Google wants driverless cars, but do we?

Once computer programs are driving cars, this will change.

> Yes, jobs will be created by these new cars, but many will be lost.

Every time a company, economy, nation or empire doesn't follow the route that saves more human effort they are outcompeted (or conquered) by those who do.

This is as much an argument against self driving cars as much as it is an argument against automation in principle. We need to figure how to handle 40% unemployment when all those truckers lose their jobs. Either Basic income, subsidized jobs, or some kind of discussion to figure out what happens next. Because self driving cars will be part of it unless there is an apocalypse.

Holy crap! I a cannot finish this unresearched technophic clickbait piece of drivel. It is making me dumber as I read it.

"Countries with an abundance of natural resources, specifically non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources."

Scholars debate the causes of the resource curse, but one popular theory has to do with the way autocrats fund themselves relative to democracies.

Autocrats, it turns out, need a lot of wealth to pay their cronies. No dictator rules alone; they need someone to run the military, someone to collect the taxes, and someone to enforce the laws. Those people have to be paid, and handsomely, or they'll overthrow the dictator (or just allow the dictator to be overthrown). This is called "selectorate theory" and this video is a great introduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Oil wealth, specifically, undermines democracy because when autocrats have access to oil wealth, they don't need to depend on their citizens very much. (Indeed, many autocratic countries rich with oil wealth just allow other countries to come in and drill it, keeping local labor entirely out of the loop.)

Resource-cursed autocracies tend to democratize when the oil wealth runs out and they need to rely on the people's productivity to deliver wealth to cronies. When autocrats are forced to allow people to educate themselves and communicate with one another, democracy ensues.

It can work the other way, too. In every democracy, there's a group of folks asking themselves a question: is now the time to try a coup, to replace democracy with an autocracy? As the value of capital increases and the value of human labor decreases, the advantages of staging a coup becomes more and more enticing.

For years we've thought of human labor as the "ultimate resource." But it turns out that human labor isn't the ultimate resource. Robot labor that's just as good if not better than human labor is a resource beyond any we've ever seen.

But that means that we're discovering/inventing the ultimate resource curse.

We might use automation to fund universal basic income, or a class of elites could use it to undermine "unnecessary" citizens (the "unnecessariat"), establishing a corporate fascism.

When we depend on human productivity for our tax base, we need to keep us all well educated and healthy. But soon, we won't depend on human labor.

"Is now the time?" they're asking. And, increasingly, the answer is "yes."

My commute is 29 miles, with all except 3 miles being on the highway. The off-highway miles, you bet I'll be in manual mode and gunning the shit out of it. But once I hit the highway, I'll hit the auto-pilot and relax. Being a driving enthusiast while wanting to have autopilot are not mutually exclusive.

I wonder how easily you can drift a Tesla...