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Comment by iofj | Hacker News Reader

One can only hope so. Or that they have some other major disadvantage. This is going to prevent a large amount of people from earning a living. Additionally it's going to kill a decent segment of SMBs who do truck driving and cargo transport on roads.

One more low-skilled job disappearing without replacement.

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Long-term, jobs disappearing is not a bad thing. It really sucks for the people who are left without a means of supporting themselves, but do we, as a society, really want to use humans for jobs that machines can do equally well? I for one don't want to work just for works sake. Very few jobs are actually enjoyable and those jobs that we can currently replace with machines tend not to be of that kind.

Tech moves on and usually displaces labour but so far hasn't created mass unemployment. Instead it's made us richer. At any point in time people are concerned by the job destruction caused by progress, but after it has happened rarely want to rewind and go back to the old ways.

I'm curious - if you think this is a bad thing, are there technological innovations which have already happened which you would want to undo? How many jobs do you think it would create? GPS could provide be a good thought experiment.

> Instead it's made us richer.

some of us, anyway

  http://www.cbsnews.com/news/census-data-half-of-us-poor-or-low-income/

I wonder what it means when half of the richest country in the world lives in poverty..

There are clearly serious problems with wealth and income distribution. However, the size of the pie and the distribution of it are different problems (although not independent).

It doesn't follow that by prohibiting technological progress things would be more equal. I'm not sure what the relationship is between income distribution and progress; I think there are probably arguments both ways.

For example, would income inequality be rising even if technological progress was not happening? Probably yes, from my reading of Pikkety. Those with capital would probably continue to accumulate more. But it would affect returns to capital so perhaps it's not so clear cut.

Is income inequality increasing as a result of technological progress? Maybe, I guess? I'd be quite interested to see some real evidence either way because I don't think the answer is intuitive either way.

I know, it is sad we are eliminating all the Ice Carriers with Refrigeration. What ever will we do...

Will you not think of the Blacksmith when you replace your horse with one of these new motor vehicles....

Through out history we have had industries decimated by new technology, do you want to stop progress simply to protect jobs? At what point in history should we have done this? or why is today any different than at any point in our past? Should we time travel all the way back and kill that bastard that invented a way to control fire? Or the Guy that invented the wheel?

The UK's Road Haulage Association, reports a driver shortage of approx. 40k drivers.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/25/lorry-driver-sh...

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