Comment by calldacopsidgaf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calldacopsidgaf | Hacker News Reader

calldacopsidgaf

"safety" is usually the first point out of the mouth of a self-driving advocate. If safety = preservation of life, I wonder how truly "safe" full Waymo supremacy would be when there are millions of Americans who drive for a living [1], in a country where working age adults need a full-time job to get basic healthcare.

Through that lens, I honestly don't know if Waymo's future would lead to preservation of life. I actually think it might increase physical harm to Americans, only that harm is laundered out of our roadways and into our failing healthcare system.

This is an important aspect of any tech that threatens whole sectors of employment.. "safety" is always thrown into question when you cut & consolidate economic lifelines without a societal safety net. If it happens to truckers it can happen to you, too.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps... This article lists 3.5 MILLION truckers, not even counting rideshare drivers and other CDL holders.

You can say the same for most of the technology progress. For example, self-propelled combine harvesters caused mass migration of Americans in 1940s from rural areas to cities because they were out of job. With your logic, it should have not happened.

The better approach is to ask government to come up with a solutions that does not involve limiting science and tech.

Should we have also not cheered on electric computers replacing all the expensive, skilled mathematician/computing jobs that used to exist? Keypunch operators? Telephone switchboard operators? Advanced printers replacing the vast majority of the typesetting work and tons of maintenance involved with early printers? Bowling Pinspotters? Tollbooth collectors?

Should we smash the machines in the factories and go back to everything being handmade? Get rid of the pick-and-place machines for our electronics and have everything hand-soldered on hand-drawn boards? Think of the jobs!

I hear these new-fangled steam locomotives can move as much freight as hundreds of horse-drawn carts. That's hundreds of jobs being replaced by just a few on the train. Think of the jobs for all those horse drivers, all the barn workers, and more!

There are tons of jobs that used to exist that don't anymore. Many were very common. We used to have to pay people to go light all the street lights. Can you imagine having to pay an army of people to walk all the city streets every night to go light all the lights and every morning to extinguish them?

To be fair, I am a bit of a skeptic of driverless cars taking over 100% of the driving industry. I think as long as roads are open to the public there will be some humans behind the wheel. There's probably just going to be enough "odd" kinds of transportation needs that don't map well to the automation that cover 90% of people and trips just fine.

Wow, heckin' epic comeback good sir, upvoted and take my Reddit gold. Never heard it before. I'm just saying it's awfully convenient to the owner class that silicon valley wants to speedrun "full autonomous takeover" while politicians saw away at individuals' economic security.

I would LOVE an autonomous utopia but if Waymo wants do the "autonomous" without the social safety net, they can spare me the BS about this saving lives and admit that their automation is about the cold, hard savings of eliminating human workers

Business being about business is not revelatory. Your grief is with the government, and by proxy, the voters.

There is a ton of research that can be done, or trash that can be picked up if people “need” jobs. The government just needs to tax and pay for it.

So what, its Waymo's fault we don't have a public option in healthcare? I didn't realize they invented a time machine to go back and bribe Lieberman.

Are all tech companies supposed to just stop and send all the engineers home and quit making new things until we get UBI?

In the end your frustrations seem more like policy choices being made by an elected government. 49.8% of voters thought this set of policy ideas were the way to go. I disagree vehemently, but a lot of people do like these policies overall.

In the end, we've eliminated tons of jobs in the past, and yet continue to make jobs that didn't even exist before. There will be more work to be done. What, did all those switchboard operators end up on unemployment forever? Did all those computer operators who manually loaded the tapes end up destitute forever? What do you think happened to all the lamplighters? This is one type of job that will probably face severe cuts in the future, but that's not proof there will be no other jobs for those people to do. Just not driving anymore. Just like how we don't pay for people to manually solder in all the components in our electronics anymore.

You're acting like this is some new thing, that Silicon Valley is somehow "speedrunning" this, but this has just been the case of technology throughout all of historical humanity. New technology comes in and supplants expensive labor. I don't see what makes autonomous vehicles different.

Let's see how those fat cats like if we automate the guillotine and decide we have our own bastilles to storm.

> I think as long as roads are open to the public there will be some humans behind the wheel.

Pretty much every car will have a human driver. Autonomous vehicles don't work.

Waymo's cars are driven remotely by humans.

Is sometimes drawing a path on a screen and clicking execute really "driving" the car?

They've got 70ish people as operators controlling a fleet of thousands of cars. Does the operator have a desk with like 50 steering wheels he's using all the time?

AV operators will be a job in the future (its a real job today, as well). Instead of sitting behind the wheel of one cab all the time though, they'll just respond to the weird edge cases that creep up and validate things are working properly.

We still have people in charge of the street light operations. There is not nearly as much work to do anymore, so we don't have nearly as many of them.

I fundamentally agree with you, but at the same time I don't want the answer to be preserving labor sinks when the answer could instead be more fairly distributing the value produced by labor so that we just don't need to work as much in the first place.

If health care is the only problem, then Medicare for all is the solution. We can have better health care and possibly fewer automobile deaths.

It is yet to be seen whether waymo can really drive everywhere that humans drive, though.

Waymo certainly can't as currently designed. Their system must have a very detailed mapping of the situation and it has a fallback of showing a human operator somewhere the situation and asking for the right course of action. (This does not violate level 4. A level 4 car must be able to safely resolve anything a human could, but it is allowed to stop and ask how to proceed.)

It never ceases to amaze just how many logical backflips Americans will do to avoid saying “our healthcare system is shit and must be fixed”.

If you work at it, I’m sure you’ll find a justification that Americans should all stop breathing because it’s bad for health insurance profits !

To misquote Milton Friedman: "Oh, I thought you were trying to have a taxi service. If it's jobs you want, we should have 2 drivers per car."

Prop up the existing wage-slavery system because anything else would cause people to not have healthcare coverage? It’s shockingly unimaginative.

Anyways, my last Uber driver was playing games on his iPad while driving. Did a good job of hiding it at first.

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