American truck drivers could lose their jobs to robots

Just a few hours ago this was submitted to HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12242525

The first paragraph reads:

"One central fact about the global economy lurks just beneath the year’s remarkable headlines: Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth."

We can extend our duration of economic success for a very long time, but not for forever. At some point we go dark.

It has happened to every civilization in history, slowly or suddenly, primitive or sophisticated, for what appears to be about a million different reasons.

I don't know whether this time it is 'The Big One', but it is folly to assume it shall never occur because we're more sophisticated than before. The same was true of every civilization before us.

Other than the Net I don't think there's a single institution we have that some other former civilization had in some way on a smaller scale.

18 wheelers will drive to depot, cargo will be moved over to smaller self driving trucks and other delivery vehicles for the last mile. At least, that's the way it should be, even today without the automation. Huge trucks have no place in an urban environment.

>> I think it credible that some people need stress in order to perform at a high level

> How is that relevant?

Well, people are motivated differently from each other and at different stages in their lives. Have you ever noticed some people intentionally generate stress? They do that because they require it to get themselves going. Stress isn't always a bad thing, that's mostly the continual low level stress that can hurt health.

> Doesn't your argument imply we should force people to take certain jobs, even against their will, so that they perform at an high level?

No. Some jobs deserve higher pay because they aren't pleasant but in the current environment they receive minuscule wages because people have no other options.

I am saying two things about the role of stress. One is that many, perhaps most people, have been 'coached' by workplace experience to endure stress. In a way they are institutionalized. The same thing occurs with schooling. It serves a purpose but that diminishes under UBI.

This means many maladaptive habits exist, like overly sensitive stress responses, that will take many years to break out of, perhaps even requiring a generational change before the full effects of UBI are evident.

Let's use an extreme example, consider the mental model of a member of ISIS. If you give them UBI, you change literally nothing about this person and their attempts to strap bombs to their bodies because their entire mental model was never aligned with optimizing their personal outcomes. Similarly many people are hardwired into existing mental models to such an extent that UBI may simply bounce off them. This is sometimes expressed by the inhabitants of urban ghettos as 'you can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the girl'.

The second thing is that most people really do currently require stress in order to operate. When they feel a tangible connection to 'survival mode', they get stuff done. Otherwise they risk stagnation. This is a simple fact that cannot be hand waved away.

Examine the lives of lottery winners if you want to see a full spectrum of irrational behavior. Only a few manage to become the improved human you want them to be. Look at the communities of those who subsist nearly entirely on welfare. There are whole housing estates in the UK where nobody has held a job in generations and it has caused immense harm.

It is interesting to note that once they become 'pensioners', they become quite a bit happier.

People like to have a solid justification for their existence. You have to provide for that, or allow them to provide that, regardless of what happens.

I think all this can be solved, but first it has to be thought about in depth.

> There are 71 countries in the world with compulsory conscription,

They are not all the same (and it doesn't have to be conscription). Some countries do it better than others. It is hard to explain with words but it is something you know when you see it. The US and Israel have it. Eritrea and Iraq do not. The soldiers of the USA and Israel are proud of their role and see themselves as part of a higher noble purpose. The soldiers of Eritrea and Afghanistan manifestly do not. We may be sure the first two groups will work well together in forming businesses.

Conscription or not, this is something that can be cultivated.

It is also a single factor, I was not using it as a universal explanation of everything innovation related. What I am saying is that people who work under short periods of severe stress make for good teams to do anything.

It is hard to do this convincingly artificially, corporate team building is mostly placebo in comparison, that's why I suggested the army but police or disaster response may work just as well.

> How do you account then for the existence of the Open Source community, a mostly voluntary collaboration between many thousands of inviduals often thought to be people with poor social skills? Not to mention all the volunteer-based non-profits, churches, events, etc?

The communities you referred to are mostly built on reputation, duty and self selection. They're what I'm talking about. Those kinds of people aren't going to have a problem in a UBI world.

The problem is that not everybody is in such a community. Many people define themselves by their job or role. That concept has to be transferred to something broader for UBI to work.

Even in the software community, a huge number of programmers are not actually part of a community such as this one. They perform solo, within corporate walls.

It's not too small to matter. For the worst case scenario of a mother of 3+ who's working several part time jobs, it pays on average around $7K. In most of the country that is rent for a year. And since someone getting an EIC is likely in government housing as they'll qualify for it, it could then be groceries for a year. Only as they qualify for EIC, they are likely on SNAP, and this money is somewhat freed up for things besides food and housing.

So for many it is too small to matter either because they don't have dependents, don't work enough, or work too much. But it's actually a near damned perfect incentive to keep people working and trying to find better jobs while keeping them out of abject poverty. Likely the best anti-poverty tool the US government has blindly stumbled upon ever.

So surgery is a mechanical thing. Take a heart like X, make it look like Y. I can see robots being able to get there at some point.

Nursing, at least part of it, is about empathy and care. If someone is in the hospital getting robot heart surgery, someone has to help guide them through the practice. I do not see robot empathy in the next 50 years. Same reason I do not see robot counselors on the horizon ;)