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So instead of improve their conditions we just fire them? Sure that won't have any negative repercussions... That's even assuming this is actually remotely pro

So instead of improve their conditions we just fire them? Sure that won't have any negative repercussions... That's even assuming this is actually remotely profitable compared to just using humans. Like a lot of this sort of automation it probably isn't, and it's true purpose is to be used as a threat against workers so they'll be even more "compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines"

echelon 1y ago
> assuming this is actually remotely profitable Why wouldn't it be? > instead of improve their conditions I wouldn't want to drive a truck. To be frank, I really don't want to answer Jira tickets and write plumbing code either. I sincerely hope that none of what most of us do today has to be a job in fifty years.
- Ygg2 1y ago
  > Why wouldn't it be? My debt is your asset, and vice versa. Tell me, what does the autonomous truck drink? Or eat? The less you pay the driver the less money does driver have to buy whatever he is carrying.
  - jfengel 1y ago
    That doesn't automatically mean that the economy drops. The truck driver gets the next-least-undesirable job. That may pay almost the same, or it may not exist. It depends. It's never as simple as "we automated the job so the person is useless."
    - Ygg2 1y ago
      > The truck driver gets the next-least-undesirable job. That the promise but is it the reality? Deaths of despair suggest it isn't. Deindustrialization is an issue once you move supply chains overseas or to the robots, with it whole parts of country die. No truck drivers means less money spent on truck stops, motels (for sleep), and in their local economy (no pubs, bowling alley, etc.) But the threat isn't just replacing drivers, it is replacing entire eco systems of jobs.
brookst 1y ago
I don’t get it. Say I’m building a company to ship self-driving trucks. I need hundreds of millions, maybe billions in capital. I need to line up purchasers. My fixed costs are huge and marginal lower, so I need volume. How, exactly, am I thinking about “threatening” existing drivers so they work longer hours and break more laws?
- iancmceachern 1y ago
  Play out the same thought experiment but from the truckers point of view.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Yes? I would feel economic uncertainty and worry, but I’m not so egocentric that I would think that someone is raising hundreds of millions of dolllars and building factories in an elaborate scheme to make me work longer hours. That’s the claim that was scoffing at.
    - iancmceachern 1y ago
      Change one part of your sentence. Change "to" to "which results in".
- meristohm 1y ago
  Are you entitled to get what you want to make DreamCo operate? What are all the costs involved, and not just costs to you directly?
  - brookst 1y ago
    I wasn’t arguing for a social good, I’m ambivalent on that. I thought I was pretty clearly questioning the claim that the motivation of DreamCo is somehow to threaten truckers so they work harder, as opposed to (wisely or not) trying to sell trucks.
- Spooky23 1y ago
dangus 1y ago
Isn’t it true that truck drivers are the most common profession in basically every state? I think it’s “funny” how corporate leaders in basically every industry are enthusiastically barreling toward a world in which they have no employed customers to buy their products created by their automated robot workforce. Nobody in politics is coming close to addressing the societal problems that are incoming in the near future.
- Noumenon72 1y ago
  Agriculturists enthusiastically barreled toward a world with no employed farmers to buy their food, and the societal problems took care of themselves because having lots of cheap food is good.
  - dangus 1y ago
    You’re glossing over the great amount of physical violence and unrest that happened during the period of industrialization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair All of that unrest eventually resulted in the new deal. We have had relative peace in the postwar period thanks to a lot of pain being resolved over a long period of time, but that lack of friction is not guaranteed to last forever. I would argue that America’s backslide into the election of a reactionary, dare I say fascist government is all about declining prosperity.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  It’s not corporate leaders. It’s owners. We’re moving to a feudal environment. The billionaires are pulling sovereign capital from the Saudis. They need to keep their treasure, that’s the priority. Politics isn’t pretending to address anything. We’re breaking the system to extract as much rent from the populace as possible. Caesar type stuff. Destroying the income tax means you’ll pay taxes based on consumption. We’ll be poorer. The overlords will be great.
Spooky23 1y ago
My brother is in this business. There’s overlapping jurisdictions that shady operators leverage hard to squeeze more out of people and equipment. Chinatown busses are the perfect example, they’d run routes designed to avoid federal jurisdiction and adopt routes and schedules to avoid weigh stations and routine inspection. Busses were unsafe and drivers unlicensed in many cases. Most were owned by Chinese mafia organizations and killed people. When they weren’t doing that, they were huge human trafficking operations. The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned, so it’s a Wild West environment. The advice I was given was avoid the busy trucking corridors (I-81/85/95) at night.
- mmooss 1y ago
  > The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned When was that? And is there anything public we can read about these things?
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    Google motor carrier safety. University of Colorado is one of the bigger academic partners.
throwaway48476 1y ago
Automation is expensive because the taxpayer subsidizes cheap labor. Get rid of the subsidy and automation will explode.
socalgal2 1y ago
> So instead of improve their conditions we just fire them? Yes? We got rid of telephohe operators. We got rid of "computers" (people who compute). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) We effectively got rid of horse shoe makers, liveries, etc... > Sure that won't have any negative repercussions... Does it suck for the truck drivers. Yes. Does that mean we should give them busy work even though their job can be automated? No. We don't know what the reprocussions will be. We do know, from 100% of past experience, that automating something opened new opportunties that ultimately resulted in more jobs that before. Whether that will be true this time as well no one has any idea. The usual example is textile creation vs fashion. The loom put people who hand weave cloth out of business. But the abundance of cheap cloth created 100x the jobs in cloth making and fashion. It's why you probably have more than 3 shirts in your house/apartment.
- dfxm12 1y ago
  On the other hand, the current administration is not interested in education or welfare though, or labor protections in general. Fired truckers don't have a whole lot of transferrable skills related to maintaining self driving vehicles, and they would all be competing for same openings anyway. You can't just get another job when you want it, and you need some way to take care of the bills until you can get hired.
yieldcrv 1y ago
The lot lizard economy is about to be in shambles
bdcravens 1y ago
Software and automation has a long history of putting people out of work. Many of the truckers are delivering loads for large companies who put mom and pop stores out of business. It's the circle of life.
sgregnt 1y ago
What kind of comment is that? You can open your own company and pay as much as you want and create whatever condition you want for the workers.
materielle 1y ago
Why stop there? We should bring back elevator operators. And station a traffic guard on every corner instead of traffic lights. Let’s bring back tool booth operators. And let’s delete Google calendar and bring back secretaries while we’re at it.
- kerkeslager 1y ago
  This sort of response misses the point. If the goal is to have jobs for everyone, then yes, bringing back all those things is actually the right move, and you're not going to convince the person who favors job creation otherwise. You seem to be under the impression that those jobs went away for a good reason, but you haven't bothered to articulate what that reason was. I think the better point is that having jobs for everyone isn't the goal. Equitably distributing the results of our society's labor so everyone's needs are met is. If people are able to live in a house and put food on their table, they'll be less concerned with whether they have a job or not. But that requires that you care enough about other people to not let people hoard unlimited resources, so I suspect most of HN will have some objections, and you'll never actually address what monkaiju is concerned about.
kerkeslager 1y ago
To me, a vision of the future in which people do jobs robots could do, just to create jobs, is a dystopia. The future I want to see is one in which humans live lives of play and leisure while robots do all the labor, and the results of the robots doing labor are distributed equitably. The problem is, there's no historical precedent for this, and we're still letting people who do almost no labor amass most of the results of other people's labor. If we follow the current trajectory, we'll have a society controlled by a few people who own the robots, and everybody else fighting over their table scraps. The solution to this isn't rejecting automation to create artificial jobs: that's just fighting over table scraps by a different name. The solution is to stop rewarding generational wealth with more wealth, and distribute resources more equitably.
Axsuul 1y ago
Making trucks autonomous is actually the most direct way to improve their conditions.

echelon 1y ago

> assuming this is actually remotely profitable Why wouldn't it be? > instead of improve their conditions I wouldn't want to drive a truck. To be frank, I really don't want to answer Jira tickets and write plumbing code either. I sincerely hope that none of what most of us do today has to be a job in fifty years.

Ygg2 1y ago
> Why wouldn't it be? My debt is your asset, and vice versa. Tell me, what does the autonomous truck drink? Or eat? The less you pay the driver the less money does driver have to buy whatever he is carrying.
- jfengel 1y ago
  That doesn't automatically mean that the economy drops. The truck driver gets the next-least-undesirable job. That may pay almost the same, or it may not exist. It depends. It's never as simple as "we automated the job so the person is useless."
  - Ygg2 1y ago
    > The truck driver gets the next-least-undesirable job. That the promise but is it the reality? Deaths of despair suggest it isn't. Deindustrialization is an issue once you move supply chains overseas or to the robots, with it whole parts of country die. No truck drivers means less money spent on truck stops, motels (for sleep), and in their local economy (no pubs, bowling alley, etc.) But the threat isn't just replacing drivers, it is replacing entire eco systems of jobs.

brookst 1y ago

I don’t get it. Say I’m building a company to ship self-driving trucks. I need hundreds of millions, maybe billions in capital. I need to line up purchasers. My fixed costs are huge and marginal lower, so I need volume. How, exactly, am I thinking about “threatening” existing drivers so they work longer hours and break more laws?

iancmceachern 1y ago
Play out the same thought experiment but from the truckers point of view.
- brookst 1y ago
  Yes? I would feel economic uncertainty and worry, but I’m not so egocentric that I would think that someone is raising hundreds of millions of dolllars and building factories in an elaborate scheme to make me work longer hours. That’s the claim that was scoffing at.
  - iancmceachern 1y ago
    Change one part of your sentence. Change "to" to "which results in".
meristohm 1y ago
Are you entitled to get what you want to make DreamCo operate? What are all the costs involved, and not just costs to you directly?
- brookst 1y ago
  I wasn’t arguing for a social good, I’m ambivalent on that. I thought I was pretty clearly questioning the claim that the motivation of DreamCo is somehow to threaten truckers so they work harder, as opposed to (wisely or not) trying to sell trucks.
Spooky23 1y ago

dangus 1y ago

Isn’t it true that truck drivers are the most common profession in basically every state? I think it’s “funny” how corporate leaders in basically every industry are enthusiastically barreling toward a world in which they have no employed customers to buy their products created by their automated robot workforce. Nobody in politics is coming close to addressing the societal problems that are incoming in the near future.

Noumenon72 1y ago
Agriculturists enthusiastically barreled toward a world with no employed farmers to buy their food, and the societal problems took care of themselves because having lots of cheap food is good.
- dangus 1y ago
  You’re glossing over the great amount of physical violence and unrest that happened during the period of industrialization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair All of that unrest eventually resulted in the new deal. We have had relative peace in the postwar period thanks to a lot of pain being resolved over a long period of time, but that lack of friction is not guaranteed to last forever. I would argue that America’s backslide into the election of a reactionary, dare I say fascist government is all about declining prosperity.
Spooky23 1y ago
It’s not corporate leaders. It’s owners. We’re moving to a feudal environment. The billionaires are pulling sovereign capital from the Saudis. They need to keep their treasure, that’s the priority. Politics isn’t pretending to address anything. We’re breaking the system to extract as much rent from the populace as possible. Caesar type stuff. Destroying the income tax means you’ll pay taxes based on consumption. We’ll be poorer. The overlords will be great.

Spooky23 1y ago

My brother is in this business. There’s overlapping jurisdictions that shady operators leverage hard to squeeze more out of people and equipment. Chinatown busses are the perfect example, they’d run routes designed to avoid federal jurisdiction and adopt routes and schedules to avoid weigh stations and routine inspection. Busses were unsafe and drivers unlicensed in many cases. Most were owned by Chinese mafia organizations and killed people. When they weren’t doing that, they were huge human trafficking operations. The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned, so it’s a Wild West environment. The advice I was given was avoid the busy trucking corridors (I-81/85/95) at night.

mmooss 1y ago
> The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned When was that? And is there anything public we can read about these things?
- Spooky23 1y ago
  Google motor carrier safety. University of Colorado is one of the bigger academic partners.

throwaway48476 1y ago

Automation is expensive because the taxpayer subsidizes cheap labor. Get rid of the subsidy and automation will explode.

socalgal2 1y ago

> So instead of improve their conditions we just fire them? Yes? We got rid of telephohe operators. We got rid of "computers" (people who compute). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) We effectively got rid of horse shoe makers, liveries, etc... > Sure that won't have any negative repercussions... Does it suck for the truck drivers. Yes. Does that mean we should give them busy work even though their job can be automated? No. We don't know what the reprocussions will be. We do know, from 100% of past experience, that automating something opened new opportunties that ultimately resulted in more jobs that before. Whether that will be true this time as well no one has any idea. The usual example is textile creation vs fashion. The loom put people who hand weave cloth out of business. But the abundance of cheap cloth created 100x the jobs in cloth making and fashion. It's why you probably have more than 3 shirts in your house/apartment.

dfxm12 1y ago
On the other hand, the current administration is not interested in education or welfare though, or labor protections in general. Fired truckers don't have a whole lot of transferrable skills related to maintaining self driving vehicles, and they would all be competing for same openings anyway. You can't just get another job when you want it, and you need some way to take care of the bills until you can get hired.

yieldcrv 1y ago

The lot lizard economy is about to be in shambles

bdcravens 1y ago

Software and automation has a long history of putting people out of work. Many of the truckers are delivering loads for large companies who put mom and pop stores out of business. It's the circle of life.

sgregnt 1y ago

What kind of comment is that? You can open your own company and pay as much as you want and create whatever condition you want for the workers.

materielle 1y ago

Why stop there? We should bring back elevator operators. And station a traffic guard on every corner instead of traffic lights. Let’s bring back tool booth operators. And let’s delete Google calendar and bring back secretaries while we’re at it.

kerkeslager 1y ago
This sort of response misses the point. If the goal is to have jobs for everyone, then yes, bringing back all those things is actually the right move, and you're not going to convince the person who favors job creation otherwise. You seem to be under the impression that those jobs went away for a good reason, but you haven't bothered to articulate what that reason was. I think the better point is that having jobs for everyone isn't the goal. Equitably distributing the results of our society's labor so everyone's needs are met is. If people are able to live in a house and put food on their table, they'll be less concerned with whether they have a job or not. But that requires that you care enough about other people to not let people hoard unlimited resources, so I suspect most of HN will have some objections, and you'll never actually address what monkaiju is concerned about.

kerkeslager 1y ago

To me, a vision of the future in which people do jobs robots could do, just to create jobs, is a dystopia. The future I want to see is one in which humans live lives of play and leisure while robots do all the labor, and the results of the robots doing labor are distributed equitably. The problem is, there's no historical precedent for this, and we're still letting people who do almost no labor amass most of the results of other people's labor. If we follow the current trajectory, we'll have a society controlled by a few people who own the robots, and everybody else fighting over their table scraps. The solution to this isn't rejecting automation to create artificial jobs: that's just fighting over table scraps by a different name. The solution is to stop rewarding generational wealth with more wealth, and distribute resources more equitably.

Axsuul 1y ago

Making trucks autonomous is actually the most direct way to improve their conditions.