6 ms·

The wide ranging impacts will be huge, as well as the unintended consequences. I actually think the first thing to go will be truck drivers. There are some soc

The wide ranging impacts will be huge, as well as the unintended consequences. I actually think the first thing to go will be truck drivers. There are some social obstacles for regular cars, but once automated driving has proven itself it's only a matter of time until the shipping/delivery industry says "wait I can have 24/7 drivers that have less accidents per million miles than the ones that can only do 11 hour days?" Just this one case has crazy implications: 3.5 million jobs lost in a short time span, but you can order from amazon at 6pm and have at it your doorstep before you wake up, all of the trucks can drive at exactly optimal fuel efficiency, all businesses that rely on truckers will likely go under, do you need distribution centers when you have cheap, never sleeping drivers? this will take consume enormous amount of energy... and I'm sure you can think of more just for that one case. Personally I think the biggest impact this will have is the energy usage one. Currently we stress about our abilities to meet future demands, but we aren't stressed enough to really innovate. Automated driving will definitely change that.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
wbobeirne 14y ago
I'm willing to bet that, at least in the infancy of the technology, there will be laws that require at least 1 capable driver in the vehicle at all times. This would still probably effect the industry greatly, as they could then hire almost anyone with a license, but 3.5 million jobs wouldn't just drop off the face of the country.
- kamaal 14y ago
  Well just like Emails haven't completely replaced Postal services. You will still need drivers. You will need people to drive Ambulances, Race cars and things like vehicles for banks and other important things. But when big paradigm shifts like this happen, generally a lot of people end up loosing jobs.
  - brc 14y ago
    Autonomous racing series - now that will be interesting. I don't think it would look like current motor racing - it is centered around the cult of the driver - but more like an outgrowth of robot wars. We could already have remote controlled race cars where the drivers sat in simulators and drove remotely - but we don't because people want to be in the hot seat. Driverless racing cars could go incredibly fast - and require real solutions to large computing problems. And this would push development of driverless cars along quickly, just as motor racing pushed along the infant car industry quickly.
    - eurleif 14y ago
      I might be wrong, but my intuition is that all the competitors would be near-perfect, and every race would end in a tie, or at least be very close.
      - jeffool 14y ago
        I'd imagine that the winner would be the one with the best strategy. My feeling is that with as many variables as you'd see in a race, that it'd be impossible for a single AI to perfectly take all opportunities. And I can imagine some outperforming others in slingshotting or taking curves. Of course, it all depends on the rules of the race.
        tlrobinson 14y ago
        Plus you can take greater risks when drivers' lives aren't at stake. I imagine it would be a pretty exciting sport, not to mention expensive.
        mayanksinghal 14y ago
        Actually, I think it might end up being cheaper than F1. No celebrity driver to pay millions to and no very-high safety concerns! Although given that most of the human population will probably not relate (or out-rightly reject the idea) to the sport because of the lack of driver, there might be less money in it.
kamaal 14y ago
Well isn't this natural evolution in terms of productivity any race would experience? Lets take for example agriculture, dairy farming, and other animal farms. Compared to something like 300 years back, very few people now work on agriculture and associated tasks. Where did all those people go, they went on to do more productive work. As there are better ways to harness energy and automate things people will move onto more and more productive work. Finally we may reach a point where things like space colonies, settlements and other massive space exploration projects will make sense. Because we will have nothing else to do.
- davedx 14y ago
  I like the theory, trust me, I do. Abundance sounds so good. But, you're completely ignoring the economic framework we live in. The problem is the people who own these automated systems accumulate more and more wealth, while the workers who once operated them get poorer and poorer. So 'nothing else to do' = 'living in grinding dystopian poverty', if nothing changes in our current economic system.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    It all boils down to education. If former laborers can be efficiently trained for new job opportunities, society wins. If not, society continues to stagnate. Farmers don't become robotics engineers or rocket scientists spontaneously.
    - nhaehnle 14y ago
      It's not quite that simple. There also needs to be demand to create those new job opportunities. I'm all for more people working in highly skilled sectors and getting rid of the need for menial labor. The question is: given how the economy works these days, where is the demand for those highly skilled jobs actually going to come from? Most things that actually push the boundaries of what we can do - such as 3D printing, space exploration - have very little effective demand going towards them these days. The one exception may be medical research, I'm just not sure about that. So I agree that society wins if the level of education can be raised and more people work in highly educated sectors. However, this is not going to be some kind of inevitable outcome of the market. The effective demand needs to be there to enable this transition, and there is no automatic market mechanism to make it happen.
bfung 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Homerdrive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Homerdrive - the truckers already have this! =P At least the packages that end up on the doorstep still require human delivery. Normalizing addresses and pin pointing the exact location still isn't quite good enough. But yes, unintended consequences will surely make things interesting. The productive will become more productive, and the 99% will get that much larger...
- ShabbyDoo 14y ago
  "At least the packages that end up on the doorstep still require human delivery." Imagine that you ordered something from Amazon. You could choose from a bunch of different times, perhaps a dozen in a day, when the automated delivery truck would swing by your house. Your phone would make a noise, and you would go outside to grab your packages off the truck. It would be like an Automat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat) on wheels. You would somehow authenticate yourself and then grab your boxes from your assigned slots.
  - saryant 14y ago
    I'm pretty much never home when the UPS guy swings by my apartment and I order enough stuff that I wouldn't want to inconvenience my neighbors two or three times a week asking them to grab it for me.
    - kalleboo 14y ago
      You could just indicate when you're going to be home and they can drive by at that time. In Japan, all the delivery services let you indicate a precise 2-hour window when you want the delivery. With automated drivers, this could be feasible in the U.S. as well.
    - bnr 14y ago
      I get all my stuff delivered to a Packstation, which is only a 5min walk away. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation
brc 14y ago
Not sure about the truck drivers. I can see the benefits in making all the long-range truck deliveries drive through the night. This could be encouraged by time-of-use road charges for things like interstate highways, for a discount in registration fees or fuel taxes, I guess. But delivery trucks will still need someone in them to make the deliveries. But what would change is that the delivery person could be doing things in the truck while on the rounds - this could be related or unrelated work. Generally, if a technology transition releases a lot of productivity, it also drastically lowers cost of whatever is affected (delivered goods, which is everything). This, by rights, should free up a lot of extra money for people, which they can then spend on other things. The other things generally cause more economic activity somewhere else, which should create the new jobs. But a portion of truck drivers will lose their job, with it never to return. However, this can't be, nor should it be, stopped.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  Delivery men could be automated too. A robot with package safe and some kind of pre-determined passcode could be sufficient. Insurance or onboard sensing to surveil would-be thieves would cover some of the safety issues. And to avoid even more problems the delivery network could work with post offices to put these safes in place of P/O boxes. Australia Post already does this - you receive a package and they send you an SMS with the code to unlock the safe they've left it in. The delivery truck would just put the packages in the safe totally autonomously.
  - Thrymr 14y ago
    I think robot delivery men are farther off than automated long haul trucks. Having a robot that can find the front door of an arbitrary residence and get to it from the street is more than a little bit beyond our current capabilities. The safe idea is interesting, though.
    - dasmoth 14y ago
      I've been wondering about this, and I think it's totally doable so long as you don't get stuck thinking about a literal "robot delivery man". The model I was considering was more along the lines of 1) park as close as possible to the target address 2) send SMS notifying the recipient that you've arrived. 3) recipient has a 5-10min window to go out to the waiting truck, swipe a card or whatever for ID purposes, and receive the goods. It's a somewhat different experience to a human knocking on your door, but I'm sure it could be made to work. Automated delivery vehicles may be able to do better in terms of offering a choice of delivery time, and sending accurate estimates of arrival time. There's considerable scope for doing a better job of delivering to households where there is usually nobody home during "working hours".

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

wbobeirne 14y ago

I'm willing to bet that, at least in the infancy of the technology, there will be laws that require at least 1 capable driver in the vehicle at all times. This would still probably effect the industry greatly, as they could then hire almost anyone with a license, but 3.5 million jobs wouldn't just drop off the face of the country.

kamaal 14y ago
Well just like Emails haven't completely replaced Postal services. You will still need drivers. You will need people to drive Ambulances, Race cars and things like vehicles for banks and other important things. But when big paradigm shifts like this happen, generally a lot of people end up loosing jobs.
- brc 14y ago
  Autonomous racing series - now that will be interesting. I don't think it would look like current motor racing - it is centered around the cult of the driver - but more like an outgrowth of robot wars. We could already have remote controlled race cars where the drivers sat in simulators and drove remotely - but we don't because people want to be in the hot seat. Driverless racing cars could go incredibly fast - and require real solutions to large computing problems. And this would push development of driverless cars along quickly, just as motor racing pushed along the infant car industry quickly.
  - eurleif 14y ago
    I might be wrong, but my intuition is that all the competitors would be near-perfect, and every race would end in a tie, or at least be very close.
    - jeffool 14y ago
      I'd imagine that the winner would be the one with the best strategy. My feeling is that with as many variables as you'd see in a race, that it'd be impossible for a single AI to perfectly take all opportunities. And I can imagine some outperforming others in slingshotting or taking curves. Of course, it all depends on the rules of the race.
      - tlrobinson 14y ago
        Plus you can take greater risks when drivers' lives aren't at stake. I imagine it would be a pretty exciting sport, not to mention expensive.
        mayanksinghal 14y ago
        Actually, I think it might end up being cheaper than F1. No celebrity driver to pay millions to and no very-high safety concerns! Although given that most of the human population will probably not relate (or out-rightly reject the idea) to the sport because of the lack of driver, there might be less money in it.

kamaal 14y ago

Well isn't this natural evolution in terms of productivity any race would experience? Lets take for example agriculture, dairy farming, and other animal farms. Compared to something like 300 years back, very few people now work on agriculture and associated tasks. Where did all those people go, they went on to do more productive work. As there are better ways to harness energy and automate things people will move onto more and more productive work. Finally we may reach a point where things like space colonies, settlements and other massive space exploration projects will make sense. Because we will have nothing else to do.

davedx 14y ago
I like the theory, trust me, I do. Abundance sounds so good. But, you're completely ignoring the economic framework we live in. The problem is the people who own these automated systems accumulate more and more wealth, while the workers who once operated them get poorer and poorer. So 'nothing else to do' = 'living in grinding dystopian poverty', if nothing changes in our current economic system.
- freehunter 14y ago
  It all boils down to education. If former laborers can be efficiently trained for new job opportunities, society wins. If not, society continues to stagnate. Farmers don't become robotics engineers or rocket scientists spontaneously.
  - nhaehnle 14y ago
    It's not quite that simple. There also needs to be demand to create those new job opportunities. I'm all for more people working in highly skilled sectors and getting rid of the need for menial labor. The question is: given how the economy works these days, where is the demand for those highly skilled jobs actually going to come from? Most things that actually push the boundaries of what we can do - such as 3D printing, space exploration - have very little effective demand going towards them these days. The one exception may be medical research, I'm just not sure about that. So I agree that society wins if the level of education can be raised and more people work in highly educated sectors. However, this is not going to be some kind of inevitable outcome of the market. The effective demand needs to be there to enable this transition, and there is no automatic market mechanism to make it happen.

bfung 14y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Homerdrive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Homerdrive - the truckers already have this! =P At least the packages that end up on the doorstep still require human delivery. Normalizing addresses and pin pointing the exact location still isn't quite good enough. But yes, unintended consequences will surely make things interesting. The productive will become more productive, and the 99% will get that much larger...

ShabbyDoo 14y ago
"At least the packages that end up on the doorstep still require human delivery." Imagine that you ordered something from Amazon. You could choose from a bunch of different times, perhaps a dozen in a day, when the automated delivery truck would swing by your house. Your phone would make a noise, and you would go outside to grab your packages off the truck. It would be like an Automat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat) on wheels. You would somehow authenticate yourself and then grab your boxes from your assigned slots.
- saryant 14y ago
  I'm pretty much never home when the UPS guy swings by my apartment and I order enough stuff that I wouldn't want to inconvenience my neighbors two or three times a week asking them to grab it for me.
  - kalleboo 14y ago
    You could just indicate when you're going to be home and they can drive by at that time. In Japan, all the delivery services let you indicate a precise 2-hour window when you want the delivery. With automated drivers, this could be feasible in the U.S. as well.
  - bnr 14y ago
    I get all my stuff delivered to a Packstation, which is only a 5min walk away. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation

brc 14y ago

Not sure about the truck drivers. I can see the benefits in making all the long-range truck deliveries drive through the night. This could be encouraged by time-of-use road charges for things like interstate highways, for a discount in registration fees or fuel taxes, I guess. But delivery trucks will still need someone in them to make the deliveries. But what would change is that the delivery person could be doing things in the truck while on the rounds - this could be related or unrelated work. Generally, if a technology transition releases a lot of productivity, it also drastically lowers cost of whatever is affected (delivered goods, which is everything). This, by rights, should free up a lot of extra money for people, which they can then spend on other things. The other things generally cause more economic activity somewhere else, which should create the new jobs. But a portion of truck drivers will lose their job, with it never to return. However, this can't be, nor should it be, stopped.

Schwolop 14y ago
Delivery men could be automated too. A robot with package safe and some kind of pre-determined passcode could be sufficient. Insurance or onboard sensing to surveil would-be thieves would cover some of the safety issues. And to avoid even more problems the delivery network could work with post offices to put these safes in place of P/O boxes. Australia Post already does this - you receive a package and they send you an SMS with the code to unlock the safe they've left it in. The delivery truck would just put the packages in the safe totally autonomously.
- Thrymr 14y ago
  I think robot delivery men are farther off than automated long haul trucks. Having a robot that can find the front door of an arbitrary residence and get to it from the street is more than a little bit beyond our current capabilities. The safe idea is interesting, though.
  - dasmoth 14y ago
    I've been wondering about this, and I think it's totally doable so long as you don't get stuck thinking about a literal "robot delivery man". The model I was considering was more along the lines of 1) park as close as possible to the target address 2) send SMS notifying the recipient that you've arrived. 3) recipient has a 5-10min window to go out to the waiting truck, swipe a card or whatever for ID purposes, and receive the goods. It's a somewhat different experience to a human knocking on your door, but I'm sure it could be made to work. Automated delivery vehicles may be able to do better in terms of offering a choice of delivery time, and sending accurate estimates of arrival time. There's considerable scope for doing a better job of delivering to households where there is usually nobody home during "working hours".