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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

It can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned, though my 15 year old daughter who's anxiously waiting to learn to drive may see things differently. She could very well be amongst the last people who learn how to drive.

The article doesn't discuss how far-ranging these impacts will be. Automakers and dealerships are just the tip of the iceberg. Part suppliers are impacted, as well as auto insurers and gasoline filling stations. Perhaps less obvious are auto repair shops of all stripes, auto repair stores, parking garages...this is a HUGE impact to the U.S. economy. It's amazing how little discussion this is getting beyond unemployed taxicab drivers.

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It's not sexy talking about how we have the potential to put millions of Americans out of jobs, and would rather handwave the discussion with a "Oh they said the same thing during the industrial revolution."

Present your argument that we'd be better off with 500,000 people employed as farmers and ditch diggers working by hand without automation and equipment.

Yes, of course. How is this even a question?

If we had the resources to give 500,000 people a living wage, a home, health care, in exchange for performing a completely meaningless task then that would be a pretty good deal (that many would also be happy to take).

Anything society has the resources to do now, we’ll have the resources to do after the advent of driverless cars. Driverless cars will strictly increase productivity—they let us produce more output with the same input of labor and capital.

So no, it is not better to give people resources for performing a completely meaningless task. If the task were completely meaningless then we could provide them the same resources without requiring the labor. Neo-Luddites arguing against driverless cars are fighting the wrong thing. Their fight should be distribution of wealth created, not against innovation that increases productivity and makes our lives collectively easier.

You're basically suggesting the broken window fallacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Basically, it's foolish to have people do unnecessary work because in doing so you have squandered time and resources that could have been spent creating additional value.

The broken windows fallacy is not apt in terms of what lobotryas wrote. If we had enough resources so that everyone had a home, health care, and access to a livable amount of money each month then that would be good. Wouldn’t it? Lobotryas did not state how to accomplish this. Just said it’d be great if we lived in such a world.

>in exchange for a completely meaningless task

Why don't we just give them the money and care instead? Then they can actually do something useful with their time.

You can co further: with a SDC the kids can drive themselves to school, you can drive home after a night out and, assuming your job can be done (at least partially) behind a laptop, you can essentially have zero commute and little issue with rush-hour (even if everybody works the same hours people will arrive at stacked times because they have different distances to work) add all that up and it ends up being sensible to live a long way from your place of work, which means that cheap houses out in nowhere suddenly become a lot more attractive and appartments in the city will trade at a smaller premium.

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