Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> “We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety and jobs for increased corporate profits," [California Labor Federation head Lorena Gonzalez] Fletcher, who called autonomous trucks dangerous, said in a statement.

We would obviously need to collect lots of data with safety drivers in place to determine how often they are necessary and how many accidents (both lethal and non-lethal) the trucks get into to determine if they really are dangerous, but this is a totally reasonable take from the head of the CFL.

> "We will continue to fight to make sure that robots do not replace human drivers and that technology is not used to destroy good jobs.”

Using union power to protect jobs just for the sake of protecting them is the thing that labor unions do that most people don't support. See the recent writer's strike for a good example -- many supported their desire for better wages and working conditions, but feelings were much more mixed on support for allowing AI to replace writers.

I might be in a bubble but in my circle the writer's strike was indeed widely supported. It's only among my techy friends that the AI replacement thing was ever really considered. My artist friends and my gymbros were just "yeah fuck the man".

> many supported their desire for better wages and working conditions, but feelings were much more mixed on support for allowing AI to replace writers.

It could be slightly lower but its still pretty high. This poll says 74% of likely voters support a prohibition on AI replacing humans for writing TV shows compared to 67% support for the strike overall.

It is a lot lower than the 87% support for "appropriate compensation" for reruns and streaming, but I think that is a much less contentious question than the AI writing prohibition one. By definition practically everyone agrees that they deserve "appropriate" compensation, the debate is over what is appropriate.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2023/8/17/a-majority-of...

You truly live in a tech industry bubble if you think most people would side with mass unemployment of truck drivers, one of the most common professions for men in the US, or want to consume AI-generated drivel for entertainment.

Would their likelihood to side with mass unemployment of truck drivers increase or decrease if it were explained to most people that this would lower the prices they pay?

Most consumers don't care either way, and many care about price above all else. Automated trucking means possibly lower prices, and AI entertainment does to.

And depending on the source you look at, Truck Driver isn't even in the top 25 for men (it's mostly construction, HVAC, Pipe fitting, and related jobs).

And in fact one source I looked at said that software engineering employs more men than truck driving (but that source was dubious).

In a way, consumers also rely on each other to keep prices low. If you don't have a large number of middle-class peers buying the same consumer goods as you, helping distribute R&D and manufacturing costs, then that consumer good will become a luxury item with luxury pricing.

I do not know what you pay for entertainment if it is expensive, but in my world, it is not. And writers are not the expensive part of it either, that seems to be the cheapest one.

“More than 3.5 million people work as truck drivers, an occupation dominated by men who hold more than 90% of truck driving jobs. Driving large tractor-trailers or delivery trucks is one of the largest occupations in the United States.”

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps...

> Automated trucking means possibly lower prices, and AI entertainment does to.

We currently have inflation driven across a wide swathe of goods, driven primarily by corporate greed, and streaming services jacking up prices while putting out endless reboot and IP farm garbage. I’m not sure what would ever lead you to this conclusion.

It doesn't matter what most people side with. CEOs will be for it so it will probably happen.

They would side against the unemployment but be for the cheaper prices it produces and ultimately vote with their wallets. Same way people decry the working conditions in Apple's factories but buy the products made in those factories anyways. This is not a SV bubble, it's just the facts of human nature. No one (or a tiny fraction) pays more for something when an identical service is available for cheaper.

What’s to say it would ever lead to lower prices and not simply higher executive pay, stock buybacks etc? That certainly seems to be far more the order of the day.

It's possible but that seems to be a fully general argument against ever making things more efficient? Why bother with any innovation at all if the profits are eaten by execs?

For lowering prices vs. eating the profits, I think a bit of both happens in most industries. There are plenty of examples where better tech constantly leads to lower prices - basically most PC hardware like SSDs today. IMO these kinds of things never get media attention but yeah prices do get lower in many areas. The dynamics of whether they extract profits or pass on savings are complex and vary over time depending on competition etc. but over the long term its hard to argue that some industry will get more efficient but no one else will start competing with the same tech to bring prices down. For self driving cars we have 2-3 players in the field too which is a good sign.

Overall this argument has been rehashed for different technologies many times. Horse drivers vs. cars, scribes vs. typewriters blah blah. Its difficult to argue we would have been better off today by protecting jobs over letting the technology help everyone eventually. Personally i think this transition will be rough though, a lot of people including programmers are going to lose their jobs and we might have years of pain ahead before things stabilize. But in the long term yeah its better than just hiding AI in a box and pretending like nothing happened.

I’m not referring to the argument in the abstract, but the specific case of making unemployed 3.5 million truck drivers and the cost savings getting passed onto consumers in the form of lower-priced goods. If this was a realistic scenario (setting aside that the driverless tech is not there) then why are the cost savings from exploiting truck drivers by making them all over-worked, independent contractors being passed on to consumers now? Instead, what we have is unrestrained corporate greed, with companies jacking up the price of goods to obscene levels and keeping the profits for themselves.

I agree grocery prices have been nuts recently. Canada recently completed a study on high prices that concluded there's not enough competition in the market [1]. They made some recommendations but nothing will be done lol..

My problem is that people are increasingly blaming technology for the failures of the government. Self driving trucks SHOULD make things cheaper. Having a robot do things that people used to do SHOULD help us all in the long run the same way washing machines do.

But when it doesn't, people have such low expectations of the government that they don't even consider that option. Like are we supposed to just stop all scientific and technological progress that could endanger jobs now, just freeze society in the state its at now?

The way I see it we need both levers, science and government to make progress. Lately the sentiment is we should burn down the half that works because the other half doesn't work. I think that's the wrong approach.

[1] https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/competition-bureau-canada/e...

Mass unemployment of longshoremen happened when containers came in.

Nothing to do with tech industry bubble.

I am shocked how little sympathy people have for e,g, teachers, who impact their kids every day, and have been consistently crapped on for decades on this continent. General public's overall sympathy to unions and/or truckers is limited.

Unfortunately, most people's attitude is "I don't have that, so they shouldn't either!" or "My life is hard, theirs should be too!!!". It would be more productive and compassionate to say "I don't have what they're asking for either, maybe I should do something about that and we'll all get better", but sadly that's not how it tends to work :-<

Maybe teachers would have more sympathy if they weren't lobbying to keep children in failing schools while sending their own children to private schools.

https://katv.com/news/nation-world/chicago-teachers-union-le...

In California, teachers in public schools are stopping to assign the homework to students, certainly through 5th grade and, in some places, beyond. They a going along with de-tracking (removing advanced classes). Not to mention other practices.

As parent, you basically have to find tutors, enroll kids into AoPS/Russian Math, etc… I, for one, stopped understanding what is it that these teachers actually do?

My parents are both public school teachers. "Classroom management" is the term that describes most of the job. My dad has inadvertently conflated the need for reopening schools during the pandemic with the need for childcare to keep the economy moving (though he quickly reversed course on the need to reopen schools when union talking points came down the pipe).

Teachers have definitely been "crapped on" for a long time, but they fervently argue for the system from which the crap flows.

My wife was a teacher before we had kids. She left the profession for exactly the reasons you mention. She liked teaching children. She hated dealing with discipline and especially with needy parents who would not trust her when she said that their child wasn't any better than any other student. She hated the fact that they wouldn't let her teach advanced concepts to advanced kids, and that they got rid of tracking and classroom aides.

When her job became more overhead than actually teaching, that's when she called it quits. Now she volunteers most of the day at school trying to help the teachers in any way she can to make their jobs easier.

> You truly live in a tech industry bubble if you think most people would side with mass unemployment of truck drivers, one of the most common professions for men in the US, or want to consume AI-generated drivel for entertainment.

if the windows of the truck are tinted and you can't tell whether or not an AI is driving and if the script isn't signed with an author's signature and you can't tell who wrote it then who how will you even know to be upset or not?

> You truly live in a tech industry bubble if you think most people would side with mass unemployment of truck drivers

Radical idea here: How about some places accept autonomous trucks, and some places accept human-operated ones, and then customers can choose which places they frequent? If they truly would side with truck drivers, they should go to stores that only used human-operated trucks without the need for legislation, right?

The most likely first adopters are probably FedEx or UPS, which have huge numbers of heavy trucks which operate only between their internal distribution hubs. This will require infrastructure at the endpoints, to get trucks directed to the correct loading dock, backed into place, and docked. They'll also need fueling, washing, and maintenance. Random trucks between random points are a ways off.

Most automated trucking scenarios are similar to the harbor pilot method ships use. The automated driving would be on the highway, and the local pilot would take over when it arrived at the gate to get it into the right loading bay and back out again.

Haven’t we proved autonomous cars to be safer than human drivers? Trucking is different of course, but just wanted to point that out

No we did not. That one seems to be just an supported claim by companies pushing that tech.

No, is the short answer. Of course self driving continues to be trialled in SF and elsewhere, but my understanding is that the safety data (where available) for example does not consider a wide range of road conditions, and has other statistical limitations when attempting to compare with human drivers.

Certainly there are good reasons why SFFD is not keen on Waymo and Cruise.

Self-driving (and AI in general) has a tendency to go catastrophically wrong for impossible to determine reasons (imagine if each hallucination was a potential traffic accident), in a way that is hard to predict and is essentially open ended in terms of consequence. Humans do very stupid things much much less often than fairly stupid things - no such correlation is offered by AI.

> Self-driving [AI] has a tendency to go catastrophically wrong for impossible to determine reasons

I don't think that's true. I live in SF and am not aware of a single catastrophe owing to self-driving cars, let alone enough such catastrophes to form a statistical sample from which we could reliably infer tendencies.

I don't really have anything to back this up, so take it with a massive gain of salt, but I seem to keep seeing discussion of Teslas hitting bikes (both cyclists and motorcycles). Most of it centers around there being enough doubt about whether Autopilot was being used, or whether the driver was actually monitoring like they should have been, or whether the cyclist "should" have been in the road, etc, as to "count" as being less safe. I can only imagine that there are impassioned interpretations of the data going multiple directions.

A Verge article [0] has some discussion on this with regard to a motorcyclist that follows this pattern, and FortNine also covers this in a characteristically well-made video [1].

There's also the problem of autonomous (electric) cars being too quiet when they first begin moving, but that's easy to solve.

So I'm not entirely sure about their safety being "proven", but that's largely because the problem domain is enormous and the data somewhat open to interpretation. Overall "proved" seems too certain a word as of now, without narrowly defining the scope.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23280461/tesla-autopilot-...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRdzIs4FJJg

Waymo/Cruise are the more relevant entities for this conversation (although neither are actively pursuing trucking right now). Tesla hasn't even legally registered FSD as a self-driving product in California. Once they do that and get their disengagement rates 10^-3 lower then they will be more relevant to the conversation about how safe driver-less vehicles are.

Not to discount the obvious potential safety issues, just noting that Tesla is taking a very different approach that is currently pretty far from being able to complete trips consistently, let alone be measured up against human drivers.

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