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Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

God, yes, and someone think of the gong farmers and pole men.

That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.

I personally find that fighting dismissive attitudes is better done by not being dismissive towards other things (or people in this case)

It’s healthier for the discussion culture here as well.

There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.

Maybe the better option is to not be so anti immigration

Birth rate is declining almost everywhere

So let's poach these people from the third world and...what about the third world? People can't just be made in factories like robots and self driving cars can. It seems inevitable that either we will have really sucky retirements (please die early grandpa, we can't take care of you!) OR (hopefully) automation will come to the rescue despite luddite protests.

Plenty of people from the third world are interested in moving, trying something new. We should all be free to try new things, but of course you he world isn't set up that way. Seems like we could match up dual needs. The western developed world is in the midst of a racist and fascist period, so not the best time to try this. We have competing changes, shortage of workers in many job areas in the West like the trades in the US, also shortage of jobs for young people in the west.

I'm all for immigration, but the world isn't producing enough people to make that a very viable long term solution. Eventually we have to reduce our demand for labor, especially when our civilization is lopsided for awhile with older people and not enough young people (a problem that will fix itself eventually as the old people die off, I guess).

I'm OK with robots driving cars like I'm ok with not needing an elevator operator anymore to use an elevator.

There are not labor shortages. Instead we see massive youth unemployment.

I think the word "professional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.

My experience with taxis has been almost universally negative.

I wont really miss taxi drivers. I guess that says a lot about them.

I've taken taxis in the US, and i can understand why people wouldn't want to. Taxis in other countries are a different experience.

Huh? how can one possibly generalize whatever experience they have not only to one country but to “other countries”, i.e. to the world. I’ve taken taxi in many countries, in all continents, and my experience have been that the drivers are generally helpful. There are scams and bad experience, but that’s minority. That applies to any country, the US included

Artificially protecting jobs by holding back technology is terrible form. At best it’s short term before the economics become an order of magnitude cheap and at worst it’s hamstringing your economy so you’re left behind.

Be that as it may, I would argue there's a straight line from "it's okay to destroy this fairly-low-skill-career for the good of the economy" to the overall situation the US finds itself in today

I figure that’s the way of the world. We’ve gone from a majority low skill economy to a much more complex one over the decades. It will probably continue.

Well, the point is that if we reach a point in which a robot can do it better and cheaper, it's no longer useful work.

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