9 ms·

A lot of the fear that comes from tech unemployment is based on predictions of the future, which are notoriously horrible. You give the example of trucking job

by moxious 10y ago

A lot of the fear that comes from tech unemployment is based on predictions of the future, which are notoriously horrible. You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline. I'm fairly sure there are exactly zero US states where bot trucking is presently common. Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor in whether or not this even could happen. Bold predictions are, with hindsight, usually wrong. A lot of these fearful arguments boil down to a simple syllogism; "if present trends continue, then (bad outcome here)". The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, and you'll see uniformly that the future predictors expected certain trends to continue which didn't, and missed the existence of other big trends that ended up as primary drivers. People just don't know what's going to happen in the future. I suppose guessing is better than doing nothing, but we shouldn't think that the future guessing we do is actually good or accurate, past experience teaches it's actually really far off.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
The fear comes from the unknown. Appalachia in the United States is what people dread. High unemployment, jobs never coming back, addiction to pain killers killing you in your 30s and 40s. Really, I suggest anyone on Hacker News to take 2-3 days and drive through parts of West Virginia, during the daylight only, to see, physically see, what the commotion is about. [1] If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation. But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough. Protect against the unknown, and people will be less anxious about rapid change. Don't protect them, and risk social instability. This is what government, social programs, and taxes are for. Or we can wait for the 21st century equivalent of the guillotines to come out. [1] http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleton-W-Va-is-a-town-decimated-by-poverty-drugs/stories/201504280190 http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleto...
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  Where most economists advocating the policies behind automation and globalization have lost the plot is they map the relative resilience at the macro level of nations that they observe to the micro level of individuals. The map is not the territory, and I've yet to see solid evidence in economics literature that rigorously tests the assumption that what is good for the nation at the policy and aggregate level is automatically good for individuals as well.
- faded242 10y ago
  Thanks to Google Street View, we don't even have to take a few days: http://bit.ly/2hKM8Yi http://bit.ly/2hKM8Yi
  - kbenson 10y ago
    I can't help but feel that your comment is both entirely valid, and also indicative of the (or at least a) general problem. I can't help but think that something is lost when viewing these through a computer screen. At least in a car the scale isn't abstract. It's right there, and there's no turning it off. The best you can do is drive away, and the time that takes is itself part of the experience.
- moxious 10y ago
  > If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation. But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough. You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough. There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas. Without jumping to either extreme, since such policy decisions are definitely not "all or nothing" -- I'd just suggest that it's a matter of where you focus your resources. Focusing on social safety net leaves other things unaddressed. Focusing on innovation and individualism clearly leaves some people's needs unaddressed too. Ultimately, the best (for me) is to have a wide dispersion of countries who make different choices, with the freedom to move between them to find the fit that's right for you.
visarga 10y ago
> Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor The need to replace truck fleets would be one reason why it won't happen overnight. It would take time to replace millions of expensive vehicles.
- awinter-py 10y ago
  Unless the conversion costs less than the annual cost of a human worker. For example, just picking randomly, a truck driver.
- Kadin 10y ago
  Otto's self driving truck system is designed as an add-on package for existing semi tractors, not as something that has to be built-in by the OEM. Passenger cars have a short enough lifespan that I doubt those sort of retrofits will be especially common.
- danielweber 10y ago
  A career lasts 40 years. Once the technology is good enough to deploy in one instance, how long until it is dominant? Say it takes 10 years to replace most of the fleet. That still means someone driving a truck at age 25 will be facing an extremely different job situation at age 35. We could use the tech to enhance the worker instead of replacing the worker, though. Right now, drivers are limited in the number of hours they can do in a day, for safety reasons. If drivers become mobile managers, there is still a need for them. Still less of them, obviously, but it does mean we don't suddenly get rid of 80% of their job openings in 10 or 20 years.
- BookmarkSaver 10y ago
  I agree that it won't happen overnight, but I would guess that with really popular models it will be very cost effective to retrofit the trucks with an automated system. I think it comes down to what you mean by "soon". I would be surprised if in 10 years a huge number of trucking jobs hadn't already been replaced, and in 20 years they will almost gone outside of a few niches.
- 10y ago
stevens32 10y ago
We don't have to guess though, the fundamentals are there. It'll be safer. It'll be cheaper. How would it not happen? It doesn't seem bold at all to think people won't be driving manually in the future. Some trends will always hold true; cost of hardware goes down, capabilities of software goes up. I don't think anyone is saying it'll happen in 7.8 years, but as the HN group is aware, we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale. There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this?
- moxious 10y ago
  > Some trends will always hold true; cost of hardware goes down, capabilities of software goes up. That's not at all true, or at the very least, it requires a raft of other assumptions which may not hold, to all stay true, in order for the consequence to stay true. Like for example the cost of rare earth metals, good trading relationships between nations, and so on. > we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars. > There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this? There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time...
  - stevens32 10y ago
    >That's not at all true, or at the very least, it requires a raft of other assumptions which may not hold, to all stay true, in order for the consequence to stay true. Like for example the cost of rare earth metals, good trading relationships between nations, and so on. Sure, those lines aren't monotonically decreasing/increasing but the trend isn't likely to reverse direction any time soon. >I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars. There'll definitely be a costly hardware buy-in for a lot cases, but some applications of AI might only need a camera - say, a replacement for a cashier at a grocery store. >There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time... I think it's worth discussing because waiting for the bad outcome to happen before trying to handle it could be too little too late. Even if the percentage risk of an economic shock is low, the magnitude of the potential damage is high. The average pre-tax income of the bottom 50% has stagnated since 1980 at about $16,000 per adult [1] These people are more likely to live paycheck-to-paycheck and more likely to work jobs which might be targeted by automation. I think it's a recipe for disaster. [1] http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/PSZ2016.pdf http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/PSZ2016.pdf
lkrubner 10y ago
"The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, " My favorite is one of the first of such modern predictions: "I have an asthma that the doctors have warned me should give me great consideration regarding my future health. My only consolation is that the total of medical knowledge has doubled during the last 7 years, and should our venerable surgeons continue to gain as they have up till now, those in the future will suffer less than I. Indeed, if my parents could only have so arranged their affairs such that I was born 25 years later than I actually was, then I believe I would live in an era where medical knowledge should have a cure for my ailment." That was Laurence Stern, writing in 1759 (in Tristam Shandy). He was dying of tuberculosis, which he referred to as an "asthma". In fact, if he had been born 25 years later, he still could have easily died of tuberculosis. The first antibiotic (not counting some minor sulfa drugs) was Penicillin, discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928. That was 169 years later than Stern was writing. Quite a bit more than the 25 years that he thought would be necessary.
coldtea 10y ago
>You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline. Are 20 years a "near-term timeline"? Because all it takes is for self-driving cars to be approved for market, and today they are under heavy testing, and we even have some (Tesla etc) where while not "self-driving" they are very close. It's not like some feature cpu/storage/battery/etc technology, where some lab breakthrough or another frequently gets reported in tech outlets, but it never arrives. This is a mature field, with multiple multi-billion investments and heavy activity.
- moxious 10y ago
  > Are 20 years a "near-term timeline"? Because all it takes is for self-driving cars to be approved for market, and today they are under heavy testing, and we even have some (Tesla etc) where while not "self-driving" they are very close. You know, it's funny when people talk about job disruption from tech, one of their key platforms is that things are changing so much faster now than they used to be. That's one of the things that's supposed to be really different about 2017. If you accept that as valid, then 20 years is a preposterously long timeline, and nobody could take seriously a prediction that far out. As an example -- in 20 years time, Hyperloop could easily become the dominant form of transportation, leaving people to shrug off as irrelevant the self-driving car stuff. Not saying that's going to happen, just saying that 20 years is so long, that level of change could happen in the same timeframe. Me personally - in terms of the economy, available goods & services and such, I think you can take a really good guess 1 year out. 2 years out it's a bit fuzzy but still OK. 5 years out you've only got the broad outlines. 10 years out, you're just straight-up guessing. 20 years out? Unrecognizably different.
  - beat 10y ago
    Self-driving trucks are a lot more likely than hyperloops to every possible location. Who's going to build the hyperloop to the Best Buy in Moorhead, MN?
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
beat 10y ago
Twenty years ago, accessing the internet from your cell phone wasn't "presently common". Twenty years is a long time in tech terms. Self-driving vehicles are just on the verge of becoming viable. And it's not some oddball garage startup stuff... giants like Google, Tesla, and Apple are throwing their full weight behind it. They see this as a future market worth hundreds of billions. And why? Because driverless trucking solves tremendous problems. It's less expensive. It's safer. I'd feel much, much safer on a highway filled with robot trucks than I do on a highway filled with fallible humans with limited reflexes. So yes, yes. It will happen, despite resistance, because it will be so much better than what we have now. And I'm not fearful about the future. But others are, and for good reason. In general, I think it'll be great. If I was a 35 year old trucker looking at seeing my industry evaporate when I'm 50, I wouldn't be so positive.
barrkel 10y ago
Some trends are more reliable than others. The key trend we're concerned about here is technology increasing productivity. That's a long-term trend (you can go back to the wheel, writing etc. if you want to stay in the domain of humans) that has accelerated over time, and hasn't shown any sign of letting up. Output increases because people are freed up; when what they used to do is more efficiently done with technology, they can apply themselves to something else. What's the end of that trend? For my part, I can think of only three ends. A) We stop creating new technology. The trend of development simply ends. We learn nothing more that can be used to increase efficiency. We know everything there is to know that can be applied to production. Seems unlikely and is contrary to the history of life on the planet. B) We invent technology that replaces people with low ability - not low skills, but low ability, so that they can never be productive - completely. This is part of what we're concerned with in this article. C) We start modifying people to increase their abilities to keep pace with what our technology is able to do. Seems dystopian. Another way to put it is that technology can do an increasing proportion of what a person can do on their own. It's a trend line that has increased throughout history. There are only three extrapolations: the trend line stops short of 100% (case A), the trend line goes past 100% (case B), or our own capability starts growing at least as fast as technology (case C).
marcosdumay 10y ago
Do you have any reasonable argument about how the transition between the first real self-driving truck¹ being around and more than 90% of the trucks being self-driven could take more than 5 years? The only way I can imagine it would take this long is if governments just prohibit it. Even then, they'll get a big chunk of the market in 5 years. 1 - By real, read commercially available, that can run into any reasonable road without anybody inside.
megablast 10y ago
Exactly, just like the guy who said everyone one day we will all carry a mainframe computer in our pockets.

by moxious 10y ago

toomuchtodo 10y ago

The fear comes from the unknown. Appalachia in the United States is what people dread. High unemployment, jobs never coming back, addiction to pain killers killing you in your 30s and 40s. Really, I suggest anyone on Hacker News to take 2-3 days and drive through parts of West Virginia, during the daylight only, to see, physically see, what the commotion is about. [1] If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation. But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough. Protect against the unknown, and people will be less anxious about rapid change. Don't protect them, and risk social instability. This is what government, social programs, and taxes are for. Or we can wait for the 21st century equivalent of the guillotines to come out. [1] http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleton-W-Va-is-a-town-decimated-by-poverty-drugs/stories/201504280190 http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleto...

yourapostasy 10y ago
Where most economists advocating the policies behind automation and globalization have lost the plot is they map the relative resilience at the macro level of nations that they observe to the micro level of individuals. The map is not the territory, and I've yet to see solid evidence in economics literature that rigorously tests the assumption that what is good for the nation at the policy and aggregate level is automatically good for individuals as well.
faded242 10y ago
Thanks to Google Street View, we don't even have to take a few days: http://bit.ly/2hKM8Yi http://bit.ly/2hKM8Yi
- kbenson 10y ago
  I can't help but feel that your comment is both entirely valid, and also indicative of the (or at least a) general problem. I can't help but think that something is lost when viewing these through a computer screen. At least in a car the scale isn't abstract. It's right there, and there's no turning it off. The best you can do is drive away, and the time that takes is itself part of the experience.
moxious 10y ago
> If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation. But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough. You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough. There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas. Without jumping to either extreme, since such policy decisions are definitely not "all or nothing" -- I'd just suggest that it's a matter of where you focus your resources. Focusing on social safety net leaves other things unaddressed. Focusing on innovation and individualism clearly leaves some people's needs unaddressed too. Ultimately, the best (for me) is to have a wide dispersion of countries who make different choices, with the freedom to move between them to find the fit that's right for you.

visarga 10y ago

> Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor The need to replace truck fleets would be one reason why it won't happen overnight. It would take time to replace millions of expensive vehicles.

awinter-py 10y ago
Unless the conversion costs less than the annual cost of a human worker. For example, just picking randomly, a truck driver.
Kadin 10y ago
Otto's self driving truck system is designed as an add-on package for existing semi tractors, not as something that has to be built-in by the OEM. Passenger cars have a short enough lifespan that I doubt those sort of retrofits will be especially common.
danielweber 10y ago
A career lasts 40 years. Once the technology is good enough to deploy in one instance, how long until it is dominant? Say it takes 10 years to replace most of the fleet. That still means someone driving a truck at age 25 will be facing an extremely different job situation at age 35. We could use the tech to enhance the worker instead of replacing the worker, though. Right now, drivers are limited in the number of hours they can do in a day, for safety reasons. If drivers become mobile managers, there is still a need for them. Still less of them, obviously, but it does mean we don't suddenly get rid of 80% of their job openings in 10 or 20 years.
BookmarkSaver 10y ago
I agree that it won't happen overnight, but I would guess that with really popular models it will be very cost effective to retrofit the trucks with an automated system. I think it comes down to what you mean by "soon". I would be surprised if in 10 years a huge number of trucking jobs hadn't already been replaced, and in 20 years they will almost gone outside of a few niches.
10y ago

stevens32 10y ago

We don't have to guess though, the fundamentals are there. It'll be safer. It'll be cheaper. How would it not happen? It doesn't seem bold at all to think people won't be driving manually in the future. Some trends will always hold true; cost of hardware goes down, capabilities of software goes up. I don't think anyone is saying it'll happen in 7.8 years, but as the HN group is aware, we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale. There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this?

moxious 10y ago
> Some trends will always hold true; cost of hardware goes down, capabilities of software goes up. That's not at all true, or at the very least, it requires a raft of other assumptions which may not hold, to all stay true, in order for the consequence to stay true. Like for example the cost of rare earth metals, good trading relationships between nations, and so on. > we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars. > There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this? There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time...
- stevens32 10y ago
  >That's not at all true, or at the very least, it requires a raft of other assumptions which may not hold, to all stay true, in order for the consequence to stay true. Like for example the cost of rare earth metals, good trading relationships between nations, and so on. Sure, those lines aren't monotonically decreasing/increasing but the trend isn't likely to reverse direction any time soon. >I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars. There'll definitely be a costly hardware buy-in for a lot cases, but some applications of AI might only need a camera - say, a replacement for a cashier at a grocery store. >There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time... I think it's worth discussing because waiting for the bad outcome to happen before trying to handle it could be too little too late. Even if the percentage risk of an economic shock is low, the magnitude of the potential damage is high. The average pre-tax income of the bottom 50% has stagnated since 1980 at about $16,000 per adult [1] These people are more likely to live paycheck-to-paycheck and more likely to work jobs which might be targeted by automation. I think it's a recipe for disaster. [1] http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/PSZ2016.pdf http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/PSZ2016.pdf

lkrubner 10y ago

"The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, " My favorite is one of the first of such modern predictions: "I have an asthma that the doctors have warned me should give me great consideration regarding my future health. My only consolation is that the total of medical knowledge has doubled during the last 7 years, and should our venerable surgeons continue to gain as they have up till now, those in the future will suffer less than I. Indeed, if my parents could only have so arranged their affairs such that I was born 25 years later than I actually was, then I believe I would live in an era where medical knowledge should have a cure for my ailment." That was Laurence Stern, writing in 1759 (in Tristam Shandy). He was dying of tuberculosis, which he referred to as an "asthma". In fact, if he had been born 25 years later, he still could have easily died of tuberculosis. The first antibiotic (not counting some minor sulfa drugs) was Penicillin, discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928. That was 169 years later than Stern was writing. Quite a bit more than the 25 years that he thought would be necessary.

coldtea 10y ago

>You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline. Are 20 years a "near-term timeline"? Because all it takes is for self-driving cars to be approved for market, and today they are under heavy testing, and we even have some (Tesla etc) where while not "self-driving" they are very close. It's not like some feature cpu/storage/battery/etc technology, where some lab breakthrough or another frequently gets reported in tech outlets, but it never arrives. This is a mature field, with multiple multi-billion investments and heavy activity.

moxious 10y ago
> Are 20 years a "near-term timeline"? Because all it takes is for self-driving cars to be approved for market, and today they are under heavy testing, and we even have some (Tesla etc) where while not "self-driving" they are very close. You know, it's funny when people talk about job disruption from tech, one of their key platforms is that things are changing so much faster now than they used to be. That's one of the things that's supposed to be really different about 2017. If you accept that as valid, then 20 years is a preposterously long timeline, and nobody could take seriously a prediction that far out. As an example -- in 20 years time, Hyperloop could easily become the dominant form of transportation, leaving people to shrug off as irrelevant the self-driving car stuff. Not saying that's going to happen, just saying that 20 years is so long, that level of change could happen in the same timeframe. Me personally - in terms of the economy, available goods & services and such, I think you can take a really good guess 1 year out. 2 years out it's a bit fuzzy but still OK. 5 years out you've only got the broad outlines. 10 years out, you're just straight-up guessing. 20 years out? Unrecognizably different.
- beat 10y ago
  Self-driving trucks are a lot more likely than hyperloops to every possible location. Who's going to build the hyperloop to the Best Buy in Moorhead, MN?
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago

beat 10y ago

Twenty years ago, accessing the internet from your cell phone wasn't "presently common". Twenty years is a long time in tech terms. Self-driving vehicles are just on the verge of becoming viable. And it's not some oddball garage startup stuff... giants like Google, Tesla, and Apple are throwing their full weight behind it. They see this as a future market worth hundreds of billions. And why? Because driverless trucking solves tremendous problems. It's less expensive. It's safer. I'd feel much, much safer on a highway filled with robot trucks than I do on a highway filled with fallible humans with limited reflexes. So yes, yes. It will happen, despite resistance, because it will be so much better than what we have now. And I'm not fearful about the future. But others are, and for good reason. In general, I think it'll be great. If I was a 35 year old trucker looking at seeing my industry evaporate when I'm 50, I wouldn't be so positive.

barrkel 10y ago

Some trends are more reliable than others. The key trend we're concerned about here is technology increasing productivity. That's a long-term trend (you can go back to the wheel, writing etc. if you want to stay in the domain of humans) that has accelerated over time, and hasn't shown any sign of letting up. Output increases because people are freed up; when what they used to do is more efficiently done with technology, they can apply themselves to something else. What's the end of that trend? For my part, I can think of only three ends. A) We stop creating new technology. The trend of development simply ends. We learn nothing more that can be used to increase efficiency. We know everything there is to know that can be applied to production. Seems unlikely and is contrary to the history of life on the planet. B) We invent technology that replaces people with low ability - not low skills, but low ability, so that they can never be productive - completely. This is part of what we're concerned with in this article. C) We start modifying people to increase their abilities to keep pace with what our technology is able to do. Seems dystopian. Another way to put it is that technology can do an increasing proportion of what a person can do on their own. It's a trend line that has increased throughout history. There are only three extrapolations: the trend line stops short of 100% (case A), the trend line goes past 100% (case B), or our own capability starts growing at least as fast as technology (case C).

marcosdumay 10y ago

Do you have any reasonable argument about how the transition between the first real self-driving truck¹ being around and more than 90% of the trucks being self-driven could take more than 5 years? The only way I can imagine it would take this long is if governments just prohibit it. Even then, they'll get a big chunk of the market in 5 years. 1 - By real, read commercially available, that can run into any reasonable road without anybody inside.

megablast 10y ago

Exactly, just like the guy who said everyone one day we will all carry a mainframe computer in our pockets.