Comment by andrewfong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewfong | Hacker News Reader

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I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways:

* NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB does its job reasonably competently and independently.

* Gradual introduction: It's unlikely fully self-driving cars will be introduced all at once. What's more likely is the gradual automation of certain driving functions (sort of like cruise control, automatic parking, and other feature sets). I think any system that hands off control from a robot to a human introduces its own safety risks, but you might see something like a dedicated autonomous lane on a freeway with special parking areas where humans can safely resume control for driving in the city. There's also augmented driving where a car is primarily human driven, but will do things like pre-charge brakes and give advanced warning to a human diver when it believes the human is about to screw up.

* Economies of scale: Large business organizations will probably get comfortable more quickly with autonomous cars than individual consumers. If FedEx and UPS support policies like "no left turns," they'll probably be among the first to get on board with fully automated trucks. And you'll certainly see some support for the insurance business, if autonomous vehicles really do result in lower overall accident rates.

UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.

So they'll just get replaced. Amazon and Google do seem keen to get into that space.

Also why the airlines go bankrupt approximately once per career. The gross revenue per flight is the same as time increases, but pay raises for seniority decrease the profit as the workforce ages.

(Not making a value judgement here. Airline pilots have a tough job and do it well, and deserve to be well-paid. But the industry is not as nice as me.)

It's not like they're forced to pay their workers more as they age. The ones with unions may be forced to do so by their contract, but non-union airlines are hardly immune from bankruptcy. Airlines go bankrupt because it's a cut-throat business with extreme competition, which drives profits to zero.

An airline customer will switch carriers for as little as a $5 savings on the cost of a multi-hundred-dollar ticket. There is essentially zero customer loyalty. If you can't convince customers to pay more, and all possible cost-cutting measures have already been implemented, then you have no room.

In an ideal world, a business could survive forever in an environment like that. In the real world, business is variable, and with no margin, you can't build any resiliency. A couple of bad years is enough to screw you.

Fedex drivers aren't. That doesn't matter as much when there aren't real alternatives, but it can become critical if technology starts to drastically reduce the need for labor. That's part of what happened to the American auto industry during the 80's.

I hope they replace the workers in the warehouses first; since UPS/FedEx/Amazon own them, they could put QR codes on the floor or other craziness to automate those workers first.

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