Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
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Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
#2If you haven't seen the short (15min) documentary "Humans Need Not Apply", then I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
A hundred years ago 'horseless carriages' replaced a lot of horses, and in the next couple decades we're going to see 'driverless trucks' are going to replace a lot of humans.
Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
#3The Box[1], a book about the history behind the shipping container which eliminated the jobs of bunches of longshorement, seems very instructive.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econ...
Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
#4Recently I am interested in the end of the Bretton Woods system. For the past few years, I've been interested in this graph: http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/family_income_med...
This is the main story. At a time, perhaps because of fixed exchange rates curbing the flow of speculative capital, perhaps not, productivity (viz., increasing automation) gains meant median wage growth - ordinary people participated in GDP growth.
Now this is no longer true, and we get pieces lamenting the death of blue collar jobs through automation. We'll blame robots, but perhaps we should be looking at the fundamentals of our economy - how we've set the free movement of capital above all else, to our detriment.
Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
#5I'm surprised at how _few_ posts/articles like this there have been, so far: self-driving cars are taking off and are a big looming imminent threat to Uber/taxi/truck drivers.
Every time I take an Uber now, I wonder if the driver realizes that his job will most likely be automated away in a couple of years.
Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
#6Truck drivers need to work with their union(s) to lobby for a law that says that only union members can own an autonomous driving agent. Problem solved - we have self-driving trucks but trucking companies must "hire" an agent via a union member. To become a union member, you'll still have to a rigorous apprenticeship and training program - and of course pay your union dues.
Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
#7>“If you can get rid of the drivers, those people are out of jobs, but the cost of moving all those goods goes down significantly,” Kaplan said.
This is a major point of automation. Yes, many jobs will be lost. But the prices of many goods will decrease.
The problem is that the current transition threatens to be so rapid as to seriously disrupt society. Perhaps new jobs will eventually be created to make up for those lost to automation (or perhaps not), but they won't be created fast enough to avoid the pain of all the rapid job losses that are coming.
Thankfully, society seems to be coming around to the idea that resistance is futile, and we need to address this problem before it becomes too overwhelming. Personally, I feel one of the most realistic options would be to reduce the standard work week to 4 days and/or 30 hours. People need to be kept busy, or society overall tends to start to crumble around the edges. This would mean people will need to shift their perspective on income, as it will likely be reduced. But this shouldn't be too bad, since all the automation will likely lead to reduced prices all around. Reducing your income by 25% may sound bad, but if practically everything becomes ~20-30% cheaper then you should have essentially the same standard of living, but with fewer working hours. Isn't that what we more or less would all like?
No matter what we wind up doing however, chances are there will be some period of difficult transition. All we can hope to do is make it as short and relatively painless as possible.
Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
#8Truck drivers need to work with their union(s) to lobby for a law that says that only union members can own an autonomous driving agent. Problem solved - we have self-driving trucks but trucking companies must "hire" an agent via a union member. To become a union member, you'll still have to a rigorous apprenticeship and training program - and of course pay your union dues.
Sounds like featherbedding. Putting pointless people in the middle just to skim money from the process. Who benefits? Nobody but them. Reminds me of how the railroads had to pay into the pension fund for Firemen, long after steam engines were dead and gone. Just because.
Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
#9Recently I am interested in the end of the Bretton Woods system. For the past few years, I've been interested in this graph: http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/family_income_med... This is the main story. At a time, perhaps because of fixed exchange rates curbing the flow of speculative capital, perhaps not, productivity (viz., increasing automation) gains meant median wage growth - ordinary people participat…
Pay/productivity gap graphs are nonsense
Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs
#10>“If you can get rid of the drivers, those people are out of jobs, but the cost of moving all those goods goes down significantly,” Kaplan said. This is a major point of automation. Yes, many jobs will be lost. But the prices of many goods will decrease. The problem is that the current transition threatens to be so rapid as to seriously disrupt society. Perhaps new jobs will eventually be created to make up for those…
I agree with most everything you've said, the one point that I would contest is:
> Yes, many jobs will be lost. But the prices of many goods will decrease.
If you're talking about what I first thought of, which is things like groceries, housewares, the "every day things" that we all buy and consume without really thinking, I'm not sure that A: The prices on these items could go much lower than they already are and remain profitable, or B: That the producers of said goods (majority MASSIVE corporations with impressive names and product rosters, and the most likely early adopters of this technology) would reduce the prices in accordance with the reduction in cost. The trend now among these companies seems to be to squeeze every last cent out of every last consumer, and if you're proposing to your given board of directors to buy all these new trucks (or change contracts to a company that has) why would you then cut the prices?
I would hope there would be market pressure to do so from at least one good actor, but I don't know how certain that is at all.