White House predicts all truck, taxi, and delivery drivers will be wiped out
qz.com
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Technical innovation is a capital expenditure that pays off large returns in the long term.
Technical innovation permanently removes/drastically minimizes OpEx for those willing to put up with significant capital expenditure (in building the Technology in the first place): but once done, those jobs are gone.
It made mining, telephone, retail, manufacturing etc companies drastically minimize their dependence on human labor. These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.
Next up is transportation.
Most governments dont want to be bothered with transportation and run it inefficiently.
New companies are capitalizing on this to establish future oligopolies: https://www.quora.com/What-controls-help-ensure-the-growing-...
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
Electric (and autonomous) vehicles are going to be the next PC era that is going to change the world for decades and build the new billionaires.
I could definitely see the case that almost none of it is going to labor in the end, but it would be interesting to see a real study.
This is only true for the first innovators. Competition means that these 'saleries' will just disappear rather than going directly to the bottomline. Exchange value (~ the price) shrinks as you replace human labour, as Karl Marx would already have told you. ;)
And that's not even a bad thing. It's good that people don't have to waste their lives in mines etc. The crucial question is how we as a society deal with this.
Or any system for that matter?
I may not personally support such a view, but from a purely functional stand point, you are about as much value as you earn and can therefore afford.
That's probably also a problem from a "purely functional standpoint", but it's compounded by folks who think there is some kind of natural law that says "value" === "economic productivity" when that's only true for a subset of societies.
Your value is that you're human being. Let the machines be enslaved to producing goods and services for the humans.
That's the capitalist way of thinking about people. Old fashioned or not, it dominates the lives of most people on the planet, and the value of most lives can be summed to a precise monetary amount - that being the value of the labor extracted from them by society over their lifetime, as determined by the market.
We should be considering what to do about the likelihood that most people made redundant by automation will simply be left valueless to society. No one seems to actually be trying to use automation to build a utopia and free everyone from the struggles of work. Rather, automation is allowing the elite to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of supporting society through compensating human beings for work.
But re-spilling takes longer than expected, doesn't happen very successfully across the board and is effectively a huge hole in that theory.
And that's if the people are close enough to the skill domain to manage the jump.
Side note- people underestimate how variables govern human learning,
Native ability, language skills, previous success with studies, self discipline, presence of children, health, spare time, non competing obligations, nutrition.
From a purely functional standpoint, most income isn't earned - it's derived from rents.
There is a good case to be made for redistribution of rents equally and only allowing income to be earned, though.
You might not be able to get away with charging twice what a taxi used to cost, but you can certainly make a very healthy margin, and healthier still as you buy up competitors.
Let me start with some facts about jobs. Both the European Union and the United States are characterised by strikingly similar labour force developments. In both regions, there has been a decline in the number of jobs for workers with low levels of educational attainment over the past 25 years. Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous increase in jobs for workers with tertiary education, and this is the only job category that expanded after 2008, even in several countries that were hit hard by the recent global and European financial and economic crises. While underemployment, when a worker takes a job for which they are over-qualified, is a prevailing phenomenon, it tends to be temporary.
If a greater share of jobs are only open to tertiary-educated workers, it could contribute to increasing inequality, if tertiary-educated workers earn ever more, relative to lower educated colleagues. Data shows that this has been the case in the United States and China, and to a much more limited extent in Germany. However, exactly the opposite has happened in many other countries during the past two decades, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden and Japan. In these countries the so called ‘skills premium’ has actually fallen."
Imagine if the technology did exist today to do safely and reliably in all cases. It would still take a huge capital investment and turnover of equipment to replace or refit all the human driven vehicles. It would be hard to do in a decade. So imagine it takes another five to ten years to drive the cost down and work out the kinks with weather and construction and so on and ten years to do the actual replacing. Keep in mind the existing equipment and labor will get cheaper as it starts to get replaced, slowing the transition. It seems it like the whole transition could take twenty years.
So in twenty years a major job category is going to get wiped out. Like lamplighters, stable hands, textile workers etc. The US has had twenty year periods where 10% of the population has quit farming (https://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf).
This will be a big change, but it may not be a worse change than some that have happened in the past.
Autonomous vehicles will also not solve the transportation problem. A hundred automated trucks still doesn't come anywhere near the efficiency of three freight engines pulling the same load. Even if every car was autonomous on the Interstate, you might get rid of gridlock but you'd still have a lot of people moving very slowly; well under the theoretical maximum capacity for single lane transport.
I wrote a post describing this:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
But we're well past the first fatality in a human-driven Uber.
Don't underestimate how stubborn people can be, especially if they're Americans who feel their freedom is being threatened.
Suburban and rural residents will rely on personally owned, human driven cars longer, sure.
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
Except we do that for road transport as well, because a van isn't very efficient over long distances, and a lorry can't maneuver easily in many environments.
At some point though, maybe right away even, they will be fewer than human drivers, which cause around 30,000/year in the US. Humans fall asleep, get distracted, display poor judgement, chemical abuse, and medical problems. Autonomous will have none of these but might introduce a few new ones.
The hardware requirements for any store that wants to adopt Amazon's tech are minimal: some cameras, an entry gate and possibly some pressure pads under the shelves.
Even if Amazon doesn't license out their tech -- and they would be foolish not to -- you can be sure that Google and Microsoft are working on their own versions. The market is staggeringly big.
Also, anything more than a basic grocer would still want real people to help people with purchasing etc.
I mean, this is a great example against your point (imo). Those self checkout stands, sure they do employ a staffer to monitor, but each of those stands is basically a line that doesn't have to be employed by a dedicated staffer.
They managed to potentially drastically reduce the number of required staffers via self checkouts. I say potentially, because 1 self checkout doesn't inherently equal one checkout clerk, but you get where i'm going with this.
If my safeway can fire the 6 clerks i regularly see staffing the checkout lines, and hire 1 to monitor.. that's still a drastic layoff.
And what about all the manual labor involved? I'm sure it won't be all robots stocking shelves, so mostly stockers can remain employed for the time being, but i'm sure at least a few employees who specialize in managing stock will be laid off as well.
Just because it's not 100% layoff doesn't mean it's any less serious, imo. We're slowly decreasing the available job market simply put. Where are these people going to go?
Secondly, once people get used to shopping at stores where they don't have to line up to pay, the new experience will become expected by consumers.
So there is a double effect whereby stores who adopt the new tech will save money on payroll, and stores that don't will lose some business.
If we get rid of all the manual labor that humans do, why wouldn't we move the advice-givers to remote offices and improve their utilization? A call center to tell you where the milk is or which wine goes with your recipe might sound bad, but consider that you'd never wait another second to talk to a clerk, and everything would get even cheaper as more and more of the basic questions for the call center get moved onto intelligent bots.
Why? They were being targeted to test stolen credit cards and it was costing the company a pretty penny having to deal with all those fraud checks/etc.
Not a detraction from your point - i just found it interesting. "Automation" seemed great there, but they were having difficulty managing how it was being used.
I wonder what might happen with the upcoming automation(s) in a similar manner?
I find it somewhat odd that another category of stores that often aren't a great match for self-checkout--big box home improvement stores--seem to have adopted it so broadly, at least around where I live.
As I mentioned, at least in the Northeast US, it seems to be particularly popular in big box home improvement stores (Home Depot, Lowes) even though it's problematic for a lot of purchases there. OTOH, I basically never see it in supermarkets here even though it's almost ubiquitous in London markets (albeit smaller stores with less fresh/un-barcoded produce).
Personally, I think if Amazon Go can follow through on its promise we'll see a drastic reduction in retail employment. The problem with existing self-checkout systems is that they're incredibly clunky and frequently require staff support/intervention. I've literally never had a successful self-checkout where everything worked properly.
So "largest" may simply be an artifact of said binning.
And driving in non-inclement weather. And driving in places that aren't meticulously mapped by Google. And being able to refuel themselves....
I'm not denying the accomplishments of current autonomous vehicles, but there is still a ways to go technically.
I think this is too optimistic. Self-driving cars only work because they are in the minority. Can you imagine a city full of current state-of-the-art self driving cars and it not turning into a traffic chaos?
In particular, I think that self-driving cars cannot work fully autonomously without communicating with other cars or the road infrastructure. And I am not aware of any effort to create a cross-vendor car-to-car communication protocol.
There are trivial cases where pure autonomous following of traffic rules will lead to deadlock (or other issues). Take these two simple examples: 1) 4 cars arrive at the same time in a four-way intersection without signals or yields 2) on a three lane road, two cars from the outer lanes try to switch to the middle lane at the same time.
These are by no means difficult problems (I'm sure there are more difficult cases too), but they must be solved and so far they're not being worked on.
Sometimes the communication needs to be complex (I.e. Verbal). I've had a few instances when I've had to negotiate to unblock a traffic deadlock, mostly when a two way lane is constricted to one vehicle only due to parked cars, or a HGV which is too big to drive past. In London this happens quite frequently.
I really cannot think how an autonomous car, with no human inside, could handle these scenarios.
I am exited about autonomous cars, but I'm not convinced they are as ready as various companies want us to believe.
Designing for the unexpected edge cases is harder than designing for the normal cases. In accordance with Cargill's ninety-ninety rule, we can expect that the "fine tuning" you mention will be turn out to be a very big job.
As an extreme demonstration, consider the fact that you could rack up a million "autonomous" miles in a matter of months, using vehicles capable of nothing more than "lane keeping assist" and "adaptive cruise control" - just set 'em loose on a NASCAR loop and run them around in circles until this artificial example's point has been proven.
As I understand it, grocery stores employ more people back-of-house and in areas like the deli counter, than they do at cash registers.
The advert's buzzwordy, bullshitty, vague explanation of the tech hints that they're not super confident themselves about how well it will face up against shoplifters.
That's a pretty fair part of the commercial fleet, though vehicles with self-mobile cargo (taxis) or dedicated handlers on each end (long haul) are quite amenable to automation.
Sure, but those humans won't be needed during the vast majority of the trip. The truck can make a pit stop at a "last mile" facility to pick up the human loaders/unloaders (who can be minimum wage temps).
Good point.
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
I expanded in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230336
Add an automated forklift to the automated truck?
That might be the end state for the foreseeable future, but as others have said that person no longer needs to be a driver, just someone to load and unload.
At some point we'll begin to ask the question of whether it's worth paying someone to travel around with the truck, or if we'd prefer the cost savings. If you're a white collar place ordering heavy equipment you'll probably just pay the guy, but if you're a warehouse you already have a pile of people who can handle that.
If the only thing you need a human for is to handle the delivery from the ground floor to the seventh floor, or to roll a pallet onto the back of the truck, you've eliminated 99% of the job. and if you've eliminated most of the work the job requires, that means you need a lot fewer people, and they need less skill and training and will be paid less.
one junior staffer in every office being tasked to go down to the loading bay and check for packages after lunch each day is not a major infrastructure change.
http://www.recode.net/2016/12/19/13600538/silicon-valley-gro...
In short: Silicon Valley is going to drive a lot of job losses in the not too distant future. There's a very real danger that will blow back as mass unemployment drives people to extremes, unless people start thinking very seriously about what this new world is going to look like, and how the vast majority of the country will earn a living.
I quit my job for 11 months in 2015 and flew around the world; backpacking off my savings:
http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/
It was the happiest time of my life. I'm planning on getting some funding sources for next time (Pateron, grants for OSS projects, etc.) and see if I can make it longer next time. I'd rather just make enough, making content and tech that I like and find useful, supported by peers, than working the the current tech world.
Reynolds envisioned a world like this in his book Army of Davids. I think he painted an overly rosy outlook and neglected to realize how difficult it is to start small businesses or how little time people have after their day jobs to work on things. (You can kinda glaze over those things when you're a UT professor).
But the question is, does Patreon, OSS grants and the like scale to the entire population of a country? My instinct is "no". Yet it's likely that a lot of people will be looking for alternative means by which to live life within our lifetimes, and no-one is really looking for broadly applicable answers.
But once you get to more or less full automation, the only people who would make money under the current system would be the owners - there wouldn't need to be any workers.
Ya, some form of Stalinist USSR, Maoist China or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.
I think things will change dramatically if we can solve energy scarcity. Much of our wealth in society is based around the availability of resources. What people forget about with 3D printers is they still need oil; and you can't (easily) print circuit boards. Humanity needs something on the level as replicator technology from Star Trek.
I want to believe, but I don't think that type of alchemy is feasible; at least not until we solve the energy problem. A breakthrough in LENR or tokamak fusion reactors could change the world dramatically.
Can't afford Uber? Just hang onto the roof of one.
As a (presumably) well-paid tech worker, it's really very achievable. Most engineers could do it in under a decade if they tried.
More so, there's nothing revolutionary about Silicon Valley. It's 150% marketing hype. Just looking at their direction, they are just not in the position to do anything of real value during the next revolutionary phase.
The only thing they have revolutionized is the acceptance and availability of very in-depth and sophisticated surveillance and the availability of massive amounts of surveillance data for the government and their intelligence/advert agencies.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
We know what people have done in the past when this sort of thing has happened - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
> The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and self-employed weavers in the 19th century that used the destruction of machinery as a form of protest.
I think that once the robots take enough jobs such that the anti-automation movement reaches a critical mass (and it won't take 100% of the jobs to do that, prob not even 50%) then we'll start seeing these sorts of things happen.
Sabotage of driverless cars will be trivial to carry out and very expensive to deal with... some forms may not have adequate protection under criminal law yet, which will require cooperation with legislators and law enforcement to address (good luck with that Uber).
I'm thinking things like finding and intentionally exploiting environmental cues that driverless cars use to make decisions (releasing plastic bags into intersections?) or else using directed radio interference to prevent them from communicating with homebase to know where to go next.
Some of these may be protected already by FCC or EPA or state-level equivalents, but will enforcement be up to the task? Is the FCC prepared to monitor and enforce local signal interference for corporations? Is a $500 littering fine enough to dissuade individuals and groups from continuing in "civil disobedience"?
My core point is that if anyone thinks people are going to take this lying down then they don't know human beings. Everyone is only 3 missed meals away from doing "whatever it takes" and that's even less if it's your kid(s) that are missing the meals.
If nothing is in place when the layoffs come then it'll take no time for former workers to organize and take matters into their own hands... within that election cycle the organization will be co-opted by some other ideology which conflates their anger at losing their job to automation with race, class, political affiliation, etc.
/speculation
And then: is that fair?
In the long run, shouldn't technological progress benefit us all equally?
Of course, the subset of people who got fired will not have a great time, but the rest of us will benefit hugely, and hopefully our taxes will help cushion their blow with re training assistance and other benefits.
Edit: I'm assuming less competition, since the barrier to entry for a fully automated trucking company would be higher than a traditional human driven fleet.
1 - http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/sticker-shock-why-are-glasses-...
You're right that the majority of the savings probably wouldn't be realised by consumers until there is more than one player, though. On the other hand, given how many companies are attempting this, that seems like it will happen quite quickly.
Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.
It's interesting that yours is one of a couple of replies that say stopping progress would be a bad thing. But the OP didn't suggest stopping. There's no reason why you can't progress technically while also considering the human impact of what you're doing. Yes, you might move slower, but humanity will be better off as a result.
And (simplified) the CEO of Uber is somehow entitled to receive the incomes of millions of truck drivers combined, even though all he did was just raising a lot of money, and be in the right place at the right time?
> Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.
That was not what I said. But it wouldn't be absurd if it was grossly unfair.
When globalization was pushed, the government passed laws to help retrain workers. Maybe it was just a band-aid, but, it was something.
Perhaps the government should intervene to direct some of the automation toward producing free housing.
If they can use automated deliveries to lower their UPS/FedEx/USPS costs, and to help them beat Brick and Mortar prices, you can bet that they'll take full advantage of it.
Retail stores to would likely deliver some of the savings to customers because they have to compete with Amazon and other online retailers.
Technical innovation moves and concentrates the savings to the top of the chain.
I expanded in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230336
Even if the vehicles themselves can be converted in an afternoon and have a switch flipped so you feed it a delivery route and it just works, you still need coordination and communication capabilities that are different from humans. Plus any mechanisms for automatically loading cargo and coordinating the AI vehicles to queue up to be loaded.
The AI technology itself represents a serious investment (although I many delivery companies are not doing their own, but really just waiting on someone else), but infrastructure, conversion, and execution are also serious investments. It's really difficult for me to stomach that the profit from an autonomous fleet would be unfairly allocated.
Will that happen?
Likely not-- I'm guessing the top brass will use all the capital saved up to buy the fleet and then release all the drivers.
I think that is the role of the government: redistribute rent on scenarios where markets won't do it.
In any case technology is only an enabler, not a conscient agent.
Everyone. The vast swathes of humanity who use transportation services (deliveries, taxis, etc.) will see the cost of said services decreased.
Fairness is an arbitrary and stupid metric. If we give every American $10 and 5 Americans $1,000 that's obviously "unfair" but also obviously to the benefit of everyone.
> In the long run, shouldn't technological progress benefit us all equally?
No?
I wonder if the same thing has been said about other professions that have been more or less wiped out in the past? I would guess the answer is "yes"
And then the next logical question is "So what did all those people end up doing?" Maybe that's how we being to answer the question of what all the truck, taxi and delivery drivers can be doing when those jobs are gone?
Or do those jobs just get phased out as people leave them? Like people who quit for whatever reason are just not replaced by other people, they get replaced with the bots (or whatever we call the things that are replacing people here).
[Added thought] Maybe the answer is found in how secretaries were replaced? They were recently the most popular jobs in many states, and now are not.
In the past, the speed of automation was slower giving time for people to adapt. Going forward, things will be swift and I am not sure what these people will do.
To survive we need food, shelter, clothing, and medicine. Food production has been automated, distribution is about to be. Clothes washing was automated, production is about to be. Medical diagnostics is about to be automated, though it will take a while for a nurse's job to be. Shelter is going to be (IMO) automated in the next few decades.
Whatever replacement jobs are going to arrive will be completely disjoint from actual needs. Everyone's going to be pet manicurists, metaphorically.
One huge problem with that that I can see is if there's an economic contraction and everyone tightens their belts at the same time, there's going to be a snowball effect as everyone gets rid of their unnecessary luxuries, which now employs 99% of the workforce. It will hit rock bottom when we realize that the only things that we really need are all now provided by robots and the %1 of people still employed.
Dunno but I will be stealing the tyres off Auto-Ubers to make my tyre shack/mansion in shanty town.
It's not going to cause a problem. The uber robot can auto-claim on its robo-insurance which is less than regular insurance because they don't crash as much. They just have to wait around for their auto tow truck who is having a crazy busy week.
After all, someone has to take care of those machines, no?