Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers

This is a great resource, but there are a few things wrong:

1. Fuel prices were low in 2015 and have been rising since then, so 39% of marginal costs is likely a peak.

2. The chart you referenced is only for marginal costs, and doesn't include fixed costs associated with a trucking company. The actual percentage of driver pay to the overall operating cost of a trucking company will be lower once fixed costs are factored in.

3. Automated truck companies will also want to capture a fraction of that 30-40% that is paid to drivers.

So in the end, shipping costs will likely drop in the 10-20% range, which is substantial, but it isn't enough to be revolutionary.

My point wasn't to the value created by having automated trucks, but to counter the point that shipping costs would drop significantly.

Also, since shipping costs are a small percentage of the price of most consumer goods, everyday purchases will not be affected much either.

There's a shortage of COBOL developers that are needed to maintain and update legacy financial mainframes that still don't make economic sense to replace since they operate at critical infrastructure points 24/7 and over the years have become pretty bulletproof.

Replacing these systems is extremely difficult since they're so relied on a replacement needs to be nearly flawless form the start. If you stumble upon on a bug in your international wire transfer code you could be messing up a $10 billion international aid wire that was meant for hundreds of factories.

Did you read my comment? Progress is awesome and inevitable, but how we deal with it and how we deal with the people who's careers are made redundant by it is what we need to discuss. We need to give people options, whether that's retraining and financial support, universal basic income, or whatever. Currently the money just goes upwards - the progress, innovation are owned by the elite as intellectual property. We need to find a different way where the fruits of this progress are distributed to benefit humanity as a whole, not used to further exploit the masses.

Re training will fail. This is the major fatal flaw of the current economic system.

Supporting data: The writing has been on the wall in glowing neon ever since the advent of MOOCs.

MOOCS have many near magical attributes that we have long sought in education

1) The students regularly self select into the courses they want, as opposed to schools where you don't have a choice.

2) Courses are free

3) Courses are high quality, and improving with testing

4) Courses are media rich, and use multiple types of stimulation for stronger impact when studying

5) Honorary mention - gamification

6) Material is always available, at any time - you are not limited to teachers being available

7) You even have online communities you can reach out to, to discuss your work

And yet they have about a 10% completion rate.

Let me underline - thats a 10% rate with a self selected pool of interested applicants.

MOOCs are literally magic.

IF you are talking about re-training then you are missing the Big Picture: The re-training and skill up revolution has come and gone.

We should currently be seeing a large rise in the number of people who are self actualizing, and learning skills in a wider range of industries.

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In economic terms, the failure rate of MOOCs indicate that retraining attempts will result in very poor retrenchment of workers.

Most jobs lost will result in under-employment, increasing the concentration of capital in the hands of capital holders.

This will have a knock on effect on the America old style university system, as this will become the only path to a higher paying career over poor paying service sector work.

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The retraining model which will work will require people to be allowed to train non stop on material, and the ability to focus and work on a subject till they have gained the necessary mastery.

I doubt this will be possible, because a family earner cannot take weeks off to master a skill only to have to hunt for jobs in a market where younger students already abound.

Consider how many people want to get healthier, apply to gyms - and then stop going.

Re-phrase the retraining problem as an attempt to get all of humanity (or a slice of it) fit.

Also since the tools of technology allow for hitherto impossible levels of orchestration and conversation management, the barrier to outrage driven organization and outrage has been set much higher, which will lead to less negotiation power during the eventual distribution of wealth