Hacker News Reader

Comment by shirro | Hacker News Reader

Self driving vehicles are already in operation in many locations though usually under more restricted use such as a fixed bus route. I wonder if the question is not if the technology can do the job but if it should.

Having a small self driving electric shuttle bus moving old people around a regional town in rural Australia seems like an empowering use of technology to provide a service to people who otherwise would not be served. But when we have youth unemployment over 10% we should be looking to services that employ people.

View on HN

Why is unemployment a bad thing?

Good question. I don't believe it is fundamentally bad but in the context of an economy and society where personal advancement and prosperity are strongly connected to employment it doesn't help. There may be other ways such as universal income but I still can't get my head around how that is sustainable.

In Australia we are teetering into our first recession in decades. Retail spending is down, property values are going backwards and increased defaults put the stability of the financial system at risk. Wages growth has stagnated, work has become casualised and the only people getting richer are those who were rich to begin with. In that context having public funds go towards technology instead of giving someone an income seems wrong. The people who made the self driving bus aren't spending at local shops like a driver would.

California may not have the same economic pressures but I would be surprised if people aren't asking some of the same questions. There is a massive number of people employed operating vehicles. They feed families and contribute to local economies. What happens when they lose their jobs?

"Busy work" jobs that aren't needed is not good. Investing in technology creates wealth and better standard of living. Most people are smart and resourceful when they want to be. If their job gets automated they should find a different one, and if there are no jobs then entrepreneurs and governments should think up ways to make use of the surplus labor.

Assuming unemployment leads to poverty (e.g. no UBI), then unemployment is absolutely a bad thing. Poverty has a very strong correlation to crime, which is, ummm bad.

Anything that increases societal atomization is bad. People need to feel they're contributing to the commons, to society at large, that they're needed and useful. Also, multi-generational welfare, the logical result of chronic unemployement, is a trap, a failure mode that does enormous harm.

Does doing a job that could be done better by robots make you feel useful and contributing to society though?

Yes, as there are plenty of those being done by humans today. Manual labour in developping countries (and plenty of small manual tasks in developped countries too, how many people wash dishes manually when dishwashers exist?), weird one-of-a-kind knowledge jobs for which the company doesn't bother buying the automation software that exists, because the transaction costs make it uneconomical.

There is no reason to believe this results in less social cohesion and self-satisfaction than a not-doable-by-robots job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com