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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Another question is: who will be getting their money?

And then: is that fair?

In the long run, shouldn't technological progress benefit us all equally?

Everyone in the world will benefit from a substantial consumer surplus from not having to pay the wages of every driver involved in the supply chain of products bought and sold.

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.

Is that necessarily how it works? I'm no economics expert, but what compels the savings to be passed back to consumers, versus just being reaped as additional margin?

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.

Yes, an autonomous truck company could temporarily lower their prices, thereby killing all their competitors, and then increase their prices to an unreasonable point.

This is the Luxottica[1] model employed in the eyewear market. I think it is reasonable to consider that a similar situation could develop in the shipping industry, given a sufficiently disruptive + monopolized offering.

1 - http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/sticker-shock-why-are-glasses-...

It has to be better than existing logistics in some way or it won't get used. That could mean it's more reliable, but it probably also means it's at least a bit cheaper.

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.

I think this falls apart when the subset of fired people exceeds the subset of beneficiaries. Everyone's job is at stake on some level.

My answer is... no? Why would that be the case? Those people don't necesarrily have any right to that money. They /arguably/ have a right to a job/food/housing, but that is a whole other discussion.

Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.

Continuing technical progress just for the sake of progress and at the expense of human life and dignity feels absurd.

And if we go by soared's answer, it's all for the sake of a diminishingly smaller number of people.

Apply this argument in 1800 and what do you get?

> 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.

> Those people don't necesarrily have any right to that money.

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.

I wouldn't say it's a "whole other discussion" when the changes are causing the unemployment.

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.

> Another question is: who will be getting their money?

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'm not sure that fairness is a stupid metric, even though it is often an irrational one. Humans are evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to unfairness, and unfairness outside of acceptable ranges leads to a lot of human misery (envy) and poor decision-making (e.g. Communism). I think engineering a society that humans enjoy or at least tolerate is easier than engineering humans. Also, I think the relative numbers matter here. If every American receives $100, but 100 Americans receive $100 billion, which they then use to engage in zero-sum competition (status, political power, mates, land), you may experience a net decrease in utility.

Orchestrating a conversion from human fleet to AI-fleet is going to be a serious investment. Developing AI vehicles that are reliably safer than humans by a good margin (5-10%) is hard, but so will the work of ripping everything out that has gone into supporting human drivers and adding everything that needs to support AI drivers.

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.

For the most part savings from labor should reduce prices and in the aggregate, "all of us" do share in the benefit. Now obviously there is no guarantee of that, but competition will likely result in a good portion of savings passed to the customer (e.g. if FedEx drops prices UPS will have to do so as well).

I think that's a very positive view of our possible near-future. What if Fedex doesn't drop its prices, and UPS doesn't either? They profit, we continue to pay. You see this today with airlines whose ticket prices stubbornly refuse to drop despite oil prices plunging. Competitors coordinating to preserve their profit is a very real thing.

This sort of cartelization would most likely be illegal under antitrust laws.

If it can be proven, yes.

I think there's a solid chance that Amazon will help drive down delivery prices, at least on the consumer end.

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.

No. Technological progress should raise all boats if handled correctly. But refusing progress because some boats will be raised higher than others is not a good solution. It's also not even "fair" if your notions of fairness include proportionality instead of just equity.

> Shouldn't technological progress benefit us all equally?

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.

In the United States, these types of questions usually boil down to how you define freedom and liberty, i.e., should citizens be "free" to automate the majority of the current workforce? Should they "have the liberty" to profit monetarily from activities that cause destruction to the environment?

Great question!

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

I'm envisioning a cooperative of sorts where a group of former truckers all partially own the now autonomous fleet.

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.

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