[FussyZeus]

Robots do better work without breaks, rest, coffee and in many cases without even occupying physical space. We're on the edge of automating driving, one of the most complex and demanding tasks humans do on a regular basis. The benefits for the companies are infinite: a completely docile workforce of robots that don't need anything but a steady flow of power. There is no reason to suspect any jobs are safe any more.

It's not a conspiracy, it's a cost/benefit chart that any responsible executive is going to be looking at.

[hueving]

We continue to automate an simultaneously make new jobs all of the time. The same arguments you used about driving could be applied to the printing press displacing people who copied books, etc. The more technology increases, the more our quality of life seems to improve.

There was almost no automation during the great depression, yet most people were unemployed. Automation has most certainly increased since 2009 and unemployment has fallen.

I'm skeptical there is any correlation between automation and unemployment at all, unless you are measuring job counts in a very specific industry being automated away.

[FussyZeus]

The entire point of automation is to reduce human intervention in a process. If post-automation jobs = current jobs in terms of quantity and skill, there would be no economic benefit to automation. This means that of the people displaced, only a minority can theoretically get the "new" job, and even then, that hopes that there are no already qualified candidates from outside the displaced pool ready to take that job.

It's true tech increases our quality of life, no one argues this (mostly). That said our current political climate can have it's roots traced to the fact that so many blue collar workers have been displaced (first by overseas labor, second by automation) and their uphill battle to attain new work at even living wages, forget similar wages has been largely ignored if not a target for mockery by the middle class.

We need to start taking a serious look at how to deal with the groups of people who will be displaced so far and at such advanced ages that asking them to re-enter the workforce is impractical not just for them, but for the economy at a whole. Hell, even older TECH workers have a hard time finding new work after their COBOL shop shuts down, do we honestly expect it to be any easier at all for a factory worker or coal miner? I do not understand why so many obviously incredibly intelligent people in the industries I work in and read about have such a hard time grasping that for a worker who's done what they call "dumb work" for 10-30 years will have difficulty getting an education and entering a white collar profession. That was hard for me and I was a kid!

[darioush]

The question is does the automation create "the same number of new jobs".

Disrupting certain fields like "driving" has an even larger impact. Traffic signs, traffic cops, logistics companies, ... it goes on.

Or if you want an example that is just happening, look at journalism and how the internet has killed it. Once reputable news shops are now publishing click-bait top 10 lists and buzzfeed is here to stay.

It's not even hard to manage a small society functioning using robots for all menial work like cleaning, farming, cooking, transportation.

[krrrh]

Automation doesn't "create jobs". People's desires plus their creativity to supply new goods or services create jobs. Driving is a relatively big part of the economy, but it's nothing compared to what agriculture used to be (upwards of 90% of employment). Automating agriculture freed up time for a multitude of new and totally unrelated pursuits.

[lacampbell]

Automated driving on an industrial scale is still decades into the future. And even when it comes, arguing that it will be a huge, earth-shaking change seems far fetched.

Like I said, it's the general trend (we could talk about automations on the same scale as your human driver example that have already happened), but the alarmism is not justified.

[FussyZeus]

I agree it's decades off but I disagree that the alarmism is not justified, simply because we are not set up as a society to at all handle the side effects of the last good paying job that you can attain without really any high cost/long term training (truck driving) going away, and that's not even taking into account the multitude of businesses that were built on the backs of truck drivers; diners, motels, truck stops, service centers, practically any business that operates right next to a highway depends to a certain degree on truckers.

Plus truckers themselves are risky as workers, they have issues with exhaustion, the turnover is insane, they have accidents and they steal things, I'm not trying to demonize the profession don't misunderstand, I'm just saying that if there is one job that companies would LOVE to get people out of, this is it.

Also I really doubt it's decades. Maybe two of them, maybe but I'd say it's closer to 12-15 years depending how the DoT keeps pace, but with so much money and so many interest groups involved in making it happen, I think it's something we really need to start putting serious thought into.

[willhslade]

It's really not that good paying of a job. True, gross costs are over 100-200K, but the wage net of maintenance, insurance and food is under 50K.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to be corrected.

[darioush]

Decades is a long time. The internet is only 2.5 decades old and now you can click and have anything you want delivered to your doorstep. Your phone can tell you how to drive to avoid traffic. Your car already runs more software in it over a few minutes than the largest research universities could run in weeks. Image recognition has gone from "scanning digits on checks" to "outperforming humans on classifying images" (at least on some tasks) just in the past decade.

Which aspect of it do you think needs decades?

[Spooky23]

The hype is infinite.

When you look at the burn rate and technology investments required of a company like Uber just to dispatch cabs, that should hint at the difficulty of the AI revolution.

[FussyZeus]

Cabs are harder though. Cabs need to negotiate the complex and often extremely busy city routes. Most truck driving is LTL to warehouses on the edge of cities, and if a truck had sufficient fuel, it would have no reason to ever leave the freeway.

[Spooky23]

Not really. All of the tech people like to talk about how easy trucking is because of the distance aspect. That's like saying pilots are obsolete because autopilot does 95% of the work. "The work" is actually the 5%.

Cabs need to drop you to a 50 meter circle adjacent to a street address. Trucks need to land at a specific dock at a specific warehouse at a specific time. Some warehouses are highly optimized and organized. Others are a total shitshow... Amazon warehouses for example often have trucks queued up for hours due to staff shortages or general incompetence at the docks.

So the business case for the automated truck is to take a trailer from X to Y, and be capable of taking direction from a $10/hr temp who can't find his ass with both hands. Or... you need to deliver the trailer to some staging area, and pay drivers to figure out that mess. Or some other solution. In any case, the "getting on the interstate" part is the most trivial problem to solve.

[FussyZeus]

In the distro center I worked at, it was incredibly rare for the long haul trucks to actually attach the trailers to the building. They would jack up the trailers in the lot, let the truck go, then use a switcher to do the remaining lot because the switcher can just pick the thing up and go instead of having to have a worker there to wind the legs up and down on the trailer. Ours was not a huge distro hub either, pretty small one so I'd imagine larger ones have even more infrastructure to handle the freight that doesn't involve the pull truck.