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Fair point, but for example if trucks get fully automated: the USA has 3.5 million truck drivers. Where are they gonna find a job? My fear is that little by li

Fair point, but for example if trucks get fully automated: the USA has 3.5 million truck drivers. Where are they gonna find a job? My fear is that little by little people will be running out of jobs to find and the middle class will shrink more and more because of this. At which point will the "automation tipping point" happen where the society acknowledges that it's simply not possible to find meaningful employment for everyone?

pitaj 6y ago
The first automated trucks won't be able to handle everything. There will still need to be a "driver" to ride along with it, at the very least to handle paperwork. Many truck drivers own their own trucks, and I imagine many of these people would be the first adopters of the technology. The point is that change will still happen gradually, and people will still be necessary.
- pb7 6y ago
  >I imagine many of these people would be the first adopters of the technology. Why do you think so? I can’t quite think of a great reason why they would or wouldn’t be the first. My inclination would be that they wouldn’t because 1) self-driving tech would be expensive (more expensive than not having it, certainly), and 2) individuals might not be willing to risk it vs. companies that can afford it to fail and bear the cost.
tuna-piano 6y ago
~70% of Indians are still farmers vs ~2% in the US. Would you recommend India adopt UBI before they discover the tractor and 68% of their country becomes unemployed? What about the seamstresses destroyed by the invention of the sewing machine? Forgive my harsh tone - but this is such a false line of thinking "Technology X will destroy job Y" that has been around for literally hundreds of years, that it deserves condemnation as it bares no reality in history or economics. The self driving truck is no different than the sewing machine.
- crowbahr 6y ago
  Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. The rate of automation is increasing. Forgive my harsh tone - but this is such a false line of thinking "It's always been this way therefore it will always be this way" that has been around for literally thousands of years, that it deserves condemnation as it bares no reality in history. To dismiss fear of automation as some resurgence of ludditism is reductive in the extreme. We already see examples of automation killing jobs and seeing workers turned out on their ear because their jobs have been automated. It's called the Rust Belt for a reason. The manufacturing jobs didn't just skip off to Mexico and China: they were automated away as well. The USA manufactures more now than it did in the 80s, but factory jobs are far fewer. Most of those factory workers now live off of benefits and Walmart, because their jobs disappeared, driving the income disparity. The US middle class is dying from automation but you blithely claim "hey at least they're still getting McDonald's jobs".
pizza234 6y ago
I think that the consequences of automation should be separated into short and long term. Definitely, I agree that "automation jumps" do create a short-term problem, if it's not handled by the government. And I think it's a hard problem. What I disagree with, and think it's a fallacy, it's that it constitutes a long term problem. I stress that long term is beyond the work life of an individual, so the argument "what does person X if they lose their job" doesn't apply, rather, what's the size of the workforce (= employed people). People who think that the work pool is fixed, typically don't realize that automation (the robots are coming!) is not a modern phenomenon. Automation in a modern sense started centuries ago, so the arguments shouldn't take today as starting point - they should take the 18th century instead; if the argument was true, we would all be unemployed right now. Nobody can say what what will be the new jobs in the future, as much as 20 years ago, nobody could imagine, say, the position of the SEO expert.

pitaj 6y ago

The first automated trucks won't be able to handle everything. There will still need to be a "driver" to ride along with it, at the very least to handle paperwork. Many truck drivers own their own trucks, and I imagine many of these people would be the first adopters of the technology. The point is that change will still happen gradually, and people will still be necessary.

pb7 6y ago
>I imagine many of these people would be the first adopters of the technology. Why do you think so? I can’t quite think of a great reason why they would or wouldn’t be the first. My inclination would be that they wouldn’t because 1) self-driving tech would be expensive (more expensive than not having it, certainly), and 2) individuals might not be willing to risk it vs. companies that can afford it to fail and bear the cost.

tuna-piano 6y ago

~70% of Indians are still farmers vs ~2% in the US. Would you recommend India adopt UBI before they discover the tractor and 68% of their country becomes unemployed? What about the seamstresses destroyed by the invention of the sewing machine? Forgive my harsh tone - but this is such a false line of thinking "Technology X will destroy job Y" that has been around for literally hundreds of years, that it deserves condemnation as it bares no reality in history or economics. The self driving truck is no different than the sewing machine.

crowbahr 6y ago
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. The rate of automation is increasing. Forgive my harsh tone - but this is such a false line of thinking "It's always been this way therefore it will always be this way" that has been around for literally thousands of years, that it deserves condemnation as it bares no reality in history. To dismiss fear of automation as some resurgence of ludditism is reductive in the extreme. We already see examples of automation killing jobs and seeing workers turned out on their ear because their jobs have been automated. It's called the Rust Belt for a reason. The manufacturing jobs didn't just skip off to Mexico and China: they were automated away as well. The USA manufactures more now than it did in the 80s, but factory jobs are far fewer. Most of those factory workers now live off of benefits and Walmart, because their jobs disappeared, driving the income disparity. The US middle class is dying from automation but you blithely claim "hey at least they're still getting McDonald's jobs".

pizza234 6y ago

I think that the consequences of automation should be separated into short and long term. Definitely, I agree that "automation jumps" do create a short-term problem, if it's not handled by the government. And I think it's a hard problem. What I disagree with, and think it's a fallacy, it's that it constitutes a long term problem. I stress that long term is beyond the work life of an individual, so the argument "what does person X if they lose their job" doesn't apply, rather, what's the size of the workforce (= employed people). People who think that the work pool is fixed, typically don't realize that automation (the robots are coming!) is not a modern phenomenon. Automation in a modern sense started centuries ago, so the arguments shouldn't take today as starting point - they should take the 18th century instead; if the argument was true, we would all be unemployed right now. Nobody can say what what will be the new jobs in the future, as much as 20 years ago, nobody could imagine, say, the position of the SEO expert.