I like the post for the humanist viewpoint. I have to think that maybe truckers aren't going to be as disappointed as I thought when the entire industry workforce is displaced in 15 years with self-driving trucks.
I've put quite a bit of thought on it and my guess is that the truck driving workforce is going to evaporate almost overnight once self driving trucks are green-lighted. It's going to be hard for a human to compete unless he can drive 24x7, never get tired, have split-second reflexes, and works for 65 cents worth of electricity a day...
I have to think that maybe truckers aren't going to be as disappointed as I thought when the entire industry workforce is displaced in 15 years with self-driving trucks.
Don't be so sure. Just because some jobs are truly shitty doesn't mean people won't fight to the death to keep them. Just look at coal miners.
Well, many workforces are going to be extinct in the coming years (as many already have been). The problem is what kind of society are we going to have once average human cannot produce anything tangible enough to support himself.
The problem is what kind of society are we going to have once average human cannot produce anything tangible enough to support himself.
I like to think about this question a lot.
My mind keep going back to Rome's slave based economy. There were a lot of slaves doing all kinds work, and rich people, and politicians, and a whole lot of average people who got government bread and circuses.
And if you kind of squint and look the situation we have today, huge inequality, a disappearing middle class, and ever more people dependent on government... it kind of starts to look familiar.
So maybe our future is just more of that. A few very rich people, politicians, a lot of fully automated production in factories, farms, and even most of the service sector, and a lot of people permanently on government support.
I honestly can't quite tell if that's a utopian or dystopian world. If you think about it in terms of how America handles its poor people, it looks kind of grim. If you look at how the Scandinavian countries, along with Holland and Germany, and few others, deal with the same problem - its not so bad.
Either way, the coming decades will be interesting.
Not sure if your comment is satirical, but I doubt we'll see self-driving vehicles on the road in any reasonable numbers anytime soon... we'll sooner see mass-adoption of electric vehicles before then.
Driving (with irrational human actors) is non-deterministic.
> I doubt we'll see self-driving vehicles on the road in any reasonable numbers anytime soon
I don't know about the rate of deployment, but Google is already lobbying Nevada to officially allow its driverless cars. They have successfully logged hundreds of thousands of miles on U.S. roadways with only one incident: one of the driverless cars was rear ended while waiting at a red light.
> Driving (with irrational human actors) is non-deterministic.
They don't have to "solve" driving. All they have to do is be less stupid than human drivers.
We haven't set the bar that high.
Even so, the Google project seems to be working fine so far, irrational human drivers notwithstanding.
And I bet Google's car is already better then most if not all human drivers can ever be.
The fact that the road is full of unpredictable humans does not mean that a computer can't be a better driver then another human. In fact, the more dangerous the road conditions, due to other bad drivers, or any other reason, the better it is to have a super-human computer do the driving.
I've put quite a bit of thought on it and my guess is that the truck driving workforce is going to evaporate almost overnight once self driving trucks are green-lighted. It's going to be hard for a human to compete unless he can drive 24x7, never get tired, have split-second reflexes, and works for 65 cents worth of electricity a day...