As Tech Evaporates Jobs, “The Tipping Point Will Be Driverless Trucks”
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
This is not the future. This is last year's technology, operating right now.
It's quite likely that the first trucking to be automated will be to and from container ports.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLf0m3ucV3M [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEk2v4RyFh4
Many people, including most professional drivers, will be happy not to have to do the chore anymore. They don't want or need jobs, they want and need fulfillment of their wants and needs.
Stood next to the monumental task of actually automating the matter around us to please us (which, if our purpose in doing so is good, is a mitzvah), the creation of a system which fulfills these wants and needs without regard to any connection to a "job" seems straightforward and doable.
But the constant drone of "create jobs" at every political debate? The yardsticking of every public policy measure against how many "jobs" it will "create" or "destroy"? A central bank with a mandate not to simply implement fair and simple currency regulations, but to actually manipulate the money supply so as to "create jobs"?
This is not just a discussion; it's an obsession. And I posit that it's as much about a moralistic work ethic (and a bunch of other things) as it is about any sound economic theory.
We need to move on to new ideas about automation, economics, and sustainability.
But they will be substantially different when facing difficult realities of war: those benefits as well may be cut and those people should go to factories, computers, fields, whatever occupation current war needs.
How do you explain a whole generation of people that their allowance will not be paid? How do you tell them that their occupation will be unpleasant? How do you train millions of people discipline, relevant skills, command-and-control?
No major nation wants to lose next war, so we are locked in full employment race.
(sorry for bad english)
A reasonable explanation could be proximity: When the war takes place in their own country, people are more likely to pick up guns instead of waiting for drones to be sent.
If one looks at it from economic-theory or game-theory perspective it sounds like a solution to many problems, nobody knows yet if that would work in practice though, especially on large scale.
As far as I know, open questions that remain are:
- Will we be able to afford it? Sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations can show, that if we introduced i.e UBI in Germany for everybody (80 mil) on a level of minimum wage (1473 E ?), it would eat their federal budget for Ministry of Health and Social Security and Ministry of Economics and Labour
- What would be the unintended consequences? (i.e on small scale uneployment rose by single digits, but we can't really tell what will happen on country scale)
(Land prices go up, as other taxes go down, as you can see on the Swiss/German border. Taxing land rents has no economic deadweight loss, since the supply of land is fixed.)
At the most crude, you could separate natural resources from the rest of the land rights, people already do that.
By the way if memory serves right Germany, which doesn't have general land taxes, already doesn't let you own mineral resources below your land by default. Would be interesting to see what effect that regulation already has on people prospecting.
>- Will we be able to afford it? Sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations can show, that if we introduced i.e UBI in Germany for everybody (80 mil) on a level of minimum wage (1473 E ?), it would eat their federal budget for Ministry of Health and Social Security and Ministry of Economics and Labour
In what way is that an unanswered question?
Every single debate about this has any number of people pointing out that you would adjust taxes so that for most people the UBI + tax increases would be net neutral with perhaps slightly higher marginal taxes at the top.
Every single discussion about UBI also somehow has any number of people pretending this point has never been raised and insisting that the cost of UBI will be UBI_Amount * Population.
This isn't even taking into account the reduction in existing social programs which would presumably be replaced by UBI.
It doesn't really matter what you 'think' about things; they'll happen and there is not very much to do about it; we (humanity) have to come up with a way not to let these (most?) people die in the streets while there are no jobs. And of course, once that is accepted, make sure not everyone hangs themselves or others out of boredom. Not saying this will happen next year, but within 100 years for sure.
Some things, like trucks, will happen faster than others and that's why (parts of) this needs to be fixed now instead of when it already happened.
I for one would be happy when this 'stress of needing to have a job' goes away for future generations: I like what I do and i'll do it forever, but the stress to 'have a job' was pushed way too hard by parents, schools, university and society as a whole. And the 'failure' of not having a job too.
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/disabili...
States love it because it comes out of federal budgets, and feds love it because it's a social security net that doesn't have the pejorative inklings of "welfare."
But what if these wants and needs include contributing to society but there are not enough opportunities to do so?
While many people do jobs out of necessity, they also get an amount of satisfaction out of doing something with a purpose.
At lower real hourly wages. Which is the effect of automation competing with human labor, it doesn't outright destroy jobs, it just reduces the market-clearing price of the forms of labor it is able to compete with.
But seriously, if we have too much people to work why not make scientists from all of them?
1. Change education system with the assumption that the default career is experimental science.
2. Change the workflow so that you don't need to be incredibly smart to prove you can be allowed to measure stuff and write the results down.
3. pay all these people to do science instead if of paying them the guaranteed income.
If we have to waste money at least "waste" them on something useful. Imagine the progress we could make if 50% of population worked as scientists. Imagine how different a society would look.
The problem would be real if society was mostly people that can't have any positive impact on science, but I don't think it's true, especially if we trained everybody with the listed assumptions.
Irrelevant. Which kind of "positive impact on science" would you expect from somebody with an IQ of 100 in the real world, as opposed to your hypothetical "society made up of Einsteins"?
Assign same experiments to 10 different teams all over the world to be sure. Would be actually better than unmotivated incredibly bright people hastily doing these experiments once.
Yes the way we do science would need to change but I think it's for the better. It's not like most of the work post-docs do isn't menial.
The biggest lie of our job-based corporate society is the belief that, unless you're doing a "job", you're not working.
We all tend to over value ourselves. That's probably not a bad thing if it has healthy limits. I have seen people convinced they "add value" when I can find no quantifiable way to justify the cost for the "value" they bring.
Having a paid job means you don't have to rely on the goodwill of someone or something else to get fed.
Automation is stripping the masses of the last speck of power they had.
Please, lie down, make yourself at ease...
How did we deal with horses in the beginning of the 20th century?
Good example for your argument, maybe, but I doubt it's going to win you many converts.
A UBI in Europe could mostly just replace current spending at similar levels, and thus would be comfortable enough in eg Germany or Scandinavia.
While UBI is more administratively efficient than means-tested benefit programs, it also inherently reaches a lot more people with its maximum benefit. I don't think there is any major country (there might be some small ones with a lot of money flowing in from the outside) that could sustainably keep UBI at any comfortable level rather than an alleviating severe poverty level at this time.
I'm pretty sure relying on your bosses to pay you a livable wage is precisely relying on good-will. If you're not able to strike or walk away, they've got no actual reason to do that.
Of course it is. Just like not exploiting people was always straightforward and doable, just like feeding and clothing the poor of the world is doable. Something being doable isn't enough for it to be done, sadly.
While I agree that "chores" are not an end of itself, and think we will always (have to) find things to be creative and skillful about, even if food, shelter and medicine grew on trees, I think everything else staying the same increased automation alone will not lead there. Why would it?
> Let's take robots on assembly lines: If it's used to free up the workforce for more creative work, say, controlling production, making decisions about it, finding creative ways to act and so on, then it's to the good. If it's used as a device to maximize profit and throw people into the trashcan, then it's not good.
-- Noam Chomsky ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kICLG4Zg8s&t=14m49s )
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
-- Stephen Hawking ( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama... )
Let's say we institute a UBI and 50% of jobs are eliminated through automation. Everyone has a basic standard of living, but those who still have jobs (who designs the robot?) have a much better standard of living (they would have to or why work?). Now you have a huge amount of income inequality and 50% of the population can't do a dam thing about their situation because there are no jobs.
The only way to fix that is to redistribute so much wealth that the incentive to work is basically eliminated. I think that's been tried before and it failed horribly.
The point is to raise the level of the bottom to something people can live on safely and with some level of dignity.
And with UBI in particular, it's to shift the impetus of your efforts from basic survival to improving your lifestyle from the lowest common denominator. People make shitty decisions with a gun to their head--with some room to experiment they'll usually be more successful.
Further, they might find other ways to individually create societal value (art, science, invention, philosophy) than just simply making their employer money. The only way you can do that right now is if you're already well-off or if some committee somewhere agrees what you're doing is valuable and subsidizes it. That's not a great way to innovate.
And they might not create value. Some people will sit at the bottom. But that needs to be OK--they do that now anyway while being a distinct drain on a society that wasn't built to accommodate that basic human nature. Nothing is perfect.
Most people work for their own self-validation if you give them a chance, though. Think we've all had that experience during time off where you're eventually compelled to do something productive just so you can know you did something.
So while some people might have their standard of living brought up, many (possible many more than would be brought up) will be forced down with the inability to pull themselves back up because of lack of jobs.
The best people, at least in industries where it fits, will move on to consult on the proper operation of the automation and others will become artisans doing highly crafted versions of what otherwise is mass-automated.
And some might move to other localities where the automation is too expensive to create or support. Automation has a cost relative to the market in which it's created and requires highly skilled people to create and maintain, whereas labor can be paid on a sliding scale based on their local cost of living and usually cost less than automation maintenance. That scales to low budgets better, especially if you don't produce quite so much of something as to hit the break-even point for automation.
UBI, in this context, is a mitigating strategy to keep the rest from becoming welfare recipients while they retrain or retire early. That would be a hell of a lot worse stigma than simply having a lower standing of living.
Automation mostly doesn't "eliminate jobs" (numerically; it certainly might eliminate job categories), it reduces the market clearing price of labor by providing a competing alternative.
Among the features of a mature UBI is replacing the combination of minimum wage and means-tested benefit programs as a means of ensuring that the "fully employed" and the less-fully-employed, respectively, are adequately supported. By displacing minimum wage, it actually reduces the degree to which reducing the market value of labor results in lost jobs.
Now, it doesn't eliminate income or wealth inequality, which is essential to maintain some incentive to engage productively with the economy for those who can, but its not a matter of nobody working, its a matter of mitigating the cost of a narrower class of people having high-value labor while the labor of the masses is increasingly low-value given the alternatives available.
Umm -- what these people are "obsessed" with is feeding their families, paying for their mortgages and their children's education, and perchance, scraping together some semblance of a soft landing for when they hit retirement age (approaching for many of them like an... oncoming truck).
If you have (realistic) proposals for how they're going to manage this (forced) transition, by all means please come forth with them. Portmanteau words aren't going to help.
Duplication isn't even the biggest disadvantage of the current system. I really wish we had an identity with real non-repudiation with our current government structure.
This replaced taxation with inflation, having the positive side effect that it pushes people to favour investment over capital hoarding, but incentivizes dept at the same time.
The effect is actually as follows. It disincentivizes dept because there is no reason for lending (as interest is eaten up by inflation), and at the same time it's actually alleviating crippling dept because the relative worth of the dept (what you could actually buy with that money) diminishes with inflation.
(But this is all orthogonal to the original question.)
If you're asking for it to be meaningful in amount, universal, and additive atop the existing programs, I think you'll find very little support from the working people who will bear the costs.
Right now, lots of poor people face extremely high effective marginal tax rates because they are in a region of income where benefits are phased out gradually. A fused UBI/tax system could be more rational here.
There is a huge gap between Google testing a driverless car, with a person in it for emergencies, and actually seeing hordes of driverless taxis of trucks on our streets.
I can imagine a new trend with bored teenagers. Jump in front of the driverless car or truck and watch it emergency stop. Then run away. Or wait for the news report where all the driverless cars in the city have gone to the same car park because a hacker thought it would be hilarious. Just one truck accident that wipes out a few children and the trucks will be taken off the road. After all, if one truck has the bug then they all do. When a person makes a mistake we don't stop all trucks because we blame the person, when a software version crashes then they all could crash.
I think this is a real issue, even if the driverless issue doesn't happen as soon as some think/fear it will. Technology is encroaching on a wide range of jobs, but this time it's to completely automate them, not simply to augment them.
I do agree with most of your analysis of the driverless car/truck issue though - I think we have a hell of a long way before that becomes commonplace.
When the problem is restricted to self-driving on the interstate highways on fixed routes it is a lot simpler than the problem of general self-driving so we'll get that solved a lot sooner.
Furthermore, there is an even simpler intermediate step, which is to have self-driving trucks that just know how to follow another truck. You then have one leader truck driven by a human, with a line of self-driving trucks follower trucks. This simplifies the problem dramatically, getting rid of almost everything that is hard about self-driving vehicle technology. The limiting factor on when truck trains will be commercially available will be regulatory, not technological.
As for accidents or malfunctions--why can't you stop a column of trucks in the breakdown lane? I'm assuming that the trucks would have at least limited self-parking ability, since that seems to be at least as easy as highway driving for a development standpoint.
We have had these for over a century. They're called trains. :)
I wonder how different the US would have looked if that was the case. It might have also slowed down climate change somewhat, since trains are much more efficient than trucks (about 3x in terms of mile-ton per unit of fuel).
Ain't that some progress
[1] http://users.humboldt.edu/ogayle/Hist%20111%20Images/RR1890....
I'm not sure why it being automated would change how braking physics work. An emergency stop at 50km/h will still result in a minimum 25m braking distance no matter who is behind the seat.
With instantaneous reaction time, the actual braking distance is around 10m unless you jump in front of an escalade or a land rover...
There's been countless other jobs where previously-essential human participation was rendered unnecessary by technology, sometimes with entire social classes finding themselves unemployed; why should this time be any different? How can it be different?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter
Also interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy
EDIT: sorry sent too early
...what changes is the "residual advantage". Until some time ago we assumed machines would only replace people in simple tasks (e.g. mill). Than only repetitive, "mechanic" tasks (i.e. assembly line). Now we realize they can replace in tasks which require some intelligence (i.e. self driving cars) but still assume they won't replace us in some "smarter" jobs. It looks to me like each step is just incremental, I don't see the "tipping" point.
Growth today is almost flat. Interest rates are zero bound. Jobs lost today might not be replaced because... nothing is happening. Or nothing that requires people that is.
> Turnspit Dogs were bred to run on a wheel in order to turn meat so it would cook evenly. Due to the strenuous nature of the work, a pair of dogs would often be worked in shifts. The dogs were also taken to church to serve as foot warmers. One story says that during service at a church in Bath, the Bishop of Gloucester gave a sermon and uttered the line "It was then that Ezekiel saw the wheel...". At the mention of the word "wheel" several turnspit dogs, who had been brought to church as foot warmers, ran for the door
And now the main thing to keep in mind that this will happening across work domains and technologies. A truck driver can't go on and switch career to a factory worker because those jobs are gone too!
In the future more and more of these laboros grunt jobs will become automated. Just a while ago there was news how Foxconn cut 60k jobs at a single factory through automation.
And this is the right way to go. Why should any human or sentient being be forced to work a boring mundane job in some factory when machines can do it? The only goal for the human race as a whole should be the liberation of people from back breaking labor. The only question is now, how will our societies react to this forthcoming change in the system. One way or another this change will come and if we're not prepared it will turn into dystopia everywhere with masses of the people sidelined out of jobs which means without means to support themselves or their families. Crime, poverty and massive slum cities are the only way this can turn out. Not to mention that since the consumer base is gone the whole world economy will simply collapse.
In 1800, with steam power, the compression rate was enormous. And sudden. The population of humanity was fewer than a billion. It implied massive misery in coal mines and factories, which hasn't disappeared much, and a greater low-to-high income ratio, yes, but it also implied an easier life for a greater part of humanity.
I think people are underestimating how many new jobs could be created. Driverless trucks would give rise companies selling fleet tracking software, integrated inventory management software, and automated vehicle servicing applications. Imagine hundreds of such companies, employing engineers, sales people, marketers, customer success guys and you have a world where you think - "Did we really have humans to do that?"
Providing jobs for, literally, hundreds of people!
What you seem to miss is that someone who was working as a truck driver has little chances to successfully transition to being an engineer, sales people, etc.
Industrialization did destroy jobs, but replaced these with jobs that did not require advanced education. So becoming an assembly line worker could be a reasonable goal for someone who had been raised as a farmer, for example (result: lots of people transitioned from farming to industry, while industry was at he same time producing better tools for farmers reducing the need for a human workers in the fields).
If 2 robots can replace 10 people working at garbage collection/disposal, how many of them will become sw developers to improve/mantain the 2 robots?
All those companies exist today and large trucking operations already use software for fleet tracking, routing, inventory management etc. So while these software companies might sell more software and might have to hire a few more people to add the features needed for handling an automated truck fleet, it's not like it's a whole new industry being created.
Yes, fleet tracking software already exists but don't think that it can grow only till we scale it to certain level and add some extra features. There will be myriad of possibilities when this data is easy to access. Currently, it is limited to only those companies who can procure the GPS devices, and install it for their customers which translated to high barrier to entry and CAC costs.
It will take as much time as factories can produce 100's of millions self-drive retro-fit kits, or alternatively, the average write-off time of a truck, say 5 years? Because 95% of companies that don't start transitioning to self-driving the day after it becomes available on the general market, will not be able to compete within the year or 2 after.
"I think people are underestimating how many new jobs could be created."
A company providing a fully automated solution for all of that is, what, 300-500 people? So let's say there would be 10 of those (which is too many, consolidation and all). Let's say that we round that up (double) to 10000, and then say we're off by a factor of 10. That's 100k, vs 3.5 million jobs now (counting just truckers, and just in the US, so not even counting all 'associated' jobs).
This whole 'but there will be new jobs' thing doesn't stand up to even the tiniest bit of math, even with very generous assumptions. And that's not even considering the nature of those new jobs. Someone who is a truck driver now, isn't going to be a software engineer, or even a sales guy. There are going to be vast portions of the population who will not be qualified to do any of the jobs that the automated ones will generate.
I don't know the solution, and I don't think UBI is it, but what I do know is that the commercial availability of self-driving cars will hit the labor market like a Mack truck (pardon the pun).
Replacing truckers with highly reliable and automated transport, would only increase the size of the industry and volume of goods transported would multiply . Analysing what are the exact jobs that would replace these truckers is flawed. There is so much interdependence in industries and technology is changing at so many points that you have to assume there would different kinds of work that would be created. I can guess that, with more goods transported, there would be more humans needed to transport it to their destination.
Of course, there could be flaw in my argument that there is an upper limit on products we can create that need transportation but I am assuming this won't be a case for a long time.
You just gave a very good example right there of a potential for new jobs but you overlooked it:
Employing former truckers as guards for self-driving truckers to protect them and their cargo from vandals and protesters.
Until self-driving vehicles also become self-defending, humans will still have to sit in the automatic trucks. They'll still need places to grab food from along the way, and so on.
And about your Foxconn example: if you look here [1] you will see why they were able to do that. Notice the vast disparity in employee numbers between them and, for example, Samsung. It is likely that Foxconn is far behind the industry when it comes to automation (probably due to access to cheap Chinese labor), and when you're behind, it's easy to make such big leaps.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...
from wikipedia, there were working industrial steam engines in 1712. The railway system in the US was started in about 1827 (over a hundred years later), and completed around 1900, about two hundred years after the technology was introduced it was useable by business owners and passengers.
Edison showed the first working electric light in 1878, it seems most people had electricity of some kind by the 1930's.
We could say personal computers were invented sometime in the 1970s, and maybe by today-ish the majority of people in the US have a computer of some kind (though that may be becoming more smartphones than computers)
I would say theres a pretty distinct trend of technology getting adapted more quickly at scale over time.
Do you honestly think the market capture rate of self driving trucks will be similar to that of steam powered engines and boats?
I don't know what those lamp lighters went on to do, but I would guess some kind of manufacturing or transportation job, since they were growing industries.
What do we have now? Are there any significant job growth for manual labor?
I'm afraid that what new jobs there are, will be the kind that do not contribute to real economic growth, but are simply there to extract wealth.
If most of the fundamental resource extraction, physical production and logistics is automated, I think it's better that people and groups can do more of what they find fulfilling and entertaining (which can be considered real economic growth even if money isn't exchanged) rather than selling each other more and more convoluted insurance policies and financial instruments.
Exactly. When left with no other option, a plausible response of the system would be an unprecedented explosion in bureaucracy.
When an automation breakthrough occurs a small portion of the population gets better jobs and the rest get absorbed into low productivity/wage jobs. So far the resulting economic growth has meant that these people were still able to afford the neccesities, but sometimes this requires Malthusian forces to kick in and cause massive misery until it is so.
Right now, talk about it revolves around the transformation into service and knowledge economies and the increasing prevalence of bullshit jobs, but each successive wave of automation makes the problem worse. Combine this with the fact that our modern automation advances seem to only be increaing productivity marginally and the overall growth of the economy seems to be slowing down and you've got a recipe for disaster.
When all the industrial jobs have been automated, couldn't they be replaced by jobs that help us fulfill our emotional needs? Or is there some set of core jobs that fundamentally produce value for the economy?
Nor will the supply of jobs dry up because of automation. There will continue to be a demand for what humans can do and a supply of humans that want to work. As long as prices are allowed to adjust so that supply and demand tend to equalize, there will be a labor market.
The real problem is interference in this marketplace, interference in people's ability to sell their labor.
In all seriousness, I'm not saying there won't be stop offs and rest stops (because really, who wants to be in a moving box for 3 days), but in terms of feasibility I can definitely theorize a situation where stopping is no longer necessary.
I just finished a road trip and man, would an auto-RV have been amazing. Instead of only catching ~50% of the view because I was the driver, I could take it all in and interact with my lady at the same time vs focused on driving. Growing up I thought RVs were crazy awful - but now I look forward to my auto-RV at age 75 driving my old ass around the country.
These are definitely on the way, if they have not already arrived. Someone I know was a train driver for a mining company here in Australia. A lot of their trains are already essentially automated with a driver being present largely just in case. Bear in mind that this was several years ago and I doubt automation has halted since then as that specific kind of train driver are exceptionally expensive to have on the payroll.
Even a few years back the drivers were either simply supervising the computer system or the human was driving however the computer system would alarm at the driver any time the human driver did something that it disagreed with. In particular, going too fast and being unsafe or going too slow and extending the trip time.
The computer was supervising the human just as much as the human was supervising the computer. From memory, the system could even raise alarms with supervisors about what is happening with the train in some circumstances.
Going from human only > human supervising computer > computer supervising human > computer only seems like a sensible progression and trains are a long way through it.
What are there alternatives for employment? (i'm NOT saying that they can't/won't work, but that their alternative jobs could be replaced in the short-term future also...).
There is a huge storm coming in the next 15-20 years and it's coming fast... I just hope the world is ready
http://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/hist-job-map-90/c...
Truck driver is an extremely common occupation across much of the country.
It was originally written to be a satire, but ended up showing a civilization way passed the everything is automated for basic needs. From there on you need to teach people to use their capabilities to create whatever they have in their mind, be that music, inventions, etc. If you take away the purpose of jobs, such as to do something with your life, you need to give alternatives, such as the option and the need for creation.
- maintenance: Starting from refueling, to tyre change
- security: Completely unguarded trucks would make quite a theft risk
- any other interactions, being with the customer at the destination or anything on the road.
So, overall there are some aspects and consequently some jobs going away, but there might be additional responsibilities being added to the remaining job, consider the truck driving of the future rather an office job located on the truck.
This is the most interesting part.
> security
Not an expert, but it would be interesting to see if theft is a bigger problem with autonomous cars, or if it's hacker attacks.
> interaction on site of the customer
There you can still cut down the workforce, and have one person handle a whole fleet of incoming trucks.
We still have to cure cancer, AIDS, deal with malaria, Alzheimer, Zika, etc. We have to solve space exploration and colonization. We have to fix aging. We have to understand the universe.
There's no law that says only brightest (most socialy adaptable) 1% of human population can work on all that. It can be 50% or more if we change how we do it (and have the resources).
That's why I think guaranteed income is stupid idea. We should have guaranteed science/engineering jobs instead. And work on all the long-shot problems. Why not?
So - that's the alternative costs of guaranteed income.
(And the same thing could happen today, on less-well monitored cars; I haven't heard much of mass tyre vandalism.)
Right now, if you wanted to, you could buy a gun, go out into the country side, block the street, and shoot the next driver that comes along.
Having trucks be automated just means that those trucks now have a dozen cameras pointed at you.
This is all just more puff about the massive campaign pushing for autonomous vehicles. Any publicity is good publicity.
But let's not pretend we're being given a choice about this driverless car thing.
Certainly cynical, but not necessarily a wrong interpretation.
> But let's not pretend we're being given a choice about this driverless car thing.
We will not have a choice on whether automation cost are much cheaper than human driving, indeed — but we have two choices:
- should we tax automation? if yes, should it be so that humans remain cheaper (probably a terrible idea) or enough to have enough to help recently out-of-work workers to re-train?
- what should do with recently out-of-work workers? In the case of drivers, that is less essential than it would seem, as many are ageing and retirement is a possible option. (Hence my intuition that Unions are not that worried, and this could be puff for automation.) However, there are two generations who have been trained for a labor-intensive world that will need re-training. What and how we handle that is important, and it is our choice.
And while we're at it, when are we going to get around to retraining the millions of people in the Rust Belt, who were already put out of work?
I work for Deliveroo (an equivalent of DoorDash/Seemless/UberEats) and our riders need a fairly new set of skills — not unlike courier — that are not yet really doable by a drone. Training those riders; being a rider and figuring out which properties drones should have to take some of the workload… all those are skills that are not directly technical, but are empowered by automation.
Tax land rent. Supply is fixed, so no economic distortions.