I wouldn't say the US is in any position to make the choice of prioritizing life over jobs, not yet anyways; there's still no way to live without a job.
Market forces will decide, of course, but I suspect we won't be saving lives with autonomous cars. Just differing the time, place and means of death.
Especially since this shock is likely to occur faster than a lot of other transitions like in automation on farms, textiles, docks, mines, or factories...
This is why it's really, really important to have an effective safety net for catching unemployed and re-training them in a technologically advanced society, as it's getting really difficult to predict where and how fast change will occur.
But it does raise questions about worker displacement that are very interesting, and not just from a social-justice-warrior brigading perspective. I imagine this will happen much faster than the textile industry changed. Am I wrong there? That alone makes it fascinating.
The solution involves real jobs with living wages, not sending former factory workers to sit in de facto community college seminars three nights a week for free.
Wake up people, the United States is a post-industrial society. We cannot manufacture things and pay people living wages to do it. We want things cheap and we want them now. Sorry.
I'd rather pay these people to be on welfare for the rest of their lives than try to bring manufacturing jobs back to the USA.
The United States is the world's second largest manufacturer.
> We cannot manufacture things and pay people living wages to do it.
It's important to recognize this statement as highly political dogma rather than neutral fact.
Of course we can. We just often choose not to, as a matter of public policy.
So yes, we can manufacture things. We just can't pay people to do it. Not if we want to afford these nice shiny new things.
Once you take it as fact that it's "impossible" for workers to have rights and a proper social contract in the modern global economy you start acting accordingly and become blind to the fact that it's not inevitable at all. It's important to recognize that our policies towards the working class in this country are deliberate political choices borne of the way power and influence works in our political system, not laws of nature.
Please. Less simplistic "solutions" that have continually failed workers.
Edit: also, one hardly needs to be a rockstar to make $60k/year as a coder. If you can write a coherent select in VBA you can make that.
And again, you think a 50 year old truck driver, who hasn't done any schooling 32 years, is going to be able to do SQL statements. And find a job at that age. I'd love to think that, but the IT industry has shown huge levels of ageism, and isn't exactly overflowing with entry-level jobs.
Only 15 years till retirement.
I feel quite certain there will still be a lot of "human" driven vehicles on and off the road in 15 years, even if self-driving really takes off.
We just need to make sure no "new" drivers are going into the business.
However, crucially, there are thousands of important and hard problems out there available to anyone with a roof over his head, food and internet access.
Anyone who doesn't find a hard problem to work on, and this includes those in employment with excellent safety nets, is going to go bad sooner or later (drugs, sociopathy, crime, mental illness, suicide, etc).
Most people don't need hard problems to work on to find purpose or self-actualization. Most are happy to grind away on tedious takes that take time but are not mentally challenging, or care for children or an elderly parent(s). This should be fine under a basic income model.
Provide for everyone, let people who want to work on hard problems work on them.
Note also that one cannot merely look after children, because they need to see a greater purpose in what you do.
I wish that the process of getting regulatory approval for this kind of tech could be explicitly tied to addressing some of these second-order consequences: no self driving cars until 1) the technology is assured to be safe on the roads and 2) there is a plan to help the huge number of human beings who are in danger of being made obsolete by it to adapt somehow.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-...
We saw a similar question. It is a human choice. I have not heard anyone suggesting that driver cars would be banned. They could not ban tobacco.
It seems that governments in many countries are playing the long game when it comes to an eventual tobacco ban. The first step is to require stern warnings on packaging of tobacco products. The next step is to include graphic pictures along with the warnings. Where I live, these warnings and graphic pictures take up most of the package surface on cigarette packs.
I suppose the next step would be to ban branding from tobacco packages so the only thing on the package is the warnings and images.
The end goal of this, I think, is to slowly erode public support for tobacco products. Then, when the eventual ban comes, the public response will be more of a whimper than an outcry.
I don't necessarily like legislation that bans people from choosing to do something, but I think there's a decent case for it in countries with publicly funded health care, where tobacco uses costs everyone, and not just the individual who chooses to use it. I enjoy freedom of choice, but I'm no libertarian. It seems to me that in any reasonably sized society, you end up needing to find a balance of tradeoffs between individual liberty and the well-being of society. The tricky part is finding that balance. The line between what's allowed and what isn't can feel capricious and arbitrary to anyone stuck on the wrong side of it.
I wonder if governments might try a similar tactic on route to eventually banning human-driven vehicles. Start with warnings, escalate to graphic images and video. Eventually, you might get to the point where the majority of people see anyone who doesn't use a self-driving vehicle as a selfish barbarian.
We're already going in that direction here in Canada:
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/05/31/well-consult-...
> I don't necessarily like legislation that bans people from choosing to do something, but I think there's a decent case for it in countries with publicly funded health care, where tobacco uses costs everyone, and not just the individual who chooses to use it.
Bingo. While I am in favour of individual liberties, smoking is not one of them if I am required to subsidize the healthcare that smokers will inevitably need.
Since I don't know any smokers, and places that sell cigarettes aren't allowed to display them in a visible location, I haven't really even seen what cigarette packages here look like for the past couple of years.
That's a slippery slope. Are we going to ban fatty or high sugar foods next? How about extreme sports? Motorcycles?
You pay for the outcomes of all those activities as well.
Activities with a high risk of physical injury are more difficult. For things like extreme sports, the relatively small number of participants might mean that the net increase in health care costs in negligible.
For activities like motorcycling that have relatively large numbers of participants, mandatory supplemental medical insurance is an option. It's probably already a good idea to have it right now, even when you aren't required to.
This is another slippery slope, though. If motorcyclists are required to have extra insurance to cover medical expenses, they'll inevitably ask "why us, and not skydivers, scuba divers, etc?". It would be difficult to know where to draw the line.
They also banned the display of tobacco products back in 2012 - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tobacco-displays-in-shops...
Couldn't a government put the taxes on tobacco products into the budget of their public health care, so that those who smoke tobacco products end up using more of their money and overall contributing more to make up for their own costs?
/s
I'm certain it will be even faster and more expedient than tobacco, especially if manufacturers of self-driving cars pick up the insurance bill for the cars they make. Eventually, the insurance rates for non self-driving cars should be unaffordable and if that's not enough, penalties for causing accidents should be ramped up until it's no longer feasible to have a human drive on public roads (they will have to be more than just monetary to prevent rich people from being assholes and driving regardless). At some point most manufacturers will cease making human-driven cars except as expensive toys for the rich.
Not only is there a decent case for this, I don't see any other alternatives. If people want to continue to drive manually, there will be race tracks and private courses where they can do whatever they want. Otherwise, making driving on public roads illegal is the only way I can see us getting close to the zero fatalities line that's ideal.