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Because now through technology the compression rate will be enormous. How many new jobs do you think will be created when those 3.5m trucker jobs are automated?

Because now through technology the compression rate will be enormous. How many new jobs do you think will be created when those 3.5m trucker jobs are automated? Probably some small fraction. And now the main thing to keep in mind that this will happening across work domains and technologies. A truck driver can't go on and switch career to a factory worker because those jobs are gone too! In the future more and more of these laboros grunt jobs will become automated. Just a while ago there was news how Foxconn cut 60k jobs at a single factory through automation. And this is the right way to go. Why should any human or sentient being be forced to work a boring mundane job in some factory when machines can do it? The only goal for the human race as a whole should be the liberation of people from back breaking labor. The only question is now, how will our societies react to this forthcoming change in the system. One way or another this change will come and if we're not prepared it will turn into dystopia everywhere with masses of the people sidelined out of jobs which means without means to support themselves or their families. Crime, poverty and massive slum cities are the only way this can turn out. Not to mention that since the consumer base is gone the whole world economy will simply collapse.

tajen 10y ago
> now through technology the compression rate will be enormous In 1800, with steam power, the compression rate was enormous. And sudden. The population of humanity was fewer than a billion. It implied massive misery in coal mines and factories, which hasn't disappeared much, and a greater low-to-high income ratio, yes, but it also implied an easier life for a greater part of humanity.
shubhamjain 10y ago
Even if driverless transport technology arrives, it would take quite sometime for it to be adopted on a massive scale. In that time, there would be a rapid rise in number of companies around this industry which would create a lot better work than those mundane jobs. I think people are underestimating how many new jobs could be created. Driverless trucks would give rise companies selling fleet tracking software, integrated inventory management software, and automated vehicle servicing applications. Imagine hundreds of such companies, employing engineers, sales people, marketers, customer success guys and you have a world where you think - "Did we really have humans to do that?"
- politician 10y ago
  > Driverless trucks would give rise companies selling fleet tracking software, integrated inventory management software, and automated vehicle servicing applications. Providing jobs for, literally, hundreds of people!
- Pamar 10y ago
  Imagine hundreds of such companies, employing engineers, sales people, marketers, customer success guys What you seem to miss is that someone who was working as a truck driver has little chances to successfully transition to being an engineer, sales people, etc. Industrialization did destroy jobs, but replaced these with jobs that did not require advanced education. So becoming an assembly line worker could be a reasonable goal for someone who had been raised as a farmer, for example (result: lots of people transitioned from farming to industry, while industry was at he same time producing better tools for farmers reducing the need for a human workers in the fields). If 2 robots can replace 10 people working at garbage collection/disposal, how many of them will become sw developers to improve/mantain the 2 robots?
- dagw 10y ago
  Driverless trucks would give rise companies selling... All those companies exist today and large trucking operations already use software for fleet tracking, routing, inventory management etc. So while these software companies might sell more software and might have to hire a few more people to add the features needed for handling an automated truck fleet, it's not like it's a whole new industry being created.
  - shubhamjain 10y ago
    Do you know how people did analytics in pre-GA days? By parsing access.log files. I don't think anyone could have imagined web analytics will grow so big as it is now. Yes, fleet tracking software already exists but don't think that it can grow only till we scale it to certain level and add some extra features. There will be myriad of possibilities when this data is easy to access. Currently, it is limited to only those companies who can procure the GPS devices, and install it for their customers which translated to high barrier to entry and CAC costs.
penguinduck 10y ago
Are you sure the compression rate will be higher than what humans have experienced previously? We've had steam power, electricity, computers (and I probably forgot something). Those were all pretty big. The current big thing is AI. What reason is there to believe that AI will have a stronger effect than those have had? So far, it hasn't had a particularly strong effect. Automating jobs in various fields is not going to be a 2-year process. It will take decades. So the rate might not actually be that high. And about your Foxconn example: if you look here [1] you will see why they were able to do that. Notice the vast disparity in employee numbers between them and, for example, Samsung. It is likely that Foxconn is far behind the industry when it comes to automation (probably due to access to cheap Chinese labor), and when you're behind, it's easy to make such big leaps. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_information_technology_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...
- unprepare 10y ago
  >We've had steam power, electricity, computers (and I probably forgot something) from wikipedia, there were working industrial steam engines in 1712. The railway system in the US was started in about 1827 (over a hundred years later), and completed around 1900, about two hundred years after the technology was introduced it was useable by business owners and passengers. Edison showed the first working electric light in 1878, it seems most people had electricity of some kind by the 1930's. We could say personal computers were invented sometime in the 1970s, and maybe by today-ish the majority of people in the US have a computer of some kind (though that may be becoming more smartphones than computers) I would say theres a pretty distinct trend of technology getting adapted more quickly at scale over time. Do you honestly think the market capture rate of self driving trucks will be similar to that of steam powered engines and boats?

tajen 10y ago

> now through technology the compression rate will be enormous In 1800, with steam power, the compression rate was enormous. And sudden. The population of humanity was fewer than a billion. It implied massive misery in coal mines and factories, which hasn't disappeared much, and a greater low-to-high income ratio, yes, but it also implied an easier life for a greater part of humanity.

shubhamjain 10y ago

Even if driverless transport technology arrives, it would take quite sometime for it to be adopted on a massive scale. In that time, there would be a rapid rise in number of companies around this industry which would create a lot better work than those mundane jobs. I think people are underestimating how many new jobs could be created. Driverless trucks would give rise companies selling fleet tracking software, integrated inventory management software, and automated vehicle servicing applications. Imagine hundreds of such companies, employing engineers, sales people, marketers, customer success guys and you have a world where you think - "Did we really have humans to do that?"

politician 10y ago
> Driverless trucks would give rise companies selling fleet tracking software, integrated inventory management software, and automated vehicle servicing applications. Providing jobs for, literally, hundreds of people!
Pamar 10y ago
Imagine hundreds of such companies, employing engineers, sales people, marketers, customer success guys What you seem to miss is that someone who was working as a truck driver has little chances to successfully transition to being an engineer, sales people, etc. Industrialization did destroy jobs, but replaced these with jobs that did not require advanced education. So becoming an assembly line worker could be a reasonable goal for someone who had been raised as a farmer, for example (result: lots of people transitioned from farming to industry, while industry was at he same time producing better tools for farmers reducing the need for a human workers in the fields). If 2 robots can replace 10 people working at garbage collection/disposal, how many of them will become sw developers to improve/mantain the 2 robots?
dagw 10y ago
Driverless trucks would give rise companies selling... All those companies exist today and large trucking operations already use software for fleet tracking, routing, inventory management etc. So while these software companies might sell more software and might have to hire a few more people to add the features needed for handling an automated truck fleet, it's not like it's a whole new industry being created.
- shubhamjain 10y ago
  Do you know how people did analytics in pre-GA days? By parsing access.log files. I don't think anyone could have imagined web analytics will grow so big as it is now. Yes, fleet tracking software already exists but don't think that it can grow only till we scale it to certain level and add some extra features. There will be myriad of possibilities when this data is easy to access. Currently, it is limited to only those companies who can procure the GPS devices, and install it for their customers which translated to high barrier to entry and CAC costs.

penguinduck 10y ago

Are you sure the compression rate will be higher than what humans have experienced previously? We've had steam power, electricity, computers (and I probably forgot something). Those were all pretty big. The current big thing is AI. What reason is there to believe that AI will have a stronger effect than those have had? So far, it hasn't had a particularly strong effect. Automating jobs in various fields is not going to be a 2-year process. It will take decades. So the rate might not actually be that high. And about your Foxconn example: if you look here [1] you will see why they were able to do that. Notice the vast disparity in employee numbers between them and, for example, Samsung. It is likely that Foxconn is far behind the industry when it comes to automation (probably due to access to cheap Chinese labor), and when you're behind, it's easy to make such big leaps. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_information_technology_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...

unprepare 10y ago
>We've had steam power, electricity, computers (and I probably forgot something) from wikipedia, there were working industrial steam engines in 1712. The railway system in the US was started in about 1827 (over a hundred years later), and completed around 1900, about two hundred years after the technology was introduced it was useable by business owners and passengers. Edison showed the first working electric light in 1878, it seems most people had electricity of some kind by the 1930's. We could say personal computers were invented sometime in the 1970s, and maybe by today-ish the majority of people in the US have a computer of some kind (though that may be becoming more smartphones than computers) I would say theres a pretty distinct trend of technology getting adapted more quickly at scale over time. Do you honestly think the market capture rate of self driving trucks will be similar to that of steam powered engines and boats?