[Iv]

I am trying to not delve into a 20 pages presentation, but I have gone though and through these themes for most of my professional life. The question whether we can really go to 100% of automation is moot if we can go to 99%. Either way it means that full employment is unnecessary and leads to the creation of bullshit jobs.

> I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.

That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.

Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...

Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them. Worse: we assume they are going to be so criticized that they have to perform better by a magnitude on day 1. That's making us waste 40 years.

[pfalcon]

> if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...

Sorry, but that sounds hilarious. If "a city wanted", it's still people who would need to ensure "to signal construction work". And people don't care. And for other stuff, people would need to pay for it with their taxes. I'm sorry, but as an outsider, I would say the roads (usual roads!) in the US are in "perfect" condition only in California. In other states, it's the usual asphalt-with-cracks, which will turn into a hole when a heavy truck rides it thru the rainy/snow season.

Heck, majority of the world has problems with trash on the streets, and cities can't neither teach their people to not litter, nor clean up timely after them.

[astrobe_]

> And for other stuff, people would need to pay for it with their taxes.

Automation benefits cities as well, you know. For instance computers probably drastically reduces the number of manual processing of paperwork. That's tax money you can use for something else.

[chordalkeyboard]

> That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.

I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.

> Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...

I believe there already are official maps and standardized signs in the developed world. I agree that incremental improvement is possible and desirable, I also think people are working on these things already. It is possible that signs could be redesigned to make them easier for machines to read but I'm not sure that's much of a bottleneck.

> Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them.

I see lots of effort to promote them, they just aren't technologically ready to perform at scale yet.

[Iv]

> I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.

We have decided to move all our factories to China instead of automating them. We still have subway drivers despite having the tech to automate subway since the 1960s.