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Any job that chiefly involves a human operating a vehicle will not exist for much longer.

• ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Not really: https://medium.com/@scobleizer/don-t-worry-uber-lyft-drivers-self-driving-cars-won-t-take-your-job-for-at-least-a-decade-3b8c58a7f102#.45ft79ln0 https://medium.com/@scobleizer/don-t-worry-uber-lyft-drivers...
• semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Maaybe for the "easy" stuff like public transport. But for many of the specialised jobs that also boil down to a human operating a vehicle, e.g. excavators, log cutting machines, snowplows etc. it takes a human who already knows how to drive a car many months, even years to learn how to do it. Since the market for these machines is many orders of magnitude smaller than for cars, and each machine type is so specialised that there is limited overlap, so the cost-benefit ratio is much worse than for cars. Thus I think it will take a lot longer for these jobs to be automated away.
  • simplemath 11y ago
    Heavy Machine Operators are probably good for 5 or 10 years longer than the rest... tops. Isn't Rio Tinto already using AI to operate its haulers? Even in niche specialized corners, the value prop of self operating machines is going to become increasingly overwhelming.
    • throwaway2048 11y ago
      if replacing a machine costs $5 million, and the automatic model $1 million ontop of that, and you pay an operator $60k a year, the value proposition isn't very clear.
      • simplemath 11y ago
        What if the automatic model was only 200k more? 20k? It's all coming.
        • throwaway2048 11y ago
          For classes of machines where only a few thousand, or even a few tens/hundreds of thousands of units exist total, the costs of developing the sophisticated AI that requires are not going to be that low for a lot longer than 5-10 years from now. Especially considering the market is split between many player and none are going to share their secret sauce AI.