Driverless electric truck starts deliveries on Swedish public road

Sure in the long run automation benefits society. But in the short run they can definitely lead to increases in inequality.

And yes if you suddenly created huge numbers of unnecessary jobs at the bottom income disparity would decrease.

I think a UBI is sort of inevitable to ensure society transitions peaceably into this new era - this round of automation appears to be falling well short on new industry creation compared to prior iterations. It's something I'd love to see get a wider adoption as otherwise I'm pretty :shrug: on Yang.

What I fear is that the new, more fulfilling occupations you describe will go to the next generation of non-truckers, not those who lost their jobs.

If you spent your whole life driving trucks and it's what you're good at, can you really transfer to a new occupation that's more fulfilling and well-paid in older age, or will you just be left unemployed or stuck with a worse job?

I think more automation is absolutely the future but we need to find some way to take care of the people who are left behind, and not just say "oh they'll get some other job".

complaining about automation sure will help, there's even a US presidential candidate polling >1% whose ideas about how the government supports its citizens were greatly inspired by - you guessed it - people losing jobs and not getting them back due to automation.

the idea that an individual can somehow strive to change capital capturing massive swathes of business and not sharing those proceeds with those they have sidelined is pretty laudable.

i appreciate your optimism but i would consider it more on the unrealistic side, especially given that truck drivers probably aren't gung ho about studying for years to get retrained given most of them don't have college degrees in the first place.

We know how the scenario plays out because we've seen the effects of automation playing out for the last 20 years. These fantasy jobs that people have been talking about since NAFTA never materialized. For working people home, health and general insecurity have skyrocketed along with household debt as wages have stagnated and fallen. We can either deal with reality as it exists or keep spinning ideological fantasies until the situation reaches a breaking point.

Yes, assuming we have a World with infinite resources then your suggestion would be compelling. As we could just manufacture more, and move these people in to other industries, producing ever more stuff for the people higher up the wealth scale.

How do you think that's going to play out with energy production becoming problematic due to climate change, with water becoming hard to come by even in some Western regions, with resources like sand (!) growing in short supply.

Oh, sure, we'll just buy our way out with our endless resources and our ever increasing consumption. WCGW.

The real "half full", ie optimistic, outlook is that we find a way societally to do something like UBI, or spread jobs across more people (3 day week, etc.), or something else, without having to get there through violent revolution or similarly disturbing means.

You're right, I don't know _the_ answer, but I do know it's not greater consumption (ie shift truckers in to a job producing something else), unless we first solve energy production in a massively transformative way.

Yes because we live in a society that currently cannot function without employment

>I'm just mindblown how hostile people suddenly became //

I welcome automation, I don't welcome the income disparity that goes along with it. Automation needs to serve mankind, not only serve the currently wealthy who can "own the means of automation" to coin a phrase. No longer is the issue owning the means of production, but that the capitalists can owner the tools, and the [robotic] workers. Where does that leave the proletariat (the current workforce)? It leaves them useless to the Capitalists. In Capitalism that which doesn't aid profit becomes valued at zero -- and people can't live on zero, even if that means wealthy people can have their parcels delivered without any human intervention.

We can't rely on perpetual growth to get out of it, we're getting to the crunch. What worked before worked because we discovered energy production that seemed limitless, but coal isn't limitless. "But we found oil, surely that's limitless?".

Wealthy people will dump money in to R&D and some will lose. Robotics is an unforgiving business and the field is littered with dead.

> It's like when people say anything more than an hour north of NYC is "upstate".

That is a correct statement that essentially nobody would argue with.

The more aggressive and somewhat arguable view is that upstate is anything north of about 125th street.

Those are manned with a qualified driver who supposedly is paying attention and can take control at any time.

These trucks are unmanned, with a remote driver who may or may not be paying attention but can take control at any time.

Offtopic, but my favorite line of the article:

"We where very surprised to see how many people intentionally jumped in front of the moving buses to see if they would stop"

Was it on the streets, with no traffic blocking ? I took the same kind of shuttles as part of an experiment, but it was on a very specific path that was shared with pedestrians, not on the road.

Actually, I think that long haulers are going to be the ones that first suffer. When you need a human there anyway to sign/unload/etc, then having that human also be a driver isn't such a huge problem. With long-haul the only thing that the human really needs to do is drive, and then, if needed, you could have a staging area to get the truck into the city… in much the same way that road-trains are dealt with.

Ah yes, Shai Agassi and Better Place right?

There are some entertaining (if biased) post-mortem articles on that startup: https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...

You get better throughput with less speed in dense environments, see pedestrians and bicyclists. The problem with highways is that they are optimized for speed and sparse environments.

Seems like having the vehicles catch a train if it's not a local journey would be better.

Add a "package truck" wagon to the back of your train, the truck can book a place, RORO. Then continue on local roads at other end.

> A giant leap for regulators Yes, this is the big one. The low speed and short distances involved are excellent arguments to allow it, and this opens up for more advanced projects in the future.

In North western Europe everyone speaks English.

The exception is France sometimes.

Eg. Flemish people normally speak Dutch, French en English.

Sometimes, you see a Wallonian ask direction in dutch and they "hate" you, because you respond in French and they want to learn Dutch.

Fyi, hate is a too strong word of course. But you see them thinking: oh come on, respond in Dutch because I'm learning it and your not helpful for that.

English is preferred for technology. Most people set their operating systems, phones etc to English.

It's an interesting situation, but most likely the company language of whatever company put together the truck is English.

Road signage, and other official signage is primarily posted in Swedish.

Swedish is very good for writing your next tome of epical poetry, it can be quite beautiful, but it's also rather unwieldy in many contexts.

It might actually not be the most commonly used language in a few generations, as the kids have already begun mixing Swedish and English something fierce.

Street signs use symbols. Street signs actually spelling out "No left turn" instead of a crossed out arrow are very rare outside US. Where text is really needed its in Swedish.

Street signs are in Swedish last time I checked.

Anecdotally I felt like I spoke more English than Swedish last time I visited Stockholm.

Not sure I buy the remote-controlled-by-humans idea personally.

I mean, to remotely drive a car at 30mph, you either need to emergency-stop any time the control signal drops out (in which case you'll constantly get rear-ended) or you need a control system so good it can keep going even through signal drop-outs (in which case why do you have the remote control anyway) or you need an immortal data connection that never suffers drop-outs or so much as 100ms of latency (i.e. orders of magnitude better than what we have today).

I mean, you could do "Human remotely controls the vehicle at walking pace" easily enough, as you could stop all you liked without people hitting you. But we'd need lots of changes to the roads to support a mass of vehicles going that slowly.