Autonomous vehicles could contribute $1.3T a year to the U.S. economy
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Looking at one of the charts from OP, these kids' parents are horses. What will they do when those jobs don't exist anymore? Will the new "horse" population be reduced? How will they fit into the new economy?
Other than providing childcare for upper middle class families (subsidized by sending their own kids to substandard preschools), most of their jobs will be replaced through automation in less than 10 years. Most of these families are working 40+ hour weeks on minimum wages and still need WIC and other benefits to get groceries and low end govt/city childcare for their kids. I know basic income is an (the?) answer, however I don't see the US getting on board with that idea in the next 10 years.
I sincerely doubt that this timescale is close to true. Even 25 years seems aggressive. Maybe some long distance trucking jobs will be replaced, but I doubt if all that many livery jobs will be replaced within your timeframe.
It's not that I think the technology won't happen -- it's clearly on the way -- I just think it's far more likely to happen as incremental advancements to existing auto technology (e.g. "lane assist", "self parking", etc.), while all of the various regulatory and societal problems sort themselves out. It's already becoming clear that the major automakers are deploying bits and pieces of self-driving tech faster than Google is getting to the glorious, all-robot future.
When you stop to think about all of the things that would have to change in our society to make a "sudden" transition to robot cars (of which the unemployment of a huge number of people is just one factor), it seems wildly implausible, even on a ten-year timeframe. We'll probably go through decades of refinement and expansion of car automation features before the first truly driverless cars roll off the assembly line.
On the other hand, even you admit that "self-driving" tech is already being deployed one way or another.
So I don't think they're particularly comparable.
EDIT to say I was being facetious.
The children (probably a half dozen of them) could not afford land (nor could the parents - land prices were on the rise and was scarce for the first time ever in the states), and farming was on the decline, so they moved to the city. They worked in sweatshops that exploited them for incredible amounts of labor without any workers protections. But because their parents tilled the fields and they bought their crops with the penance from their boss, they adapted to a world without farming.
The industrial revolution was never driven by the farmers hanging up their hoes and moving to the city. That happened, but in small quantity. What happened was that a generation of farmers made a generation of not-farmers and when they died their farms were sold to megafarm corporations rather than tilled by their children because the efficiencies of farming made their plots generate too little crop to support a family.
The difference is that here, the obsoleted class does not have a store of capital to cash out on like the farmers did - when farming died, you liquidated the farm at 50 and lived off the sale until you were 60 and your kids would support you until you died at 70.
This time, the obsoleted class will be 40 year old truck drivers who have done that for twenty years - and they will be left in crisis with no savings and no viable pivot in the economy. It will be interesting.
> the efficiencies of farming made their plots generate too little crop to support a family
That makes no sense
So they would have needed a much greater quantity of crop yield to make the same relative income, and most family farms were not big enough to support it (and the farmers didn't have the savings to afford equipment).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment
This is one of the major reasons you're seeing pushes for basic income. The future simply doesn't have enough jobs to support the amount of people who want them.
Once so much is automated, would it not be feasible and practical to provide basic needs (food, clothing, housing, etc) to every human being?
Also, a politically acceptable alternative to basic income might be Keynesian economics:
-> In one case, the government taxes the middle and upper classes, and gives out that money to everyone -- no strings attached.
-> In Keynesian economics, government similarly hands out money to people, but requires them to do something in return for it.
Both involve high taxes and high government spending. I just realized this similarity between Keynesian economics and basic incomes, and I'm amazed by the parallel.
With Keynesian economics, the governments gets to makes people "do stuff", in return for what would've been "free money" with basic income.
If a government uses this to direct the population towards productive and meaningful endeavors, then could this be better? Government could provide "basic income" to all the unemployed arts graduates by funding the arts. Similarly, we could encourage every smart person to pursue pure research, and then instead of "basic income", fund them to do research!
The environmental problems we are experiencing are mostly an issue of our population relative to the environment. Ultimately there needs to be a population control/reduction mechanism.
It won't be easy, pretty, or likely even ethical but it will happen and it will be a source of great conflict.
The alternative is we end up space ferrying before that happens.
All statistics point to the opposite. Education and higher income correlate with lower number of children.
In countries like India, the educated middle and upper classes have a very low birth rate -- most families have 1 or 2 kids. It usually the poor and uneducated families that have the most kids.
Most developed countries also have a birth rate that is below replacement. As people get more educated, the human population (for whatever reason) seems to be at risk of collapse / rapid shrinkage.
I don't know why educated people chose to have less kids, but that is what the statistics are telling us.
The reality is the social safety net will have to be expanded.
Too many people will be unable to transition this economic turmoil without serious societal problems. It will have to be paid for by higher taxes which will further anger the Republican base in the US which could be problematic.
The simple truth is a large swath of the US is simply going to be living off the dole during the transition period.
Can anyone sketch the logic for me?
Basically all breaks down to capturing more utility from the vehicle. 95% of the time my car sits in a parking spot, 4% of the time I am driving by myself. There are upsides to owning a car but underutilization is not one of them.
Innovation in quick remove interiors seems like it'll be needed.
Then again I am driving a 99 volvo so not exactly living in the lap of luxury. My view on this might be skewed.
"The right to access every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city." -Lewis Mumford
It's like having a really, really big purse or backpack.
Additionally, if I spill something in my car, oh well, maybe I'll steam clean the upholstery after a few months of such spills, but if I spill something in a shared vehicle, that seems worse to me--letting the mess build up for a few months impinges on others.
So basically, people are assuming (or hoping) that the per mile charges on autonomous vehicles will be a lot lower than current per mile options.
For me, the biggest obstacle is that there isn't a car sharing service near me, so I'd like an autonomous car to deliver itself right into my driveway on 5 minutes notice.
Tomorrow: driverless Lyft. Request a Lyft, hop in, ignore traffic entirely while talking or reading; step out at the door of the restaurant. After, request a Lyft while walking out of concert, step out the door of SF Jazz and hop into car(1), read/chat on the way home. The reduction of stress is huge, the whole date is much more enjoyable.
(1) This scenario does reveal a future problem, what happens when a whole bunch of people call for a driverless ride after an event? Does this happen now, are bunches of people competing for Ubers and Lyfts after concerts today? How will we identify ourselves to a _driverless_ car as being the requesting party?
Also, lyft will download the Giants schedule.
They will pay more.
It is a $20k to $30k investment that you leave on the street each night. Major risk. Then you need to find parking. In a crowded city you may even need to pay for parking. You must pay for insurance. If you want to change cities every few years (think across the nation or world, not next town over) you have to sell the thing at a loss or take a road trip over a much faster flight.
Now why would I want any of that when for a small premium I can effectively have a car only when I need it (ride share).
Parking is a pain, that's always been the case in urban areas.
What's interesting though, if auto-cars really end up easily affordable and accident free - and maybe tech industry lobbying encouraging.. Imagine a future where human driven cars are forbidden!
Also, all those words and not one mention of the liability shift to the manufacturer when cars go fully autonomous. That's one of the biggest issues with the transition. Software will have to be near perfect to avoid bankrupting manufacturers through tort suits. (It's not just an insurance premium shift, it's liability for major tort damages in fatal accidents that often bankrupt the responsible party.) So we are more likely to be in a semi-autonomous, driver-assistance world for quite some time. And that invalidates pretty much all of the article which is predicated on driverless vehicles.
Likewise, the glut of minimum wage labor (and the gradual transition of most of the populace into low level service workers) and the lack of well paying careers outside tech going forward, with the propensity to attempt to automate all of it as soon as we are able, means it will keep getting worse.
Point me to any use we will have in the next ten years for just a human being without any specialized training that will see significant enough gains to offset all these obviously continuing declines in workforce participation and available work. And even beyond that - how many tasks are we going to have for anyone but programmers? Is any industry going to grow rather than shrink?
We are going to try our hardest to automate as much of every industry there is as we can. We won't eliminate your doctor in 10 years, but Watson and similar AI will replace 90% of his job, so that one doctor can handle 10 times as many patients as they do now. You might insist on a meatbag barista, but once a barista bot can sense your phone is nearby and makes your coffee for you before you even get to the counter just the way you like it at any location anywhere, most people will much prefer that convenience, and the cheaper coffee is just a nice perk.
All professions are under threat - even programmers are being threatened, not the forward thinkers who found startups or push new ideas, but the cogs that work in big inefficient bureaucratic business software - it is often solving the same problem, that better languages, frameworks, and general solution are working to replace. Local IT admins have died an unsung death in the last five years as cloud infrastructure has taken over the industry, for example.
The list goes on and on.
Edit: ok smart-asses. You're an OTR trucker. This has been your sole career for 25 years. You're laid off because self-driving trucks have eliminated demand for your profession. Now what? Get a job as a Social Media manager?