Technical innovation moves and concentrates the savings to the top of the chain.
Technical innovation is a capital expenditure that pays off large returns in the long term.
Technical innovation permanently removes/drastically minimizes OpEx for those willing to put up with significant capital expenditure (in building the Technology in the first place): but once done, those jobs are gone.
It made mining, telephone, retail, manufacturing etc companies drastically minimize their dependence on human labor. These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.
Next up is transportation.
Most governments dont want to be bothered with transportation and run it inefficiently.
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
Electric (and autonomous) vehicles are going to be the next PC era that is going to change the world for decades and build the new billionaires.
> These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.
This is only true for the first innovators. Competition means that these 'saleries' will just disappear rather than going directly to the bottomline. Exchange value (~ the price) shrinks as you replace human labour, as Karl Marx would already have told you. ;)
And that's not even a bad thing. It's good that people don't have to waste their lives in mines etc. The crucial question is how we as a society deal with this.
With a sufficiently complicated system involving sufficient capex to get started, you can avoid having to compete with anyone but the companies who started around the same time as you, at least for several years. Startups try to build network effects into their products to build this up - many businesses invest lots in physical infrastructure.
You might not be able to get away with charging twice what a taxi used to cost, but you can certainly make a very healthy margin, and healthier still as you buy up competitors.
I am curious if anyone has done an analysis to see how much of the capital expenditures going to automation goes to labor vs profits/return on capital.
I could definitely see the case that almost none of it is going to labor in the end, but it would be interesting to see a real study.
"Our recent research casts doubt on the hypothesis that technology-driven developments were a major factor behind rising inequalities in advanced countries.
Let me start with some facts about jobs. Both the European Union and the United States are characterised by strikingly similar labour force developments. In both regions, there has been a decline in the number of jobs for workers with low levels of educational attainment over the past 25 years. Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous increase in jobs for workers with tertiary education, and this is the only job category that expanded after 2008, even in several countries that were hit hard by the recent global and European financial and economic crises. While underemployment, when a worker takes a job for which they are over-qualified, is a prevailing phenomenon, it tends to be temporary.
If a greater share of jobs are only open to tertiary-educated workers, it could contribute to increasing inequality, if tertiary-educated workers earn ever more, relative to lower educated colleagues. Data shows that this has been the case in the United States and China, and to a much more limited extent in Germany. However, exactly the opposite has happened in many other countries during the past two decades, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden and Japan. In these countries the so called ‘skills premium’ has actually fallen."
This may not be unprecedented, and hence may not be worse overall than other historical changes in employment. Yes, eventually all delivery driving of people and things will be able to be replaced by machines. But it doesn't exist today to do it safely and reliably in all cases.
Imagine if the technology did exist today to do safely and reliably in all cases. It would still take a huge capital investment and turnover of equipment to replace or refit all the human driven vehicles. It would be hard to do in a decade. So imagine it takes another five to ten years to drive the cost down and work out the kinks with weather and construction and so on and ten years to do the actual replacing. Keep in mind the existing equipment and labor will get cheaper as it starts to get replaced, slowing the transition. It seems it like the whole transition could take twenty years.
So in twenty years a major job category is going to get wiped out. Like lamplighters, stable hands, textile workers etc. The US has had twenty year periods where 10% of the population has quit farming (https://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf).
This will be a big change, but it may not be a worse change than some that have happened in the past.
I still don't think driverless tech is even there yet. What Uber is doing in San Francisco is a little scary. I'm waiting for the first fatality.
Autonomous vehicles will also not solve the transportation problem. A hundred automated trucks still doesn't come anywhere near the efficiency of three freight engines pulling the same load. Even if every car was autonomous on the Interstate, you might get rid of gridlock but you'd still have a lot of people moving very slowly; well under the theoretical maximum capacity for single lane transport.
Of course there will be fatalities from autonomous vehicles.
At some point though, maybe right away even, they will be fewer than human drivers, which cause around 30,000/year in the US. Humans fall asleep, get distracted, display poor judgement, chemical abuse, and medical problems. Autonomous will have none of these but might introduce a few new ones.
Well obviously trucks or buses can't compare on a per lane basis. But that's not a fair comparison. There's a street to almost every house but not a rail road track. If the railway tracks were as dense as streets you'd end up with much of the same problems and restrictions. You'll always need a truck of some sort to distribute goods from a railway station to a house. And I doubt you will come out on top if you have the added costs and time of transferring goods from trains to trucks.
OTR trucking is about speed and flexibility, not cost. I would love to see more freight shipped via train, but at the same time I'm very much liking 2 day Prime delivery.
Amazon Go will be worse. There are a lot more retail workers than drivers. The technology is closer to fruition: Amazon has a working autonomous store, but we are still a long way from fully autonomous vehicles.
The hardware requirements for any store that wants to adopt Amazon's tech are minimal: some cameras, an entry gate and possibly some pressure pads under the shelves.
Even if Amazon doesn't license out their tech -- and they would be foolish not to -- you can be sure that Google and Microsoft are working on their own versions. The market is staggeringly big.
Hmmm...I would respectfully disagree :). While it would most certainly impact stores by reducing cash clerks etc. people would still be required for warehousing/monitoring etc. A lot of high volume retailers/grocers already have a self-checkout station, if they had wanted more automation, they would probably just increase the number of these stations.
Also, anything more than a basic grocer would still want real people to help people with purchasing etc.
> A lot of high volume retailers/grocers already have a self-checkout station, if they had wanted more automation, they would probably just increase the number of these stations.
I mean, this is a great example against your point (imo). Those self checkout stands, sure they do employ a staffer to monitor, but each of those stands is basically a line that doesn't have to be employed by a dedicated staffer.
They managed to potentially drastically reduce the number of required staffers via self checkouts. I say potentially, because 1 self checkout doesn't inherently equal one checkout clerk, but you get where i'm going with this.
If my safeway can fire the 6 clerks i regularly see staffing the checkout lines, and hire 1 to monitor.. that's still a drastic layoff.
And what about all the manual labor involved? I'm sure it won't be all robots stocking shelves, so mostly stockers can remain employed for the time being, but i'm sure at least a few employees who specialize in managing stock will be laid off as well.
Just because it's not 100% layoff doesn't mean it's any less serious, imo. We're slowly decreasing the available job market simply put. Where are these people going to go?
The advice part of a storekeeper's job is the easy one to automate.
If we get rid of all the manual labor that humans do, why wouldn't we move the advice-givers to remote offices and improve their utilization? A call center to tell you where the milk is or which wine goes with your recipe might sound bad, but consider that you'd never wait another second to talk to a clerk, and everything would get even cheaper as more and more of the basic questions for the call center get moved onto intelligent bots.
I'm not saying that all retail jobs will go... yet. But the number of employees per store will go down, and since there is a large absolute number of retail workers, it will still be bad.
Secondly, once people get used to shopping at stores where they don't have to line up to pay, the new experience will become expected by consumers.
So there is a double effect whereby stores who adopt the new tech will save money on payroll, and stores that don't will lose some business.
You realize Amazon has an warehouse system run by robots, so there's a major flaw there..why do we need people to stock or work in a warehouse when that too can be automated? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quWFjS3Ci7A
Amazon Go is not much of a change from an existing store where there are self-serve checkouts in terms of staffing. The huge staff cuts have already happened in most supermarkets.
Interesting side note. I overheard staff talking at a local grocery store with a good number of chains. Now, i'm not sure to the extent of this (ie all chains or just those in my state), but they had to actually remove self checkouts.
Why? They were being targeted to test stolen credit cards and it was costing the company a pretty penny having to deal with all those fraud checks/etc.
Not a detraction from your point - i just found it interesting. "Automation" seemed great there, but they were having difficulty managing how it was being used.
I wonder what might happen with the upcoming automation(s) in a similar manner?
I'm curious where you're experiencing so much self-checkout. The vast majority of stores I go to have, at most, a single self-checkout lane.
Personally, I think if Amazon Go can follow through on its promise we'll see a drastic reduction in retail employment. The problem with existing self-checkout systems is that they're incredibly clunky and frequently require staff support/intervention. I've literally never had a successful self-checkout where everything worked properly.
Yeah, Amazon go seems like more of a boon for customers who don't have to check themselves out anymore. Go in to a CVS in the city and there will be one employee at an empty register and four self checkouts with a short line.
I think it would be hard to argue that we are a long way from fully autonomous vehicles, since millions of miles have already been driven by autonomous vehicles. What remains is mostly regulatory hurdles, psychological hurdles, and fine tuning.
> What remains is mostly regulatory hurdles, psychological hurdles, and fine tuning.
I think this is too optimistic. Self-driving cars only work because they are in the minority. Can you imagine a city full of current state-of-the-art self driving cars and it not turning into a traffic chaos?
In particular, I think that self-driving cars cannot work fully autonomously without communicating with other cars or the road infrastructure. And I am not aware of any effort to create a cross-vendor car-to-car communication protocol.
There are trivial cases where pure autonomous following of traffic rules will lead to deadlock (or other issues). Take these two simple examples: 1) 4 cars arrive at the same time in a four-way intersection without signals or yields 2) on a three lane road, two cars from the outer lanes try to switch to the middle lane at the same time.
These are by no means difficult problems (I'm sure there are more difficult cases too), but they must be solved and so far they're not being worked on.
Don't underestimate the difficulty of those hurdles. Driverless cars are a technology that will be directly responsible for human deaths. We as a society don't have a legal or ethical framework to deal with that sort of thing yet. Driverless cars could very well be the first deployment of autonomous robots within the general public, that is significant.
The number of miles is not what matters, but the number of trips in which a human driver can be reliably replaced by a robot. It doesn't matter how far the vehicle can go; what we care about is the degree of confidence we can have that the vehicle will reach its destination without incident.
Designing for the unexpected edge cases is harder than designing for the normal cases. In accordance with Cargill's ninety-ninety rule, we can expect that the "fine tuning" you mention will be turn out to be a very big job.
As an extreme demonstration, consider the fact that you could rack up a million "autonomous" miles in a matter of months, using vehicles capable of nothing more than "lane keeping assist" and "adaptive cruise control" - just set 'em loose on a NASCAR loop and run them around in circles until this artificial example's point has been proven.
Driving millions of miles is easy if you are driving circles around a test track. Which is not quite what current self-driving cars are doing, but they aren't driving on arbitrary roads in all conditions either.
I am exited about autonomous cars, but I'm not convinced they are as ready as various companies want us to believe.
That store, deviod of clerks, seems like a shoplifter's dream to me.
The advert's buzzwordy, bullshitty, vague explanation of the tech hints that they're not super confident themselves about how well it will face up against shoplifters.
Barring major infrastructure and cultural changes, or general purpose ambulatory robots, delivery trucks will still need humans on board to handle the delivery (and pickup) part. No self-driving car is delivering to the seventh floor, and I'm certainly not operating the lift gate myself for LTL pallet deliveries.
That's a pretty fair part of the commercial fleet, though vehicles with self-mobile cargo (taxis) or dedicated handlers on each end (long haul) are quite amenable to automation.
So last-mile service is becoming last-yard service. That's a good way to think of it because these will be subsistence jobs, or slightly below. Employees will no longer need a commercial license, or even a clean driving record.
I think one of the first things that will happen with self driving trucks will be that we essentially get around the limit on how long a truck driver can be on the road without a break since they will be able to sleep in the truck.
That might be the end state for the foreseeable future, but as others have said that person no longer needs to be a driver, just someone to load and unload.
At some point we'll begin to ask the question of whether it's worth paying someone to travel around with the truck, or if we'd prefer the cost savings. If you're a white collar place ordering heavy equipment you'll probably just pay the guy, but if you're a warehouse you already have a pile of people who can handle that.
> delivery trucks will still need humans on board to handle the delivery (and pickup) part. No self-driving car is delivering to the seventh floor
Good point.
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
>>Barring major infrastructure and cultural changes, or general purpose ambulatory robots, delivery trucks will still need humans on board to handle the delivery (and pickup) part.
Sure, but those humans won't be needed during the vast majority of the trip. The truck can make a pit stop at a "last mile" facility to pick up the human loaders/unloaders (who can be minimum wage temps).
this claim that because a robot can't do 100% of a job, they won't take over that job seems to pop up in every discussion about automation.
If the only thing you need a human for is to handle the delivery from the ground floor to the seventh floor, or to roll a pallet onto the back of the truck, you've eliminated 99% of the job. and if you've eliminated most of the work the job requires, that means you need a lot fewer people, and they need less skill and training and will be paid less.
one junior staffer in every office being tasked to go down to the loading bay and check for packages after lunch each day is not a major infrastructure change.
I think we're going to see some innovating in the mailbox and/or the front door as well. I mean who really wants to accept a package when it could be automated.
In short: Silicon Valley is going to drive a lot of job losses in the not too distant future. There's a very real danger that will blow back as mass unemployment drives people to extremes, unless people start thinking very seriously about what this new world is going to look like, and how the vast majority of the country will earn a living.
I really hate the idea that everyone needs to work. I get paid a lot as a software engineer to write stuff. Over the years, I've just seen so much money poured into tech that makes people buy more tech or that does nothing but license intellectual property.
I quit my job for 11 months in 2015 and flew around the world; backpacking off my savings:
It was the happiest time of my life. I'm planning on getting some funding sources for next time (Pateron, grants for OSS projects, etc.) and see if I can make it longer next time. I'd rather just make enough, making content and tech that I like and find useful, supported by peers, than working the the current tech world.
Reynolds envisioned a world like this in his book Army of Davids. I think he painted an overly rosy outlook and neglected to realize how difficult it is to start small businesses or how little time people have after their day jobs to work on things. (You can kinda glaze over those things when you're a UT professor).
I'm visualizing a future world where a million more homeless people are truck-hopping rather than train-hopping. You summon a delivery robo-truck by stealing all the goods off a shop shelf. It's a bit like calling for a sand worm in Dune.
Can't afford Uber? Just hang onto the roof of one.
The answer doesn't have to be that everyone has a job. It could be universal basic income. It could be any array of things.
But the question is, does Patreon, OSS grants and the like scale to the entire population of a country? My instinct is "no". Yet it's likely that a lot of people will be looking for alternative means by which to live life within our lifetimes, and no-one is really looking for broadly applicable answers.
No they're not. Silicon Valley is hyped and is just an exercise in transition of American business culture and economic classism to reign in "disruptive technology". That is the only "innovation".
More so, there's nothing revolutionary about Silicon Valley. It's 150% marketing hype. Just looking at their direction, they are just not in the position to do anything of real value during the next revolutionary phase.
The only thing they have revolutionized is the acceptance and availability of very in-depth and sophisticated surveillance and the availability of massive amounts of surveillance data for the government and their intelligence/advert agencies.
In a long enough timeframe, most of our jobs will become obsolete; the question is how long? As a programmer I am not worried, as AI isn't really smart enough to interpret the crap I am asked to build.
> The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and self-employed weavers in the 19th century that used the destruction of machinery as a form of protest.
I think that once the robots take enough jobs such that the anti-automation movement reaches a critical mass (and it won't take 100% of the jobs to do that, prob not even 50%) then we'll start seeing these sorts of things happen.
Sabotage of driverless cars will be trivial to carry out and very expensive to deal with... some forms may not have adequate protection under criminal law yet, which will require cooperation with legislators and law enforcement to address (good luck with that Uber).
I'm thinking things like finding and intentionally exploiting environmental cues that driverless cars use to make decisions (releasing plastic bags into intersections?) or else using directed radio interference to prevent them from communicating with homebase to know where to go next.
Some of these may be protected already by FCC or EPA or state-level equivalents, but will enforcement be up to the task? Is the FCC prepared to monitor and enforce local signal interference for corporations? Is a $500 littering fine enough to dissuade individuals and groups from continuing in "civil disobedience"?
My core point is that if anyone thinks people are going to take this lying down then they don't know human beings. Everyone is only 3 missed meals away from doing "whatever it takes" and that's even less if it's your kid(s) that are missing the meals.
If nothing is in place when the layoffs come then it'll take no time for former workers to organize and take matters into their own hands... within that election cycle the organization will be co-opted by some other ideology which conflates their anger at losing their job to automation with race, class, political affiliation, etc.
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Technical innovation is a capital expenditure that pays off large returns in the long term.
Technical innovation permanently removes/drastically minimizes OpEx for those willing to put up with significant capital expenditure (in building the Technology in the first place): but once done, those jobs are gone.
It made mining, telephone, retail, manufacturing etc companies drastically minimize their dependence on human labor. These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.
Next up is transportation.
Most governments dont want to be bothered with transportation and run it inefficiently.
New companies are capitalizing on this to establish future oligopolies: https://www.quora.com/What-controls-help-ensure-the-growing-...
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
Electric (and autonomous) vehicles are going to be the next PC era that is going to change the world for decades and build the new billionaires.
This is only true for the first innovators. Competition means that these 'saleries' will just disappear rather than going directly to the bottomline. Exchange value (~ the price) shrinks as you replace human labour, as Karl Marx would already have told you. ;)
And that's not even a bad thing. It's good that people don't have to waste their lives in mines etc. The crucial question is how we as a society deal with this.
Or any system for that matter?
I may not personally support such a view, but from a purely functional stand point, you are about as much value as you earn and can therefore afford.
You might not be able to get away with charging twice what a taxi used to cost, but you can certainly make a very healthy margin, and healthier still as you buy up competitors.
I could definitely see the case that almost none of it is going to labor in the end, but it would be interesting to see a real study.
Let me start with some facts about jobs. Both the European Union and the United States are characterised by strikingly similar labour force developments. In both regions, there has been a decline in the number of jobs for workers with low levels of educational attainment over the past 25 years. Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous increase in jobs for workers with tertiary education, and this is the only job category that expanded after 2008, even in several countries that were hit hard by the recent global and European financial and economic crises. While underemployment, when a worker takes a job for which they are over-qualified, is a prevailing phenomenon, it tends to be temporary.
If a greater share of jobs are only open to tertiary-educated workers, it could contribute to increasing inequality, if tertiary-educated workers earn ever more, relative to lower educated colleagues. Data shows that this has been the case in the United States and China, and to a much more limited extent in Germany. However, exactly the opposite has happened in many other countries during the past two decades, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden and Japan. In these countries the so called ‘skills premium’ has actually fallen."
http://bruegel.org/2016/12/explaining-inequality/
Dead Comment
Imagine if the technology did exist today to do safely and reliably in all cases. It would still take a huge capital investment and turnover of equipment to replace or refit all the human driven vehicles. It would be hard to do in a decade. So imagine it takes another five to ten years to drive the cost down and work out the kinks with weather and construction and so on and ten years to do the actual replacing. Keep in mind the existing equipment and labor will get cheaper as it starts to get replaced, slowing the transition. It seems it like the whole transition could take twenty years.
So in twenty years a major job category is going to get wiped out. Like lamplighters, stable hands, textile workers etc. The US has had twenty year periods where 10% of the population has quit farming (https://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf).
This will be a big change, but it may not be a worse change than some that have happened in the past.
Autonomous vehicles will also not solve the transportation problem. A hundred automated trucks still doesn't come anywhere near the efficiency of three freight engines pulling the same load. Even if every car was autonomous on the Interstate, you might get rid of gridlock but you'd still have a lot of people moving very slowly; well under the theoretical maximum capacity for single lane transport.
I wrote a post describing this:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
But we're well past the first fatality in a human-driven Uber.
At some point though, maybe right away even, they will be fewer than human drivers, which cause around 30,000/year in the US. Humans fall asleep, get distracted, display poor judgement, chemical abuse, and medical problems. Autonomous will have none of these but might introduce a few new ones.
The hardware requirements for any store that wants to adopt Amazon's tech are minimal: some cameras, an entry gate and possibly some pressure pads under the shelves.
Even if Amazon doesn't license out their tech -- and they would be foolish not to -- you can be sure that Google and Microsoft are working on their own versions. The market is staggeringly big.
Also, anything more than a basic grocer would still want real people to help people with purchasing etc.
I mean, this is a great example against your point (imo). Those self checkout stands, sure they do employ a staffer to monitor, but each of those stands is basically a line that doesn't have to be employed by a dedicated staffer.
They managed to potentially drastically reduce the number of required staffers via self checkouts. I say potentially, because 1 self checkout doesn't inherently equal one checkout clerk, but you get where i'm going with this.
If my safeway can fire the 6 clerks i regularly see staffing the checkout lines, and hire 1 to monitor.. that's still a drastic layoff.
And what about all the manual labor involved? I'm sure it won't be all robots stocking shelves, so mostly stockers can remain employed for the time being, but i'm sure at least a few employees who specialize in managing stock will be laid off as well.
Just because it's not 100% layoff doesn't mean it's any less serious, imo. We're slowly decreasing the available job market simply put. Where are these people going to go?
If we get rid of all the manual labor that humans do, why wouldn't we move the advice-givers to remote offices and improve their utilization? A call center to tell you where the milk is or which wine goes with your recipe might sound bad, but consider that you'd never wait another second to talk to a clerk, and everything would get even cheaper as more and more of the basic questions for the call center get moved onto intelligent bots.
Secondly, once people get used to shopping at stores where they don't have to line up to pay, the new experience will become expected by consumers.
So there is a double effect whereby stores who adopt the new tech will save money on payroll, and stores that don't will lose some business.
Why? They were being targeted to test stolen credit cards and it was costing the company a pretty penny having to deal with all those fraud checks/etc.
Not a detraction from your point - i just found it interesting. "Automation" seemed great there, but they were having difficulty managing how it was being used.
I wonder what might happen with the upcoming automation(s) in a similar manner?
Personally, I think if Amazon Go can follow through on its promise we'll see a drastic reduction in retail employment. The problem with existing self-checkout systems is that they're incredibly clunky and frequently require staff support/intervention. I've literally never had a successful self-checkout where everything worked properly.
As I understand it, grocery stores employ more people back-of-house and in areas like the deli counter, than they do at cash registers.
So "largest" may simply be an artifact of said binning.
I think this is too optimistic. Self-driving cars only work because they are in the minority. Can you imagine a city full of current state-of-the-art self driving cars and it not turning into a traffic chaos?
In particular, I think that self-driving cars cannot work fully autonomously without communicating with other cars or the road infrastructure. And I am not aware of any effort to create a cross-vendor car-to-car communication protocol.
There are trivial cases where pure autonomous following of traffic rules will lead to deadlock (or other issues). Take these two simple examples: 1) 4 cars arrive at the same time in a four-way intersection without signals or yields 2) on a three lane road, two cars from the outer lanes try to switch to the middle lane at the same time.
These are by no means difficult problems (I'm sure there are more difficult cases too), but they must be solved and so far they're not being worked on.
And driving in non-inclement weather. And driving in places that aren't meticulously mapped by Google. And being able to refuel themselves....
I'm not denying the accomplishments of current autonomous vehicles, but there is still a ways to go technically.
Designing for the unexpected edge cases is harder than designing for the normal cases. In accordance with Cargill's ninety-ninety rule, we can expect that the "fine tuning" you mention will be turn out to be a very big job.
As an extreme demonstration, consider the fact that you could rack up a million "autonomous" miles in a matter of months, using vehicles capable of nothing more than "lane keeping assist" and "adaptive cruise control" - just set 'em loose on a NASCAR loop and run them around in circles until this artificial example's point has been proven.
I am exited about autonomous cars, but I'm not convinced they are as ready as various companies want us to believe.
The advert's buzzwordy, bullshitty, vague explanation of the tech hints that they're not super confident themselves about how well it will face up against shoplifters.
That's a pretty fair part of the commercial fleet, though vehicles with self-mobile cargo (taxis) or dedicated handlers on each end (long haul) are quite amenable to automation.
That might be the end state for the foreseeable future, but as others have said that person no longer needs to be a driver, just someone to load and unload.
At some point we'll begin to ask the question of whether it's worth paying someone to travel around with the truck, or if we'd prefer the cost savings. If you're a white collar place ordering heavy equipment you'll probably just pay the guy, but if you're a warehouse you already have a pile of people who can handle that.
Good point.
Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.
I expanded in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230336
Sure, but those humans won't be needed during the vast majority of the trip. The truck can make a pit stop at a "last mile" facility to pick up the human loaders/unloaders (who can be minimum wage temps).
If the only thing you need a human for is to handle the delivery from the ground floor to the seventh floor, or to roll a pallet onto the back of the truck, you've eliminated 99% of the job. and if you've eliminated most of the work the job requires, that means you need a lot fewer people, and they need less skill and training and will be paid less.
one junior staffer in every office being tasked to go down to the loading bay and check for packages after lunch each day is not a major infrastructure change.
Add an automated forklift to the automated truck?
http://www.recode.net/2016/12/19/13600538/silicon-valley-gro...
In short: Silicon Valley is going to drive a lot of job losses in the not too distant future. There's a very real danger that will blow back as mass unemployment drives people to extremes, unless people start thinking very seriously about what this new world is going to look like, and how the vast majority of the country will earn a living.
I quit my job for 11 months in 2015 and flew around the world; backpacking off my savings:
http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/
It was the happiest time of my life. I'm planning on getting some funding sources for next time (Pateron, grants for OSS projects, etc.) and see if I can make it longer next time. I'd rather just make enough, making content and tech that I like and find useful, supported by peers, than working the the current tech world.
Reynolds envisioned a world like this in his book Army of Davids. I think he painted an overly rosy outlook and neglected to realize how difficult it is to start small businesses or how little time people have after their day jobs to work on things. (You can kinda glaze over those things when you're a UT professor).
Can't afford Uber? Just hang onto the roof of one.
But the question is, does Patreon, OSS grants and the like scale to the entire population of a country? My instinct is "no". Yet it's likely that a lot of people will be looking for alternative means by which to live life within our lifetimes, and no-one is really looking for broadly applicable answers.
As a (presumably) well-paid tech worker, it's really very achievable. Most engineers could do it in under a decade if they tried.
More so, there's nothing revolutionary about Silicon Valley. It's 150% marketing hype. Just looking at their direction, they are just not in the position to do anything of real value during the next revolutionary phase.
The only thing they have revolutionized is the acceptance and availability of very in-depth and sophisticated surveillance and the availability of massive amounts of surveillance data for the government and their intelligence/advert agencies.
Deleted Comment
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
We know what people have done in the past when this sort of thing has happened - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
> The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and self-employed weavers in the 19th century that used the destruction of machinery as a form of protest.
I think that once the robots take enough jobs such that the anti-automation movement reaches a critical mass (and it won't take 100% of the jobs to do that, prob not even 50%) then we'll start seeing these sorts of things happen.
Sabotage of driverless cars will be trivial to carry out and very expensive to deal with... some forms may not have adequate protection under criminal law yet, which will require cooperation with legislators and law enforcement to address (good luck with that Uber).
I'm thinking things like finding and intentionally exploiting environmental cues that driverless cars use to make decisions (releasing plastic bags into intersections?) or else using directed radio interference to prevent them from communicating with homebase to know where to go next.
Some of these may be protected already by FCC or EPA or state-level equivalents, but will enforcement be up to the task? Is the FCC prepared to monitor and enforce local signal interference for corporations? Is a $500 littering fine enough to dissuade individuals and groups from continuing in "civil disobedience"?
My core point is that if anyone thinks people are going to take this lying down then they don't know human beings. Everyone is only 3 missed meals away from doing "whatever it takes" and that's even less if it's your kid(s) that are missing the meals.
If nothing is in place when the layoffs come then it'll take no time for former workers to organize and take matters into their own hands... within that election cycle the organization will be co-opted by some other ideology which conflates their anger at losing their job to automation with race, class, political affiliation, etc.
/speculation