Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#51

Post by barpet » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

GarrisonPrime wrote: post #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…

I do not think automation reduces the prices for consumers. In fact I think automation and cutting costs ( workforce ) will just lead to maintaining fat margins. This will just lead to creating another tier of "cheaper" goods and services. Meaning goods form even crappier materials. Endangering the environment because of scaling out to poorer countries like Africa and so on. Not good.

"Reducing your income by 25% may sound bad, but if practically everything becomes ~20-30% cheaper"

I do not think this stands as an argument. Just look at the costs of the livings vs incomes in "poorer" countries than US. You can be a middle class man somewhere but that still does not mean you will be entitled to buying "quality" goods or healthy food.

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#52

Post by maxerickson » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #43

enraged_camel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make no mistake: technologies like this -- which bring massive cost-savings to companies -- tend to arrive sooner than most people think. The incentives are just too big to ignore. Mining companies in Australia are already using self-driving trucks to transport ore. http://www.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-driving-... And self-driving cars are just around the corner in the USA. Trucks will follow maybe hal…

You think cars come before trucks? Trucks seem easier to me. Driving 500 miles on a very standardized highway seems like an easier problem than negotiating city streets and picking up hard to identify passengers from a curb.

A lot of the time the passenger will be holding a beacon that communicates their position to the car.

It also seems to me that such things won't be a big deal. Some Google demo shows their system recognizing a bicyclist making a hand signal. It's the dynamic traffic stuff that will take longer to deal with.

I was thinking about one problem the autonomous systems will have to handle on my run yesterday; pedestrians can look at drivers and use eye contact to make sure the driver has noticed them. An autonomous system doesn't have eyes to look at. The first idea I came up with was a highly directional light source that the system could point at the system could point at the heads of pedestrians it had recognized. Not a laser, but a moderately bright light in a recess that limits the direct visibility of the source.

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#53

Post by monkmartinez » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

nsgi wrote: post #25

mishchea wrote: post #5

I'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.

More like a couple of decades.

I disagree. At most one decade, but I would bet it happens much sooner. As some have mentioned... the economic incentives are too high.

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#54

Post by monkmartinez » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

topkai22 wrote: post #48

monkmartinez wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really needs more attention/consideration. Self-driving anything seems like a ripe target, as the perceived "harm" is to a corporation not a human driver/operator. That is, theives will not have to hurt anyone to get the goods.

This seems like it has already been "solved" by trains- moving targets are hard, cargo is anonymous, stationary targets are in semi-secured railyards, and shrinkage is part of the cost of doing business. Who wants to hijack a truck and find its full of breakfast cereal?

I would guess that a train is much harder to stop than a truck. Further, one can drive next to a truck and have people jump on the truck to do some "snooping." The "driver" is not going to freak out/swerve as the drone truck just keeps going towards its destination at a perfectly efficient speed, perfectly centered in the lane.

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#55

Post by bogomipz » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

Sure the cost of goods will go down the same way that we all work less hours now due to efficiencies that technology has provided.

It would seem that having trucks that can be on the road for 24 hours straight will result in less trucks being needed. I am sure the auto industry will make up for that that decrease in units sold by increasing the price per unit sold. I don't think there will be any dividend passed on to consumers.

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#56

Post by intrasight » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8

intrasight wrote: post #6

Truck 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.

Is no more fetherbedding than any other regulated profession (doctors, layers) who get to themselves decide who is a member in good standing.

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#57

Post by astazangasta » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:43 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #9

astazangasta wrote: post #4

Recently 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 http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=30585

I disagree with this conclusion, and I tend to disfavor the PCE. The argument is that employers are spending more on benefits, therefore pay has not actually fallen. However, the largest component of the difference between the PCE and CPI is based on employer-provided healthcare; in the US, healthcare spending has been growing at faster than inflation for decades, and medical costs are one of the main avenues of wealth transfer (for example, $300 billion a year, 2% of GDP, goes in patent royalties to owners of pharmaceutical companies).

It is a bit crap to suggest that because we are paying people more so they can pay their doctors more, for worse outcomes than anyone in the rest of the developed world, they are somehow turning out better. In any case, the fact that real wages have remained essentially flat requires us to believe that workers are fine with not having made any gains in disposable income in exchange for better benefits, which seems unlikely.

Also, the fact that labor peaked in 1973, when the graph begins to diverge, should reinforce, not contradict, this argument.

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#58

Post by gsnedders » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

monkmartinez wrote: post #54

topkai22 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like it has already been "solved" by trains- moving targets are hard, cargo is anonymous, stationary targets are in semi-secured railyards, and shrinkage is part of the cost of doing business. Who wants to hijack a truck and find its full of breakfast cereal?

I would guess that a train is much harder to stop than a truck. Further, one can drive next to a truck and have people jump on the truck to do some "snooping." The "driver" is not going to freak out/swerve as the drone truck just keeps going towards its destination at a perfectly efficient speed, perfectly centered in the lane.

In plenty of places, you can stop a train simply by cutting the signal wire (because it will fail-safe).

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#59

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8

intrasight wrote: post #6

Truck 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.

[deleted]

Re: Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

#60

Post by intrasight » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:46 PM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #56

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is no more fetherbedding than any other regulated profession (doctors, layers) who get to themselves decide who is a member in good standing.

And to carry the analogy further, AI agents are now better than radiologists at analyzing images. But the AI agent works for/under the direction of the radiologist.