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Well isn't this natural evolution in terms of productivity any race would experience? Lets take for example agriculture, dairy farming, and other animal farms. Compared to something like 300 years back, very few people now work on agriculture and associated tasks. Where did all those people go, they went on to do more productive work.

As there are better ways to harness energy and automate things people will move onto more and more productive work.

Finally we may reach a point where things like space colonies, settlements and other massive space exploration projects will make sense. Because we will have nothing else to do.

I like the theory, trust me, I do. Abundance sounds so good.

But, you're completely ignoring the economic framework we live in.

The problem is the people who own these automated systems accumulate more and more wealth, while the workers who once operated them get poorer and poorer. So 'nothing else to do' = 'living in grinding dystopian poverty', if nothing changes in our current economic system.

It all boils down to education. If former laborers can be efficiently trained for new job opportunities, society wins. If not, society continues to stagnate. Farmers don't become robotics engineers or rocket scientists spontaneously.

It's not quite that simple. There also needs to be demand to create those new job opportunities. I'm all for more people working in highly skilled sectors and getting rid of the need for menial labor. The question is: given how the economy works these days, where is the demand for those highly skilled jobs actually going to come from?

Most things that actually push the boundaries of what we can do - such as 3D printing, space exploration - have very little effective demand going towards them these days. The one exception may be medical research, I'm just not sure about that.

So I agree that society wins if the level of education can be raised and more people work in highly educated sectors. However, this is not going to be some kind of inevitable outcome of the market. The effective demand needs to be there to enable this transition, and there is no automatic market mechanism to make it happen.

Not sure about the truck drivers. I can see the benefits in making all the long-range truck deliveries drive through the night. This could be encouraged by time-of-use road charges for things like interstate highways, for a discount in registration fees or fuel taxes, I guess.

But delivery trucks will still need someone in them to make the deliveries. But what would change is that the delivery person could be doing things in the truck while on the rounds - this could be related or unrelated work.

Generally, if a technology transition releases a lot of productivity, it also drastically lowers cost of whatever is affected (delivered goods, which is everything). This, by rights, should free up a lot of extra money for people, which they can then spend on other things. The other things generally cause more economic activity somewhere else, which should create the new jobs.

But a portion of truck drivers will lose their job, with it never to return.

However, this can't be, nor should it be, stopped.

Delivery men could be automated too. A robot with package safe and some kind of pre-determined passcode could be sufficient. Insurance or onboard sensing to surveil would-be thieves would cover some of the safety issues.

And to avoid even more problems the delivery network could work with post offices to put these safes in place of P/O boxes. Australia Post already does this - you receive a package and they send you an SMS with the code to unlock the safe they've left it in. The delivery truck would just put the packages in the safe totally autonomously.

I think robot delivery men are farther off than automated long haul trucks. Having a robot that can find the front door of an arbitrary residence and get to it from the street is more than a little bit beyond our current capabilities.

The safe idea is interesting, though.

I've been wondering about this, and I think it's totally doable so long as you don't get stuck thinking about a literal "robot delivery man". The model I was considering was more along the lines of 1) park as close as possible to the target address 2) send SMS notifying the recipient that you've arrived. 3) recipient has a 5-10min window to go out to the waiting truck, swipe a card or whatever for ID purposes, and receive the goods.

It's a somewhat different experience to a human knocking on your door, but I'm sure it could be made to work.

Automated delivery vehicles may be able to do better in terms of offering a choice of delivery time, and sending accurate estimates of arrival time. There's considerable scope for doing a better job of delivering to households where there is usually nobody home during "working hours".

Yes, I was doing the typical constrained thinking of trying to apply new technology to an existing format.

What you're essentially describing is a motorised set of po boxes. Which would work brilliantly. For pizza delivery it's a motorised warmer oven with multiple components, probably looking a lot like those little motorised droids that are always zipping around the ankles of actors in Star Wars films.

They are further off but it's a completely unrealistic endeavor at this point in time. With automated vehicles automated delivery men become much more palpable, if not inevitable . As more and more people become comfortable with automation it will only further the other areas where robotics could really make an impact.

Between 'drive this truck 50 mph on city streets through traffic to a destination address' and 'carry this package from the curb to the front door' I'd have thought the first one would be more difficult to solve.

Yeah, in hindsight, the safe/dropbox idea is much more viable and likely to happen.

"if a technology transition releases a lot of productivity, it also drastically lowers cost of whatever is affected (delivered goods, which is everything). This, by rights, should free up a lot of extra money for people"

And here is the problem. What actually happens is the people who control "production" end up with most of this extra money.

What actually happens is the people who control "production" end up with most of this extra money.

This is not true. It's actually a pretty well-understood economic phenomena.

When changes to pricing is forced by changes in upstream costs, as with this example, but also as forced by increased taxes/fees, etc., you can predict who will bear the brunt of the cost (or enjoy the windfall) based on the elasticity of the buyer.

For example, we know that the elasticity for gasoline is very inelastic, because consumption only changes a small amount in response to price changes. This means that an increase in taxes on the petroleum industry will be borne mostly by the consumer, and not the producer.

However, for other industries where consumers are more likely to change their spending habits in relation to price changes, it will be the consumers that are on the winning side.

Well, no. Look up why aluminium is dirt-cheap today.

Not really. You would only end up with one group controlling all the extra money if there was a monopoly and pricing control. Even if you have a handful of shipping companies with the automated delivery technology whatever cost gains there are will soon be passed onto the customers.

Lowered cost of production always results in lowered cost of goods, which either raises quality for the same price, or lowers cost and released cash for other purchases.

I'm willing to bet that, at least in the infancy of the technology, there will be laws that require at least 1 capable driver in the vehicle at all times. This would still probably effect the industry greatly, as they could then hire almost anyone with a license, but 3.5 million jobs wouldn't just drop off the face of the country.

Well just like Emails haven't completely replaced Postal services. You will still need drivers. You will need people to drive Ambulances, Race cars and things like vehicles for banks and other important things.

But when big paradigm shifts like this happen, generally a lot of people end up loosing jobs.

Autonomous racing series - now that will be interesting. I don't think it would look like current motor racing - it is centered around the cult of the driver - but more like an outgrowth of robot wars. We could already have remote controlled race cars where the drivers sat in simulators and drove remotely - but we don't because people want to be in the hot seat.

Driverless racing cars could go incredibly fast - and require real solutions to large computing problems. And this would push development of driverless cars along quickly, just as motor racing pushed along the infant car industry quickly.

I might be wrong, but my intuition is that all the competitors would be near-perfect, and every race would end in a tie, or at least be very close.

I'd imagine that the winner would be the one with the best strategy. My feeling is that with as many variables as you'd see in a race, that it'd be impossible for a single AI to perfectly take all opportunities. And I can imagine some outperforming others in slingshotting or taking curves. Of course, it all depends on the rules of the race.

Plus you can take greater risks when drivers' lives aren't at stake. I imagine it would be a pretty exciting sport, not to mention expensive.

Actually, I think it might end up being cheaper than F1. No celebrity driver to pay millions to and no very-high safety concerns! Although given that most of the human population will probably not relate (or out-rightly reject the idea) to the sport because of the lack of driver, there might be less money in it.

I think your last point is the most relevant. I've spoken to a couple of huge F1 fans about this and they both seem to think it's the most stupid idea they've ever heard. They want less computers and more human control in their F1 cars, not the other way around.

Personally I have a dream of one day seeing an AI car competing against humans in an F1 race, but alas I fear it will never happen.

To quote "The Fast and the Furious"...

"It doesn't matter if you win by an inch or a mile; winning's winning."

One-make or control racing series ostensibly pit equal machinery, with only the drivers brain making the difference. Presumably in an autonomous series, there would be little technical rules to force equivalent vehicles. Thus one car would be optimised for a certain type of track, and one for another. Different teams can come up with different strategies, and there is always the element of chance.

It's near-impossible for a motor race to end in a tie because there is only one optimum racing line, and only one car can occupy it at a time. Just removing the drivers wouldn't be enough to change the results.

Yes, you'd get one team dominating as you do in any motorsport, but the methods to temper this are well known.

Basically it would be like current motorsport but with the element of risk for the driver removed, which would result in higher speeds and greater risks being taken. I think it would be exciting to watch.

It's on its way already to an extent. Apologies for linking to Fox News, but it was the only one with video: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2010/03/29/vw-stanford-build-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Homerdrive - the truckers already have this! =P

At least the packages that end up on the doorstep still require human delivery. Normalizing addresses and pin pointing the exact location still isn't quite good enough.

But yes, unintended consequences will surely make things interesting. The productive will become more productive, and the 99% will get that much larger...

"At least the packages that end up on the doorstep still require human delivery."

Imagine that you ordered something from Amazon. You could choose from a bunch of different times, perhaps a dozen in a day, when the automated delivery truck would swing by your house. Your phone would make a noise, and you would go outside to grab your packages off the truck. It would be like an Automat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat) on wheels. You would somehow authenticate yourself and then grab your boxes from your assigned slots.

I'm pretty much never home when the UPS guy swings by my apartment and I order enough stuff that I wouldn't want to inconvenience my neighbors two or three times a week asking them to grab it for me.

You could just indicate when you're going to be home and they can drive by at that time.

In Japan, all the delivery services let you indicate a precise 2-hour window when you want the delivery. With automated drivers, this could be feasible in the U.S. as well.

I get all my stuff delivered to a Packstation, which is only a 5min walk away. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation

"You would somehow authenticate yourself and then grab your boxes from your assigned slots."

Easy to imagine with a phone, but does HP still support their fingerprint readers? Seems like a gimme.

Or maybe just require the card used at purchase to be swiped in the delivery truck. Then you could ask anyone to stay home and pick up your item, just give them your card.

In fact, one concept with increasing popularity in Germany are Packstations (http://www.dhl.de/en/paket/privatkunden/packstation.html). Basically it's a set of parcel boxes where customers can unlock the one that contains their packet.

Now, instead of hoping that the delivery guy arrives when you are at home, you just give the address of the next Packstation and pick it up at your convenience.

Isn't that pretty much re-inventing the post office, except that you don't ship the item through the postal system? This seems like an indication that we need to fix our postal systems...

If you want to put it that way, it's re-inventing the system of lots of small post-offices. But it's completely automated, so it's financially feasible. And DHL is the parcel carrier of Deutsche Post, the privatized entity that used to be Germany's publicly operated postal system.

I'm not sure that there's anything to fix here, specifically.

USPS is testing this in trial markets right now:

https://tools.usps.com/go/EPLAction!input?WT_z.redirect=www....

Amazon is doing this too with Amazon Lockers: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_l... They're still on a trial run, but they have been rolling out in a couple more cities recently.

That idea is very cool; but I feel it introduces a whole new amount of complexity.

Making a car that drives you (safely) somewhere is the problem Google is working on.

Delivery of packages along a route is a whole other matter; for example I live on a street with a weird t/fork at the end. Vans tend to struggle getting in and out.

The decision making process to effectively get a van to my door probably still one that requires human input :)

You'd be surprised!

The autonomous cars had to solve problems much more difficult than this in the DARPA challenges. Stanley and Junior have been thrust into artificially complicated mazes and come through with no problem.

Heck, here the car can autonomously produce a 'slide park': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_piO849uRdI