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> AB InBev said it could save $50 million a year in the U.S. if the beverage giant could deploy autonomous trucks across its distribution network.

Sweet words for AB InBev shareholders, not so sweet for the obsoleted truckers though.

Obviously this technology is inevitable, but I think that the authors of such technologies should also come up with political proposals on what to do with the displaced people.

Politicians should start acting now and figure out how to respond to these changes. And that should be done on a global scale, because technology is very fast to spread across borders.

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> I think that the authors of such technologies should also come up with political proposals on what to do with the displaced people.

Did the inventors of automobiles have to deal with all the farriers and people who tend to horses?

...or when milkmen were obsolete?

...or when switchboard operators were obsolete?

...or when telegram operators were obsolete?

(I could go on all week)

History is full of instances where certain job roles are no longer needed and are obsoleted. This is a good thing, it means we're moving forward and progressing.

I wish everyone wasn't so afraid of jobs, but that's the consequence of being up to your eyeballs in debt.

History is full of examples, but there is no time in History when the world was as complex and populated - and armed - as it is today.

Not even close.

We're talking about tens of millions of people potentially loosing their jobs worldwide due to such 'progress'.

This can lead to uprisings, revolutions and bloodshed - a lot of suffering - which can be prevented if the transition is well planned.

'Global reach' cuts both ways, both through positive and negative consequences.

Best to avoid the narcissism of the present when you can.

The industrial revolution was far more disruptive than what we are currently experiencing, albeit paced slower. The idea that way can't learn nearly everything we need to know about current change from observing the past strikes me as very naive. People, after all, are just people.

The automobile inventors didn't have to deal with it, but somebody did.

It's unfortunate that Smith was particularly weak in this area (or rather, that so many people have followed him in hand waving about it) but the consequences of displaced jobs is something that a society absolutely, unavoidably, has to deal with. You only get to choose if you approach it with a realistic plan, or not.

Strange - not sure what was controversial about that.

You're not even close to a realistic comparison. As a percentage of jobs overall, people working with horses, milkmen, switchboard operators, etc didn't amount to the sheer enormity of the jobs that will be obsoleted or displaced by self driving vehicles.

There is no comparison in history to make. Nothing has happened like this before. Never.

The closest you could get would be something like the aftermath of WW2 in Europe or maybe some devastating plagues but even that isn't a good comparison because those removed the people entirely; dead people don't need to be fed or swayed from starting a violent revolution.

It's not just the truckers or cab/bus drivers. It's all the industries that support them. Those will disappear too.

Just think of all the truck stops we have in the US and the amount of money that truckers spend at these places to sleep, take showers, get wifi, etc. Those will go away too.

The motels where travelers sleep at midway points in their travels will lose all that business. The auto body shops that rely on people making mistakes while driving will lose all that business too.

You're vastly underestimating the disruption if you're bringing up switchboard operators and milkmen.

How about the luddites and looms? Very large percentage of people worked in weaving before tech rushed them out.

Or say how we went from 98% of people farming to 3%.

You think truck drivers going from 5% to 1% is a bigger jump?

That switch from farming to industry was not some sort of beautiful utopia. It was dangerous & violent & chaotic. It also took hundreds of years.

There is at least the possibility that the automated future will be as dangerous & violent & chaotic. It could be much worse as we will have less time to adapt.

Heh. This reminds me of Toffler's books, like "The Third Wave". He thought - in the 70s! - that the amount of information that people had to absorb was too much and people would soon be unable to adapt.

This was twenty years before the web.

He was wrong?

Very wrong.

He would have enjoyed Black Mirror methinks.

This attitude continues to boggle my mind.

It's as if you think it would be better for millions of people to spend massive amounts of their lives away from their families, living extremely unhealthy sedentary lifestyles, eating truck stop and gas station "food" and operating massive machines that cause many deaths every day of the year.

You actually think it's a good thing that millions of people spend their time this way!

We have the ability to make the world better. We have the ability to eliminate the need for thinking, feeling, living humans to whittle away their lives sitting in trucks and being away from their families.

Yes, technology is going to force us to question to role of "work" in society, and if it's more important to earn lots of money while being away from your family and living and extremely unhealthy life, or if it's more important to earn less money, and have more time with family and healthy living.

Yes, the world is about to change - and keep changing - and it's going to change whether you resist it or not.

An excellent point. Clearly they should spend their life sedentary in low rise office parks surrounded by cars in suburban San Francisco, operating a network of increasingly smaller machines that serves to siphon the wealth from the rest of world into their increasingly greedy pockets.

>You actually think it's a good thing that millions of people spend their time this way!

I think you're putting words in riskable's mouth. What the comment actually said is that you were vastly underestimating the disruption in comparing it to milkmen, etc. There wasn't any judgment whether it was a good thing or not.

The percentage of Americans employed as farmers in the US far exceeded that of trucker drivers. Yes there was disruption, but those people didn't permanently go on to be the underclass unemployed of society. They and their descendants went on to more fruitful activities. The thing is, at the time, you couldn't imagine what those activities would be.

[0] http://www.usda.gov/factbook/art/fig31.jpg

Oh, you mean all the farmers and factory workers that made up the Midwest, which are now overwhelmingly trump supporters, largely because of the destruction of all economic opportunity in their region?

Huh? The US moved away from farming as a key employer what? 80 years ago? It has nothing to do with Trump.

Sorry, I should have reserved my comment for a day when I am not recovering from a sinus infection :) Farming, in the midwest at least, was a dying but still widely practiced profession up into the early 80's. This also includes meat farming. The farm consolidation really got into the swing of things in the mid 80's. Add in the decimation of the auto and steel (and supporting industries) and you see a period from 1960 - 1990 that had an unprecedented level of people forced out of work due to automation and lost jobs.

The Trump comment was tossed in because it's been easy to forget about this stuff as a coastal living millenial, and the recent Trump phenomenon has brought it back to the forefront.

Sorry for the initial snarky comment!

> You actually think it's a good thing that millions of people spend their time this way!

You're putting words in my mouth. I never said that. I was pointing out that the amount of disruption was being vastly underestimated.

Always remember that what's better for most can be the opposite for some. If that some is big enough there's going to be big problems. How big is hard to say but if we know it's coming and we do nothing our wounds will be self-inflicted.

> You actually think it's a good thing that millions of people spend their time this way!

Regardless of what they do, if that helps them take care of their families, people will do it with a sense of pride.

Young men are sent to war - to die - for the same reasons.

Purpose. That's what they get from it.

That's why they call it 'hard work'.

But I think you're fighting the wrong crowd here - most of us here understand that this inevitable and the world will evolve towards these new technologies.

But it is dangerous to ignore the ripple effects that it might cause in society, so we might as well start thinking about the potential solutions.

We'll see how you feel when you're 50 and obsolete.

I grew up watching my parents and grandparents work guaranteed employment in companies that would keep them on for life, treat them well, offer promotions and actually come good with retirement on time and the amount promised. What a world we had in the 70s 80s and 90s.

I have never lived under that delusion. I know work is not guaranteed, I know companies will always "downsize", I know I am an expense to be eliminated and I know my retirement will continue to be pushed back, and that I'll only get a fraction of what I was promised if it ever comes.

That is the reality of the world I live in.

Anyone that doesn't accept that reality is not living in the real world.

< I grew up watching my parents and grandparents work guaranteed employment in companies that would keep them on for life, treat them well, offer promotions and actually come good with retirement on time and the amount promised. What a world we had in the 70s 80s and 90s.

If you watched that, you enjoyed a phenomenal amount of privilege. That is much more of a marketing pitch about the past than anything that actually existed. In fact, in macro terms (even adjusting for statistical differences) the 2000s were much better for employees than the 70s, 80s and early 90s.

I remember my grandparents being laid off a lot, and the plant moving right before they retired while raiding the pension fund on the way out. I remember the company declaring bankruptcy and not paying their disability obligations so the tax payer had to.

That was during the supposed good years you mention. The coming years are going to yield dramatic changes to what jobs even mean, and at least in the US, we've spent the last 30 years making our society more dependent on people working for a big company not less.

In light of that, it seems prudent to me at least, to give some thought to how we transition whole industries to not need workers.

What a world we had in the 70s 80s and 90s.

I love this nostalgia for the good old days. Life in the US during the 1970's sucked hard. Google "general malaise". Line-ups for gasoline, double digit inflation with no economic growth, post-Vietnam. People thought the US' days as a superpower were numbered.

I'm not talking about the US

> History is full of instances where certain job roles are no longer needed and are obsoleted.

Yeah, exactly, and we get to learn from history. That's part of moving forward and progressing. We can't ignore consequences just because similar things have happened before.

> Obviously this technology is inevitable, but I think that the authors of such technologies should also come up with political proposals on what to do with the displaced people.

Why would you want computer scientists and engineers doing that? Do you think they have some special expertise in labor politics too?

What would help here is the same thing that would help in other industries that have gone down the tubes: temporary monetary support ala unemployment insurance, retraining programs, maybe moving stipends to relocate to areas with more jobs. Basically, social safety nets.

No need to worry so much because this is all a big PR bubble. We will have self-driving lawyers long before we have real viable self-driving vehicles.

Disagree. Yes, there's still a lot of work to do before we have real viable self-driving vehicles, and I think Tesla's goal of end of 2017 is unrealistic, but there's so much money and effort behind it now from so many different companies, personally I'd be shocked if we didn't have self-driving cars by 2025.

We've spent a lot of money and effort on fusion energy, without succeeding in creating a reliable, cost-effective energy source.

Yes, but for self-driving cars, the problem seems more surmountable. We already have cars that can drive in real traffic without intervention a large % of the time. There are plenty of edge cases, but they don't seem insurmountable.

"... without intervention a large % of the time."

You could drive a semi (pun-intended) through that caveat. Driving is all about edge cases; bad weather, bad roads, bad visibility, poor signage, poorly maintained cars.

I wouldn't be so sure. Personally, I think trailer trucks will be the first things that go driverless. Sure, we may be 10 years away still, but that's not very long. There will likely be just as many (or more) truckers in 10 years as there are now.

Though I think the fears of job displacement are still (a bit) overblown. This type of thing won't happen overnight. It will start with a few companies, some drivers will move to other companies, others will get different jobs.

Truck companies could earn some brownie points with the public by offering to train their old drivers to work on the autonomous trucks.

We will have self-driving lawyers long before we have real viable self-driving vehicles.

If I'm ever in an accident with a self-driving truck, they'll probably stack the jury with internet-enabled toasters. =(

Considering the aging truck force[1], the impact of automated trucks may not be as big of an impact as what most are estimating.

[1] https://blog.transplace.com/2015/02/an-aging-truck-driver-wo...

AB InBev annual revenue....$43.6B in 2015.

Savings from autonomous trucks... 0.11% of revenue.

I'm not sure what the margins for InBev's products look like, probably pretty decent, so it's not a low margin business. 0.11% of revenue is pretty good in terms of cutting costs, but I would have thought it would be bigger.

Truckers become car hackers

Has anyone ever discussed taxing computer labor -- e.g. companies can pay (via tax) AIs to drive trucks at 80% of a human wage. Companies get safer drivers, save costs, and the government gets a cash influx to help all the new jobless truck drivers.

Interesting proposal. I think it'd take a lot of fine tuning to work as desired though.

You'd have to make the tax low enough to still retain a significant benefit for the company, but high enough to aid in providing a social safety net. You'd also have to ensure that it's hard to get around this legislation without making it so broadly applicable that AI research and development are penalized.

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