.....negative? That's just my guess though.
Or just get a good curriculum and follow it. You only have to be 1 day ahead on the lessons to teach. We're talking 6-12 year olds. You can read from the book, watch the videos with them, talk through your own experiences.
And its just an hour or two a day. Doesn't have to cramp your career at all. Or you can team up with others in your community, take a day a week and do what you know, leave the rest to the others. Now your child is in a group of 4 or 5, still manageable, still valuable to have the close attention of their teachers.
So essentially.......create your own school, use people in the community as teachers, and still call it "home schooling"? I am sorry,but I don't see it that way. And with most careers working as they are, if you spend 2 hours per day, you either have to give the lessons very early in the morning or very late in the day - both are horrible for children. And then you run into the same problems regular teachers do - when do you check homework? It will take you non-trivial amount of time which you don't have if you work full time.
School requires a structure, a time and place and schedule or its easy to get off track. So sure, create a school.
Very early in the morning is a great way to start the day. Young kids are never brighter than in the early morning.
If its not worth the effort to work full-time and add in home-schooling, then I'm sorry but it may not work for you. It sure does work easier if somebody in the household works part-time. I should say, works outside the home part-time, and works in the home part-time. Because the more you put into it, the more you get out.
It depends on the weight you give your kids in your life I guess. And the condition of your local schools. Maybe its not a problem where you are.
But if your schools are not the best, its a tragedy to consign your valuable child to a 6-year sentence in a rough environment. With a half-strength education and a poor start to life.
Most of the learning in school is taken from the material in the text books. So home schooling only requires an adult facilitator that can assist on moving that book knowledge to the brain of the student. Now that in itself is a skill that not every parent has. In those cases, the student, if successful, will figure out how to learn from the books.
Also much of home schooling is done as a correspondence course, which typically comes from a private school (these schools, usually religious in nature, have regular classrooms, and have home-schooled students which are considered part of the class, and they have periodic meetups available for field trips and stuff). In these cases there is a teaching staff to back up the parent, which provides homework and testing material, and sometimes phone support too.
Why do you expect parents to turn kids into experts in all these subjects, when public school is not reaching anywhere near that goal?
And who said kids must know those exact topics and not others? Why do you think when you have the liberty to teach your kids about the world at home, that you still need to follow the government curriculum?
On that topic: home-schooling opens up many opportunities unavailable to public school. Biology can include raising goats, space permitting. Gardening, cooking, beekeeping. Math can be integrated with gardening, carpentry, planning outings. Social studies can dovetail with public service, community events, food drives. Its all fair and all education.
Well I would expect my child to be taught biology by someone who has a higher degree in that subject, a degree which I myself don't have so I don't feel qualified to teach it. And I would like the government curriculum to be applied because I pay for it in my taxes, so I equate home schooling with an all out anarchism.
And I have my mind fully opened to the idea of home schooling - I just have not seen a single compelling argument for it yet. If such is provided I will support the idea fully - but for now for me it looks like it's just a waste of time and money.
There's little biology in elementary school (planting the seed in the cup). The government curriculum is available to home-schoolers for free; your school district is required to provide a copy to you if asked. So no problems there.
The money is a sunk cost, no getting that back. And the real waste; the real cost to you is the education or lack of one that your child receives.
If you don't value your child over your tax bill, then maybe home-schooling isn't for you. Just lob your kid into the public school and feel like you're getting a bargain; I sure won't be there to stop you.
Maybe it's just a difference in how things are done in different countries. In mine private schools are almost non-existent, and those that exist have a really bad reputation for basically giving out diplomas for money. There is a broad selection of public schools, and where I grew up(city of only 15,000) there were 10 different schools,and you could either go to a one which was bad with education or one which was consistently in top 50 in the entire country. Every single one of them free. That's what I mean when I say that I pay for education in my taxes - every level of education over here is free, including higher education(so colleges and universities too) - not using it and resorting to home schooling seems borderline foolish.
Free is a temptation I'm sure. Education in America through College is 'free' too, in the same sense.
But if you can afford the time and effort, then home-schooling is a whole different process with a substantially different goal. Instead of babysitting its about engaging your youth in lifelong learning. Its got the advantages of personal attention and customized plans. The child is relieved of the risks of institutionalization, while taking advantage of the facilities as needed.
Its not such a radical notion, to manage the education part of your child's life in much the same way you provide food and housing. In America, home-schooling before the modern age had a different name - it was called 'schooling'.
> How can you give your child expert knowledge of physics, mathematics, history, biology, foreign language of choice and sports?
Who comes out of high school with "expert knowledge" in anything?!
The same could be said for a lot of university degrees for that matter.
Public education has only been a "normal" thing for a century and a half or so. It's certainly not the only way to turn out a competent adult, and that's assuming it actually does, which is becoming more and more questionable.
Sorry, I might have phrased that sentence wrong - by "give child expert knowledge" I meant that the person teaching has to be an expert,not that the child has to become one. If you are teaching your child about something that you haven't received proper education in, then what, do you expect to be learning as you go? That even sounds ridiculous, and I am pretty sure it is.
For elementary-age teaching, you really only have to be one lesson ahead. Which as an adult is easy/trivial. Its not expert knowledge you're providing; its training in how to learn, methodical approaches to study, and a lively interest in a variety of topics. And the topic of course, which is pretty much reading, writing and arithmetic. Which at that level if you haven't received proper education in, yes you should consider not home schooling.
Most classes don't require an expert-level of knowledge and some teachers are completely incompetent, especially prior to high school. I had a science teacher in junior high that did not believe in evolution.
School is not just for teaching, it also accomplishes the task of keeping the kids safe - and everyone else safe from the kids - while the parents are working.
Given that both parents are working in developed countries, this is very important.
School as babysitter is probably the place they fail the most. They fail to keep your kid safe from other sociopathic kids. They fail to occupy them sufficiently. They fail to feed them well.
If your public school were a babysitter, you'd fire them.
What if driverless cars can call upon a network of remote human drivers that can, in the case of computer confusion, take over and drive the car through the troublesome area? Sort of like an on-demand remote pilot, drone style.
That's actually what I figured this article was about, based on the title.
I think Volvo is working on such a concept - a human driver in the front-most car, with other cars following in a train. Cars can join and leave the train as their occupiers want. This is envisioned for use on the freeway, no idea of the actual development progress or if it's just a concept.
Iowa has been part of this at our National Advanced Driving Simulator institution. When I was in school decades ago it was all the rage. But freeways still aren't automated nor regulated enough to permit automatic driving.
Lately they've been turning their attention to more pressing needs, like learning how to help the handicapped drive.
I think the problem is just "automated". "Regulation" can't solve the problem of humans being just plain too slow to deal with that sort of scenario. It's a bad idea for humans to draft each other today; fuel economy gains will be offset by all the other negative effects. It's not ever clear to me that automation can solve the problem either; people imagining complicated driving arrangements often seem to forget that there will still be variances in cars. It does no good to build a 50-car train on the highway if car #34 turns out to have 15% less effective brakes and in the slightest emergency stop damages 15 cars in front of it.
If that sounds absurd, it's not. If you're trying to take advantage of the computer driving to run up against your safety margin, that has further effects. Sure, most of the time the computerized cars could in fact drive mere inches from each other's bumpers, but in an emergency situation this means you have no margin. You can't both spend your margin and have it when you need it.
If anything I expect robotic cars to end up being more cautious than humans in the end. Automated cars will be able to precisely calculate the risks of given driving behaviors just by their nature, and I seriously doubt that car companies are going to have any stomach for permitting their cars to engage in complicated gas-saving car behaviors that will provably be more dangerous than driving safely, which I suspect will look rather a lot like what highways do now, except with less variance in the speeds.
One of the things I'm really curious about is whether during a winter storm the cars will simply refuse to drive. That will be an interesting cultural change up here where snow is actually a thing.
"Problems that humans will have to assist with" aren't randomly & evenly distributed. For instance, compared to what one good winter storm would do, for most of the year your "emergency drivers" will be twiddling their thumbs.
Also, the distribution of the problems themselves are going to be very time sensitive. When the car yells "Oh crap, I need a human!", you're looking at at least 5 seconds for a human to respond. Even ignoring the "take a number" problem, which pushes that number arbitrarily high during times of high load. Whatever problem resulted in the car yelling "I need a human!" is probably resolved one way or another before the human gets there, because physics isn't waiting. If the car persistently needs a human, the answer is not to remote-drive the car but to stop driving entirely, so it's only the transient issues that matter.
Basically, I'm not clear on what problem this solves.
Minimum wage is a ban on jobs. It means the government passes a law forbidding people from selling their labor for less than $X.
Before you defend minimum wage, you should try and come up with a coherent explanation as to how is it that any good can come from curtailing people's freedoms by prohibiting them from setting their own prices for the labor they wish to sell.
What, to encourage automation instead of using humans? If it really is cheaper to use humans there's no reason to prevent that, there are plenty of places we need automation that will cause technology to keep advancing. Better to let the market chose humans or automation as it wills (and then buff up the social safety net if this throws too many people out of work).
What would be the good or service sold in order to generate the wealth to be distributed to all humans as basic wage?
And who would be the generous folks doing all the work to produce those goods and services, while being OK with sharing, with everyone, the goods (i.e. money) that they trade their goods for?
In a lot of ways, money is a measure of inefficiency. For example, if everyone had the education, experience and time to repair their own vehicles/homes etc, they wouldn't have to pay someone else to do it. We would see the costs of those services decrease, along with the income of people who would otherwise provide them.
We're seeing this all over in the economy with Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc. As better rapid prototyping, artificial general intelligence, and moneyless transactions like BitCoin become mainstream, there will be less and less exchange of money.
However, the overall wealth created in the economy will only increase. We're rapidly approaching a point in time (well before the singularity) where human labor can't compete with automation. We can stick with the current system of capitalism where all of the gains go to a few at the top and everyone else is in a race to the bottom to preserve their jobs. Or..
We can adopt a system that works to maximize the social good instead of production, profits, influence, things that we might think of as 20th century goals. My current favorite alternative is cooperativism, where the workers own the means of production so there is no need for unions. One example is WinCo, which simultaneously provides lower prices than Walmart and higher wages/benefits to its employees because it doesn’t spend exorbitant amounts on advertising or dividends (which tend to run 15-30% of a for-profit corporation’s overhead, sometimes more).
Ironically one of the biggest problems with cooperativism is the lack of community ownership. So a company like Valve can be regarded as the epitome of cooperativism, where the workers can potentially make billions of dollars and the community makes nothing other than taxes. In many cases even those are waived, for example in Boise where I live, Micron and hp get enormous tax waivers to attract them. Some cities even pay corporations bonuses to move there.
So the only solution that I see is to raise taxes on businesses and to abandon the idea of corporate profits so that high income individuals pay the tax rates that the US enjoyed in its highest growth decades. That would mean a readjustment of our tax brackets to match inflation since then. I would suggest few or no taxes at or below the median individual income of roughly $40,000 per year, and then use a logarithmic scale beyond that. If it was base 2, then to double one’s net income, they would need to make 4 times as much, so $160,000 per year instead of $80,000. They would pay a tax of $80,000 on that or 50%. To make 4 times median, they would have to make $640,000 per year, and pay $480,000 in taxes or 75%. If base 2 seems too high, then society would vote on which base is most fair, probably settling on something similar to what we use today below $250,000 and eliminating the loopholes above that. This is basically a flat tax in a nonlinear system.
That way we get the wage/innovation benefits of a cooperative and the social benefit of a public income stream. As cooperatives become larger, they would have a choice to pay their workers in innovation (providing free food and benefits like Google) or pay society at large through taxes if they choose cash. In other words, society gets a win-win, because non-cash innovation is the stuff of Star Trek, and even cash is still cash.
The US GDP is $16 trillion, so spread over the 160 million workers, that’s roughly $100,000 per person. The missing $60,000 reflects our wealth inequality, which means we could switch to this system today and give everyone a basic income of $40,000 and the rich would have $20,000 to spare. In other words, tax policy alone could provide for everyone right now (the way they do it in social democracies like Finland) but since the US seems averse to that, I expect cooperativism to be the path of least resistance, meaning that capitalism will eventually adopt it as the social ills of vast wealth inequality become unpalatable and we seek a peaceful reconc...
Your seeing money as a measure of inefficiency is based on flawed premises, notwithstanding your pre-emptive "in a lot of ways" self-cut slack.
Money is just another product, and in that sense it isn't special. People sell their money for goods and services when they deem it profitable to them. For instance, I could build my own house, but the time required to learn and then build it is more than the time it takes me to trade my (preferred) labor for money, then use that money to trade for a housemaker's (preferred) labor, because people are better (ie. more efficient) at what they prefer to do. The housemaker accepts to trade their labor for money because they also want things for which it is more profitable for the housemaker to build a house for money and then trade that money for what they want. The process of trading something with someone else for something you prefer results in what we call profit.
This also means when you say "moneyless transactions like BitCoin", you're mistaken; bitcoin is money. Money is any product for which there is a large enough network of people willing to accept that product as payment for labor. So the rise of BitCoin won't decrease the exchange rate of money, because BitCoin will become money by definition, since it will be used by people to arbitrage their time in a profitable way as explained in the previous paragraph.
Then you say wealth will increase because machines can make things. But the more you have of something, the more its value goes down. This is supply and demand. So you don't get automatic wealth just because machines can produce, for instance, a bunch of tires, and a bunch of cars, if there's not enough people wanting those cars with tires to self-drive them around. That means customers will assign less value to tires and cars, as the overabundance of tires and cars drive their own prices down.
I haven't heard of WinCo, but if you're saying they're more profitable than Walmart, then I should hope they drive Walmart out of business. I have no hatred for Walmart, mind you; but I do have a love for better things, and charging cheaper prices than competitors while making more money seems to me like a win-win for everyone involved. If WinCo's business model really works, and yet it hasn't displaced Walmart, and assuming what you say is true, then I'm lead to believe other forces (likely regulatory) are keeping this outcome from being brought about. I'd appreciate if you could educate me as to why WinCo stores aren't popping up everywhere and displacing Walmart (or maybe they are and I'm ignorant).
I'm still having trouble understanding how you got so quickly to the conclusion that "the solution that I see is to raise taxes". I also find it weird that you say things like "the community makes nothing other than taxes". The community is constituted of people. People can make money by selling their labor. Why do they expect Valve to work for them? I'm confused.
Also when you talk about US's high tax rates (70-90%) in its highest growth decades (1950s and 60s), you should make sure to mention that they also had more loopholes than we have today, which means in effect that companies in general were paying nowhere near the official tax rate in taxes (they were paying around 30%). See [1] for a page with links to the studies. This is one of the most common economics history fallacy floating around today.
Your analysis of spreading over GDP to the population don't take into account the change effect; that once you do that, people's behaviors change unexpectedly in a way that you can't guarantee that the GDP will remain anywhere close to what it is. Numbers look into the past, not the future. The GDP now only means how much was produced given the variables in place. If the variables were different (eg. more income distribution) then the outcome would be different (either more or less, or the same for different reasons). But ...
You make a lot of valid points and I’m not trying to argue against them, because they do apply to today’s world. My main concern though is:
But the more you have of something, the more its value goes down. This is supply and demand.
This is the foundation of modern economics, but remarkably it isn’t true. A carrot is always worth the value of a carrot. Maybe we assign it a monetary value based on scarcity, but I’m talking about the intrinsic value of stuff. We make more and more stuff every year, but the average US citizen is not seeing his or her wealth increase. The stuff is being hoarded in the hands of a select few, which is the end result of free market capitalism if it isn’t regulated to provide a fair playing field. This bothers progressives to no end, but I think libertarians rather enjoy that outcome.
I don’t think the two ideologies will ever find common ground, so I’ve been trying to look beyond all of this and find a path to a Star Trek economy. We’re approaching full automation within 1 or 2 decades, and the singularity no later than 3 or 4 (barring a global disaster or political interference). Already today the US has perhaps 2-3 times more stuff than it needs. More empty houses than homeless, for example. The cost of food is inverted, so that resource-intensive products like meat cost less than vegetables. Automobiles have an arbitrary value, depreciating 50% as they’re driven off a lot. We basically waste more than most of the rest of the planet earns. We can analyze the reasons behind this to no end, meanwhile 6 billion people are living a subsistence lifestyle that would be like slavery to us.
Anyway, I don’t see WinCo ever toppling Walmart. It has more to do with regulatory capture and monopoly than quality of service though. WinCo has a rather narrow niche and isn’t willing to do the strong-arming to have a presence in every city. They aren’t trying to maximize profits either. But I do think employee ownership is the next big thing. The costs to form a business are lower than ever, and the great failure of banks to provide seed capital has caused attention to turn to pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We just don’t need bosses anymore, or venture capital for that matter, which means we don’t need investors or the burden of paying dividends.
But it worries me that all of this emphasis on self-actualization is promoting selfishness. The “I’ve got mine” mentality is reminiscent of the Michael Douglas Wall Street days and I find it distasteful. I don’t trust the majority of people who’ve made it to do the right thing and give something back to the community that got them there. So I prefer to leave it in the hands of the people and just vote for increased pay by raising taxes. We could double taxes tomorrow and pass a moratorium on government spending and raise everyone’s income by $10,000 ($3 trillion divided by 300 million citizens) as a basic income. In other words, most people would see an increase in income if taxes were raised. This is counterintuitive, but what happened from roughly 1940 to 1980. Unfortunately a basic income was not in the picture, so most of the wealth created was in the form of public works. Now those roads, bridges, dams etc are crumbling because we’ve slashed government spending to unsustainable levels.
I’ve heard all of the arguments about how if we give everyone more money, inflation goes up. That turns out to be one of the great fallacies of all time and an easy way to get people to vote against their own self-interest. I worked at a business that charged $99/hr and paid the employees $15/hr. Doubling everyone’s pay is more likely to mean taking $15 per employee out of the boss’s pocket than doubling prices. This appears to be true across the board in most industries today (wages as a percentage of business overhead are lower than ever), and is an impetus behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Well, this has become completely political now and I’m probably...
I guess a counter-argument against this idea would be all of the restrictions on commercial drivers. I think truck drivers are only allowed to drive so many hours per day.
Imagine self driving trucks could drive through the night, 24 hours per day. That alone could make quite a difference.
If the article is right and the cost of human labor really does fall, isn't it conceivable that you'd see teams of drivers driving day and night in shifts? (This would be much like pilots on long-haul flights).
Well a driver less car is certainly more expensive than the uber provided driver if your ignore the costs of the drivers car, the costs of getting them to the age the can drive, teaching them to drive, and on and on and on.
The issue I see is that driver less cars have to be better than the better than average driver. Equal to an average driver is not sufficient. Even an average driver can tell the difference between a cardboard box and a block of concrete in the road, can follow detour signs, and more.
Driver less cars and public transportation may end up either competing or playing off each other. Who knows. Though I would expect driver less buses and semi trucks far sooner than individual cars - there is at least a market fo those. Heck I see still drives on trains, I guess until we can end that position how do we expect cars to go it alone? (and train drivers are responsible for some major accidents both with people and cargo)
Not fair! You don't get to count the entire cost of raising a child, in the cost of a human driver. Just the marginal cost of convincing an adult to take on the job of 'driver'.
Driverless cars are better because they are available. Recently here (on HN) was a post about why you can't find a taxi in the rain. (The answer was demand.) But another part is, many cabs are parked in the garage most of the time. Because drivers work only a few hours a day, and are not on-call during peak demand hours like rainstorms.
Automated cabs could be scheduled and deployed minute by minute. That's a clear win.
> The real win will be getting all the idle passenger cars out of parking garages/lots and freeing up all that space imo.
That space is of trivial importance compared to limited road space. Roads need to be used as efficiently as possible, as there's only so much asphalt/concrete between two points.
> Heck I see still drives on trains, I guess until we can end that position how do we expect cars to go it alone? (and train drivers are responsible for some major accidents both with people and cargo)
I've always wondered why there hasn't been more progress on this front. Driverless trains have been around for 50 years now [0]. Anyone care to comment further?
At least here in Minneapolis, a good portion of the train operates down the middle of public streets. It follows red lights and has to deal with people pulling into intersections waiting on a turn signal, stupid pedestrians, etc.
Even WITH drivers two people (that I know of) have been hit in the last two months. The train line wasn't set up with driverless uses in mind in the first place, and the city is likely worried about liability and cost in switching over. Even if the number of accidents goes down with full automation, cities aren't likely to believe that until enough other places prove it for them.
Sure, but wouldn't automation provide something more? If people know it's automatic, they're less enclined to assume the driver will stop; There is also less risk that the computer-driver is at fault; and last but not least, the video of the accident could be tweeted immediately so everyone is convinced that the biker/pedestrian/car is at fault. As opposed to human drivers, who are more reluctant to be filmed because it invades their privacy.
My comment was more aimed separate railways - what you have sounds more like a tram. Here they are building a new tramline, and there has already been a collision with a car before it even opened :D
Also, before we get to driverless cars, how about smarter traffic lights, that can say "ok, these guys are waiting for no reason. Instant green!" Smaller, easier problem, super helpful.
A driverless train needs to be entirely grade-separated, which generally restricts it to metros. Big cities generally have legacy metros where it would be difficult and expensive to update signaling to allow automated operation. And driverless metros generally still need a train operator to handle the doors and passenger safety, so the train/signaling upgrades are mostly worthwhile when the line is so busy that being able to run a couple more trains per hour pays off.
For me, the driverless car isn't about providing a chauffeur service that is otherwise too expensive. That's a nice side benefit. To me, the main benefit is safety, as automated systems can be more 'alert' at all times, and have carefully tuned algorithms to know what the safe limits are, and keep enough 'slack' in the system to react etc etc. Automated cars are consistent drivers.
>At the same time firms like Uber are making the use of hired cars cheaper and more convenient
More convenient maybe, but I was under the impression that Uber was significantly more expensive than hailing a cab? (This is based on what I have read, as I don't live or visit anywhere near where Uber has services.)
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadThat said, this looks like a reply to Slate's recent article: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/...
What I immediately thought on reading the headline, without realizing we were diving into "robots are taking our jobs!" was this: how about people sitting at home driving our cars for us? If the packet was dropped or latency got high, the car would slow/stop/switch-to-auto-cruise. Badda boom, badda bing, you have the best of both worlds.
And it gets better. Since you're using real humans to drive, you can take the sensor input and match it up with the real-world driving patterns to try to tease out some edge case behaviors. It'd be like Uber with your own car.
This reminds me of a recent decision that was made by a fellow parent. They have 2 young kids. 1 in kindergarten and 1 in daycare. The oldest is a smart young girl. In fact she often gets bored during class because she already knows the material. Because of this she gets in a little trouble for goofing around.
Her parents came to the decision that because she knows the material and is goofing around, they are not going to work with their youngest as much as they did with her. That way he will be ready for kindergarten.
I feel this irrational decision shares the same thought process as deciding to pick cheaper manual labor over advanced technology. But I do understand that we may eventually need some jobs to keep all us busy and active. But lets now slow down our education to do so.
I don't think you can call this irrational, it's just accepting of human behaviour.
Outings, sports, music etc. are great but not enough on their own. For a lot of people doing home schooling, it must be difficult to arrange for several hours most days in the company a largish group of children with varied backgrounds and personalities. Not having this can make it difficult for children to develop socially.
But in my experience, many parents who home school mostly fail on this "not hard" task. So maybe it is harder than you're making out? Or maybe my sample set isn't very good, it's not like I've done a broad study, I'm just taking this from families and adults (who were home schooled) that I know personally.
This may be a bit of unfair stereotype, but in my experience there are plenty of real world examples backing it up.
I'd not take the failings of some, as a condemnation of the whole practice. The only one who matters to you is you - can you do it? Start with a small step - join a group with your student, see if the quality of social interaction is different from their public school experience. How do you tell? You ask your student.
You said "it's a myth", maybe you really meant "it doesn't have to be that way".
The latter is clearly true.
Because school, especially middle school, is not showcasing social skills you want her to learn. Cliques, ostracizing, bullying, humiliation are lessons to be sure. But they can stunt growth, particularly in the very young.
It becomes harder in high school. Many home-schooled students attend regular high school when they are ready for it. And they are ready years earlier than those in the state-sponsored track.
Don't imagine that the average parent can teach a class of 30 better than a trained teacher. Nor can they tutor a single student better. But neither of those things is happening.
The average parent can tutor a single student better than a trained teacher can teach a class of 30 (or 40). That's the tradeoff you have as a parent. And yes, you sure can do better.
Consider: if that teacher did nothing but give individual attention to students all day for 5 hours, your student would get 10 minutes of individual attention per day. You can do that in the first 10 minutes of your home-school day. You can do 10 times better than that. In fact home-school 'school days' are generally just an hour or two, during which the student progresses further than the public-school student does in 5 hours.
And its just an hour or two a day. Doesn't have to cramp your career at all. Or you can team up with others in your community, take a day a week and do what you know, leave the rest to the others. Now your child is in a group of 4 or 5, still manageable, still valuable to have the close attention of their teachers.
Very early in the morning is a great way to start the day. Young kids are never brighter than in the early morning.
If its not worth the effort to work full-time and add in home-schooling, then I'm sorry but it may not work for you. It sure does work easier if somebody in the household works part-time. I should say, works outside the home part-time, and works in the home part-time. Because the more you put into it, the more you get out.
It depends on the weight you give your kids in your life I guess. And the condition of your local schools. Maybe its not a problem where you are.
But if your schools are not the best, its a tragedy to consign your valuable child to a 6-year sentence in a rough environment. With a half-strength education and a poor start to life.
Also much of home schooling is done as a correspondence course, which typically comes from a private school (these schools, usually religious in nature, have regular classrooms, and have home-schooled students which are considered part of the class, and they have periodic meetups available for field trips and stuff). In these cases there is a teaching staff to back up the parent, which provides homework and testing material, and sometimes phone support too.
And who said kids must know those exact topics and not others? Why do you think when you have the liberty to teach your kids about the world at home, that you still need to follow the government curriculum?
Open up your mind.
And I have my mind fully opened to the idea of home schooling - I just have not seen a single compelling argument for it yet. If such is provided I will support the idea fully - but for now for me it looks like it's just a waste of time and money.
The money is a sunk cost, no getting that back. And the real waste; the real cost to you is the education or lack of one that your child receives.
If you don't value your child over your tax bill, then maybe home-schooling isn't for you. Just lob your kid into the public school and feel like you're getting a bargain; I sure won't be there to stop you.
But if you can afford the time and effort, then home-schooling is a whole different process with a substantially different goal. Instead of babysitting its about engaging your youth in lifelong learning. Its got the advantages of personal attention and customized plans. The child is relieved of the risks of institutionalization, while taking advantage of the facilities as needed.
Its not such a radical notion, to manage the education part of your child's life in much the same way you provide food and housing. In America, home-schooling before the modern age had a different name - it was called 'schooling'.
Who comes out of high school with "expert knowledge" in anything?!
The same could be said for a lot of university degrees for that matter.
Public education has only been a "normal" thing for a century and a half or so. It's certainly not the only way to turn out a competent adult, and that's assuming it actually does, which is becoming more and more questionable.
Given that both parents are working in developed countries, this is very important.
If your public school were a babysitter, you'd fire them.
No. Humans are emotional.
Emotions are complex, and appear irrational, but that is just because we have barely scratched the surface in understanding emotion.
That's actually what I figured this article was about, based on the title.
Lately they've been turning their attention to more pressing needs, like learning how to help the handicapped drive.
If that sounds absurd, it's not. If you're trying to take advantage of the computer driving to run up against your safety margin, that has further effects. Sure, most of the time the computerized cars could in fact drive mere inches from each other's bumpers, but in an emergency situation this means you have no margin. You can't both spend your margin and have it when you need it.
If anything I expect robotic cars to end up being more cautious than humans in the end. Automated cars will be able to precisely calculate the risks of given driving behaviors just by their nature, and I seriously doubt that car companies are going to have any stomach for permitting their cars to engage in complicated gas-saving car behaviors that will provably be more dangerous than driving safely, which I suspect will look rather a lot like what highways do now, except with less variance in the speeds.
One of the things I'm really curious about is whether during a winter storm the cars will simply refuse to drive. That will be an interesting cultural change up here where snow is actually a thing.
Also, the distribution of the problems themselves are going to be very time sensitive. When the car yells "Oh crap, I need a human!", you're looking at at least 5 seconds for a human to respond. Even ignoring the "take a number" problem, which pushes that number arbitrarily high during times of high load. Whatever problem resulted in the car yelling "I need a human!" is probably resolved one way or another before the human gets there, because physics isn't waiting. If the car persistently needs a human, the answer is not to remote-drive the car but to stop driving entirely, so it's only the transient issues that matter.
Basically, I'm not clear on what problem this solves.
Before you defend minimum wage, you should try and come up with a coherent explanation as to how is it that any good can come from curtailing people's freedoms by prohibiting them from setting their own prices for the labor they wish to sell.
And who would be the generous folks doing all the work to produce those goods and services, while being OK with sharing, with everyone, the goods (i.e. money) that they trade their goods for?
I'm just trying to understand your suggestion.
We're seeing this all over in the economy with Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc. As better rapid prototyping, artificial general intelligence, and moneyless transactions like BitCoin become mainstream, there will be less and less exchange of money.
However, the overall wealth created in the economy will only increase. We're rapidly approaching a point in time (well before the singularity) where human labor can't compete with automation. We can stick with the current system of capitalism where all of the gains go to a few at the top and everyone else is in a race to the bottom to preserve their jobs. Or..
We can adopt a system that works to maximize the social good instead of production, profits, influence, things that we might think of as 20th century goals. My current favorite alternative is cooperativism, where the workers own the means of production so there is no need for unions. One example is WinCo, which simultaneously provides lower prices than Walmart and higher wages/benefits to its employees because it doesn’t spend exorbitant amounts on advertising or dividends (which tend to run 15-30% of a for-profit corporation’s overhead, sometimes more).
Ironically one of the biggest problems with cooperativism is the lack of community ownership. So a company like Valve can be regarded as the epitome of cooperativism, where the workers can potentially make billions of dollars and the community makes nothing other than taxes. In many cases even those are waived, for example in Boise where I live, Micron and hp get enormous tax waivers to attract them. Some cities even pay corporations bonuses to move there.
So the only solution that I see is to raise taxes on businesses and to abandon the idea of corporate profits so that high income individuals pay the tax rates that the US enjoyed in its highest growth decades. That would mean a readjustment of our tax brackets to match inflation since then. I would suggest few or no taxes at or below the median individual income of roughly $40,000 per year, and then use a logarithmic scale beyond that. If it was base 2, then to double one’s net income, they would need to make 4 times as much, so $160,000 per year instead of $80,000. They would pay a tax of $80,000 on that or 50%. To make 4 times median, they would have to make $640,000 per year, and pay $480,000 in taxes or 75%. If base 2 seems too high, then society would vote on which base is most fair, probably settling on something similar to what we use today below $250,000 and eliminating the loopholes above that. This is basically a flat tax in a nonlinear system.
That way we get the wage/innovation benefits of a cooperative and the social benefit of a public income stream. As cooperatives become larger, they would have a choice to pay their workers in innovation (providing free food and benefits like Google) or pay society at large through taxes if they choose cash. In other words, society gets a win-win, because non-cash innovation is the stuff of Star Trek, and even cash is still cash.
The US GDP is $16 trillion, so spread over the 160 million workers, that’s roughly $100,000 per person. The missing $60,000 reflects our wealth inequality, which means we could switch to this system today and give everyone a basic income of $40,000 and the rich would have $20,000 to spare. In other words, tax policy alone could provide for everyone right now (the way they do it in social democracies like Finland) but since the US seems averse to that, I expect cooperativism to be the path of least resistance, meaning that capitalism will eventually adopt it as the social ills of vast wealth inequality become unpalatable and we seek a peaceful reconc...
Money is just another product, and in that sense it isn't special. People sell their money for goods and services when they deem it profitable to them. For instance, I could build my own house, but the time required to learn and then build it is more than the time it takes me to trade my (preferred) labor for money, then use that money to trade for a housemaker's (preferred) labor, because people are better (ie. more efficient) at what they prefer to do. The housemaker accepts to trade their labor for money because they also want things for which it is more profitable for the housemaker to build a house for money and then trade that money for what they want. The process of trading something with someone else for something you prefer results in what we call profit.
This also means when you say "moneyless transactions like BitCoin", you're mistaken; bitcoin is money. Money is any product for which there is a large enough network of people willing to accept that product as payment for labor. So the rise of BitCoin won't decrease the exchange rate of money, because BitCoin will become money by definition, since it will be used by people to arbitrage their time in a profitable way as explained in the previous paragraph.
Then you say wealth will increase because machines can make things. But the more you have of something, the more its value goes down. This is supply and demand. So you don't get automatic wealth just because machines can produce, for instance, a bunch of tires, and a bunch of cars, if there's not enough people wanting those cars with tires to self-drive them around. That means customers will assign less value to tires and cars, as the overabundance of tires and cars drive their own prices down.
I haven't heard of WinCo, but if you're saying they're more profitable than Walmart, then I should hope they drive Walmart out of business. I have no hatred for Walmart, mind you; but I do have a love for better things, and charging cheaper prices than competitors while making more money seems to me like a win-win for everyone involved. If WinCo's business model really works, and yet it hasn't displaced Walmart, and assuming what you say is true, then I'm lead to believe other forces (likely regulatory) are keeping this outcome from being brought about. I'd appreciate if you could educate me as to why WinCo stores aren't popping up everywhere and displacing Walmart (or maybe they are and I'm ignorant).
I'm still having trouble understanding how you got so quickly to the conclusion that "the solution that I see is to raise taxes". I also find it weird that you say things like "the community makes nothing other than taxes". The community is constituted of people. People can make money by selling their labor. Why do they expect Valve to work for them? I'm confused.
Also when you talk about US's high tax rates (70-90%) in its highest growth decades (1950s and 60s), you should make sure to mention that they also had more loopholes than we have today, which means in effect that companies in general were paying nowhere near the official tax rate in taxes (they were paying around 30%). See [1] for a page with links to the studies. This is one of the most common economics history fallacy floating around today.
Your analysis of spreading over GDP to the population don't take into account the change effect; that once you do that, people's behaviors change unexpectedly in a way that you can't guarantee that the GDP will remain anywhere close to what it is. Numbers look into the past, not the future. The GDP now only means how much was produced given the variables in place. If the variables were different (eg. more income distribution) then the outcome would be different (either more or less, or the same for different reasons). But ...
But the more you have of something, the more its value goes down. This is supply and demand.
This is the foundation of modern economics, but remarkably it isn’t true. A carrot is always worth the value of a carrot. Maybe we assign it a monetary value based on scarcity, but I’m talking about the intrinsic value of stuff. We make more and more stuff every year, but the average US citizen is not seeing his or her wealth increase. The stuff is being hoarded in the hands of a select few, which is the end result of free market capitalism if it isn’t regulated to provide a fair playing field. This bothers progressives to no end, but I think libertarians rather enjoy that outcome.
I don’t think the two ideologies will ever find common ground, so I’ve been trying to look beyond all of this and find a path to a Star Trek economy. We’re approaching full automation within 1 or 2 decades, and the singularity no later than 3 or 4 (barring a global disaster or political interference). Already today the US has perhaps 2-3 times more stuff than it needs. More empty houses than homeless, for example. The cost of food is inverted, so that resource-intensive products like meat cost less than vegetables. Automobiles have an arbitrary value, depreciating 50% as they’re driven off a lot. We basically waste more than most of the rest of the planet earns. We can analyze the reasons behind this to no end, meanwhile 6 billion people are living a subsistence lifestyle that would be like slavery to us.
Anyway, I don’t see WinCo ever toppling Walmart. It has more to do with regulatory capture and monopoly than quality of service though. WinCo has a rather narrow niche and isn’t willing to do the strong-arming to have a presence in every city. They aren’t trying to maximize profits either. But I do think employee ownership is the next big thing. The costs to form a business are lower than ever, and the great failure of banks to provide seed capital has caused attention to turn to pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We just don’t need bosses anymore, or venture capital for that matter, which means we don’t need investors or the burden of paying dividends.
But it worries me that all of this emphasis on self-actualization is promoting selfishness. The “I’ve got mine” mentality is reminiscent of the Michael Douglas Wall Street days and I find it distasteful. I don’t trust the majority of people who’ve made it to do the right thing and give something back to the community that got them there. So I prefer to leave it in the hands of the people and just vote for increased pay by raising taxes. We could double taxes tomorrow and pass a moratorium on government spending and raise everyone’s income by $10,000 ($3 trillion divided by 300 million citizens) as a basic income. In other words, most people would see an increase in income if taxes were raised. This is counterintuitive, but what happened from roughly 1940 to 1980. Unfortunately a basic income was not in the picture, so most of the wealth created was in the form of public works. Now those roads, bridges, dams etc are crumbling because we’ve slashed government spending to unsustainable levels.
I’ve heard all of the arguments about how if we give everyone more money, inflation goes up. That turns out to be one of the great fallacies of all time and an easy way to get people to vote against their own self-interest. I worked at a business that charged $99/hr and paid the employees $15/hr. Doubling everyone’s pay is more likely to mean taking $15 per employee out of the boss’s pocket than doubling prices. This appears to be true across the board in most industries today (wages as a percentage of business overhead are lower than ever), and is an impetus behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Well, this has become completely political now and I’m probably...
Imagine self driving trucks could drive through the night, 24 hours per day. That alone could make quite a difference.
The issue I see is that driver less cars have to be better than the better than average driver. Equal to an average driver is not sufficient. Even an average driver can tell the difference between a cardboard box and a block of concrete in the road, can follow detour signs, and more.
Driver less cars and public transportation may end up either competing or playing off each other. Who knows. Though I would expect driver less buses and semi trucks far sooner than individual cars - there is at least a market fo those. Heck I see still drives on trains, I guess until we can end that position how do we expect cars to go it alone? (and train drivers are responsible for some major accidents both with people and cargo)
Driverless cars are better because they are available. Recently here (on HN) was a post about why you can't find a taxi in the rain. (The answer was demand.) But another part is, many cabs are parked in the garage most of the time. Because drivers work only a few hours a day, and are not on-call during peak demand hours like rainstorms.
Automated cabs could be scheduled and deployed minute by minute. That's a clear win.
The real win will be getting all the idle passenger cars out of parking garages/lots and freeing up all that space imo.
That space is of trivial importance compared to limited road space. Roads need to be used as efficiently as possible, as there's only so much asphalt/concrete between two points.
You also should count the opportunity cost of the contribution that the adult could make if they weren't spending the time being a driver.
I've always wondered why there hasn't been more progress on this front. Driverless trains have been around for 50 years now [0]. Anyone care to comment further?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
Even WITH drivers two people (that I know of) have been hit in the last two months. The train line wasn't set up with driverless uses in mind in the first place, and the city is likely worried about liability and cost in switching over. Even if the number of accidents goes down with full automation, cities aren't likely to believe that until enough other places prove it for them.
And ATO requires a level of competence in operations and maintenance that not all organizations are capable of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_22,_2009_Washington_Metro...
For the same reason I don't see why ubiquitous driverless buses should come before driverless taxis.
More convenient maybe, but I was under the impression that Uber was significantly more expensive than hailing a cab? (This is based on what I have read, as I don't live or visit anywhere near where Uber has services.)