Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

In a 2018 paper, UC–Berkeley sociologist Steve Viscelli suggested that in the most likely scenario, long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages, will be replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous vehicles through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle less well than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs changing.

I'm not sure if the author is claiming that the job displacement will be 1:1. Does anyone honestly think it would be 1:1? I don't think so. And if more jobs are disappearing than are being created, there is a net job loss; also the author agrees that the new jobs would be lower pay. Whether jobs will be created in entirely and unpredictably new industries is besides the point. Yang's point is that everyday people are inadequately prepared to make that transition to new jobs. He frequently cites data that the US federal government sucks at job retraining.

IF various tech companies are successful in their endeavors (and yes, that's a big if), it will be true that a lot of people will need to transition to something new. And given recent demos by various tech companies for voice AI tech (yeah, Google's really was impressive when it came out, and it will probably get better until it's commercialized one day), self-driving tech (I'm a skeptic for the short-term, but it will probably happen in the long-term), and etc, I think the subject is ignored at the working population's peril. Never mind self-checkout, which is already a reality and steadily gaining ground.

Yeah, honestly I don't really understand the article's point.

Is it that say McDonalds switching to electronic kiosks to order your burger is going to create as MANY tech jobs as it took away? Because that doesn't pass the smell test.

> Yeah, honestly I don't really understand the article's point

To discredit Yang's main running ideal.

Perhaps the article's reason for being is simply that, if you publish a headline with a professional-looking article behind it, then large swaths of people will have their opinions swayed without actually reading through.

There were a slew of anti-yang articles that came out from the leftmost media sources immediately after the debate, owing to the fact that Yang made Elizabeth Warren look unprepared in her answer about job loss.

Andrew Yang, snake oil salesman: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/andrew-yang-tech-entr...

Is Yang doing more harm than good to the case for universal income?: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/16/andrew-ya...

Andrew Yang is Full of it: https://slate.com/business/2019/10/andrew-yang-automation-un...

There was one more I can't find. It's good to be generating hit pieces; it means someone views you as a threat.

National Review a leftmost media source?

Or Politico, or Slate. When I hear "leftmost" I'm thinking like, Jacobin or Chapo

What is the basis for saying Politico has a bias in some direction?

I watched the debate, and I'm not a big Warren fan, but it most definitely wasn't my impression that Yang won that argument or made her look unprepared. If anything I would give the point to Warren for citing data arguing that automation to date has had significantly less impact than sending jobs to China and Mexico.

I think Yang has a solid argument that automation is a considerable job risk in the future, but we don't know how long that will take. I really doubt truckers are going to be obsolete so quickly. The tech will be good enough no doubt, but there's going to be a kerfuffle that'll slow it down, especially if you get a pro union candidate like Sanders.

I think Yang is a good talker, charismatic, and smart, but I don't buy his urgency... yet. That being said, I think he'd make a good candidate (personally prefer Bernie, but would happily accept Yang).

No doubt a lot of media is trying to tank him (we see this with Bernie constantly), which just makes it really hard to sort the reality from the BS and polarizes people further.

"Ah yes, noted Leftist bastion" checks notes "the National Review"

It will free up a lot of workers to do other things

Right now if you want to employ them you have to compete with McD burger-flipping, now they will be available for your next enterprise

First, jobs are work in that they’re emotionally boring repetitive tasks the bean counters have whittled down into cost saving nonsense. So fuck them: https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...

Second, there is a ton of work out there our society likes to ignore the value of because it’s not shallow novelty: https://aeon.co/essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-...

And really if automation does take more jobs than we can replace, being really nice to each seems like a good idea. Cause most people won’t be needed. Are we to descend into Mad Max life or could we, you know, kill the notion alpha attitudes are useful.

I am reminded of a paper by chimp researchers who watched a community of chimps gang up on some alpha male chimps and kill them off. Then noted how their community became much more ethical after such selfish, entitled behavior was eradicated.

“In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” - Marx

Yeh. Though I think it’s not explicit enough? A bit open to literal interpretation only.

I actually see it as “too little” new information that’s of utility to the general populace.

We spend then “too much” time focused on “too few ideas that matter”.

Like what celebs eat is discussed more than environment, and on and on. Too little new progress is made to satisfy these less discussed but ultimately far more important problems.

Thinking Keynes, our demand has been nudged to focus on consumerism, celebrity, gainz!. But we maybe need to balance that with the demands of the literal majority being shat on.

I’ve seen it discussed here too, that focusing on poverty via a statistic emotionally numbs analysis, ignoring that it’s still hundreds of thousands or whatever number it is, of real people barely scraping by.

We’re fetishizing opinions that we’re obliged to import as education from our parents and institutions, which is unavoidable. What is avoidable and manageable is the content of those opinions.

Free speech is generating whatever syntax you want. You’re not owed a society that kowtows to the embedded semantics.

Applying ethical standards to chimps seems weird. By what measure did they become more ethical?

You can read the study here: http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/driverless/

"Autonomous trucks could replace as many as 294,000 long-distance drivers, including some of the best jobs in the industry. Many other freight-moving jobs will be created in their place, perhaps even more than will be lost, but these new jobs will be local driving and last-mile delivery jobs that—absent proactive public policy—will likely be misclassified independent contractors and have lower wages and poor working conditions."

Those last mile delivery jobs also already exist. That market isn’t going to grow, necessarily, because long distance becomes autonomous.

Wouldn’t lowering costs for freight mean an increase in trips ?

More things can be shipped farther away therefore more last mile jobs?

If tech companies reach their holy grail of what they want to do with self-driving, last-mile delivery jobs won't exist. And as I already said, yes, that's a big if. But it's something the tech companies are aiming to achieve. And besides that, I am highly doubtful that proactive public policy would enable last-mile delivery jobs to have higher wages and better working conditions. The public policy isn't there today, I'm not confident it would be there in the future. Most public policy trusts macro economic theory's invisible hand to naturally raise wages if there are truly more jobs than there are people. And if it's true, that's what will happen, then there's no need for proactive public policy. So... /shrug

All of this ignores Yang's other point that all of the roadside diners and other hospitality industry on the highways that depend on the trucking industry would be affected.

I'm not saying that the tech companies will achieve what they are aiming to do. Again, I'm a short-term self-driving skeptic. But I think it's dangerous to not have the conversation.

If only we hadn't invented the printing press, scribes would still be making good wages. Somehow everybody found a job afterwards, though -- the economy adjusts with an increased supply of labor. UBI is a promising antidote for short term automation shocks, which Yang is also a proponent of.

>If only we hadn't invented the printing press

The difference is that scribing was a limiting factor to new and expanded methods of communication. Removing this limit allowed industry to expand due to massive decreases in costs of communication and expansion into entirely new forms. A similar argument can be made for many of the usual purported counter examples against automation alarmism. Steam engines, combustion engines, trains, cars, highways, the internet, they all were massively reducing friction and transaction costs, thus opening up new forms of commerce which brought new kinds of jobs.

Automation is a different kind of beast. The promise of the automation revolution is not orders of magnitude increases in efficiency, its removing humans from the equation. A long haul truck doesn't get across the country and order of magnitude faster, it just gets there more cheaply without the constraints human involvement. This does create a market for self-driving trucks and the industries needed to support them. But they too can be automated. The potential for making human labor irrelevant to large chunks of the economy is real and shouldn't be hand-waved away.

It really is not different, and people of the time certainly made the same exact arguments against most of the inventions on your list. Whether it's caused by a cotton loom or an immigrant, there is something about having to learn how to do a new job that really sets people the wrong way.

The only difference is that we are getting closer to the same asymptote we have been approaching for centuries now, where human labor is less about supplying material property and more about providing human service. Sure, it is possible that within the next few decades all but the most highly skilled and educated workers will be displaced into a continuously growing service industry. A decent chunk of people are not cut out for making a living on human interaction, so this is where a base UBI makes a lot of sense. It does not, however, imply that the labor force as a whole will not have any work to do.

Why would the new jobs be lower pay? If a truck driver can operate one truck while an autonomous truck operator can operate say 10, then the latter's marginal revenue is 10x more. Technology makes people more productive, which leads to greater wealth and higher pay.

Technology does make people more productive, but the claim that it’ll increase their pay is dubious. We’ve seen many times that companies will choose to keep the money rather than paying their employees more if they provide more value than their position requires.

A more results-based analysis is that technology makes companies more productive, which leads to greater profits. What you described sounds inexperienced and naive, not matching historical results without collective bargaining.

The people were just biological machines with mutually exclusive temporarily aligned self-interests.

Making productivity easier decreases the value of that productivity. Their wealth & pay may increase, but not as a 1:1 ratio to productivity.

Were that not the case, there would be no incentive for customers to select the new service.

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