Self driving Uber vehicle kills pedestrian

[notimportant1234]

The only problem that I have with self driving cars is that they will take away a lot of jobs.

So, you support federal subsidies for manufacturing buggy whips and slide rules ?

How many people we want to impoverish paying taxes to support people without marketable skills indefinitely??

Rather see displaced professional drivers retrained (at public expense) for better career options.  Driverless cars are coming out slowly enough now, if people would stop choosing 'driving' as a job, natural attrition might carry through for quite a while.  This is entirely foreseeable issue and if we had a well managed congress this transition could be virtually painless.  

A good way of How Not To Do It (that should be avoided) would be like the dems telling the coal miners (and their bundled union campaign political contributions) to Go Fuck Yourselves and You Filthy Coal Too.  That could certainly have been handled BETTER.  To this day, it remains to be ascertained if Dem leadership learned anything from that self inflicted wound.  The rest of us can be smarter.

My post was quite blunt. I'm not against progress but I do not see people handling it well. My concern is that what the dems did to the coal miners will be the rule not the exception.

[johan]

The only problem that I have with self driving cars is that they will take away a lot of jobs.

As someone who hires and manages truck drivers, I can't wait for the day when my trucks no longer need drivers. Like yourself, I've wondered who be able to afford to shop at a Walmart when that Walmart only needs to employ two or three people in order to keep the store running at peak efficiency. And when it only takes about ten people throughout the supply chain to keep that store stocked instead of the hundreds of people it requires now. 

But here's the thing. We're not Amish and we, as a species, are for the most part not going to be Amish. Which means we will not force businesses to operate in less efficient ways simply because it will mean they're then forced to employ more people. So this train's coming whether we like it or not. And yes, its probably going to rip our economy to shreds. Which means we're going to have rethink and probably reinvent how our economy works. The fact that we don't know or can't imagine how that will look now doesn't scare me that much. We've worked it out before, we'll work it out again.

So yeah, can't wait for the day when my company doesn't have to rely on a staff of semi-skilled mouth breathers who feel they should be paid like Nobel laureate PhD scientists and should be completely forgiven as though nothing happened when they hook the wrong load and pull it 500 miles in the wrong direction or got another ticket because they can't be bothered to run legally. I can't wait.

[vorlon13]

Perez might be the one to make that nightmare come true.

Depends on which puppeteer has his/her hand up his butt.

[notimportant1234]

I know it's coming, I just hope we will handle it and not turn it in a freak show.

[CapnAwesome]

The thing is, this is a really old argument, going back forever, all the way to the luddites and industrial revolution. I'm not too worried, it hasn't been true yet. Technology seems to create more jobs than it takes away.

[Anomalocaris]

The buggy analogy is not exactly apt. The industrial revolution did not remove or even reduce the need for human participation in the process of the wealth generation. It simply required humans to participate in new and jitherto unfamiliar ways. So long as human participation is required to generate capital and wealth, it is possible for participating humans to negotiate a cut of the wealth.

I think we are rapidly arriving at an age where human participation in any form is unnecessary to most of the wealth creation. I can envision a day in not too distant future when everything from inspiration to creativity, to say nothing of repetitive or unkilled labor, requires no human participation.

In such a case there is nothing humans can do to adapt themselves to any position where they can negotiate for a cut of wealth through indispensable contribution. Rather their only leverage for claiming wealth would be by threat and violence to disrupt processes that could have gone on without them at all.

[bennyboy]

Yeah, probably. Perhaps the only way to maintain the relevance of a species of recently-speciated apes is to knock progress back down to the point where the skills of the normal Joe come into play. If lifting stuff, hitting stuff, eating stuff, and fucking stuff doesn't matter, then people pretty much won't matter.

[Minimalist]

Oh, no.  Not so.  The first five minutes of every local news broadcast is either traffic accidents, someone shooting someone else and/or the cops shooting someone or a fire.  

That was true when you and I were kids. These days car accidents rarely make the local news and if they do, they're almost never the lead story. The only exception is when they happen to have good (i.e. horrific) video of the scene or dashcam/traffic cam footage of the accident actually happening. If they can't get their hands on good video, it will almost never make the broadcast anymore. Unless it was a self-driving car. Statistically speaking, in the last week at least 3 or 4 people lost their lives on the road within 100 miles of wherever you are. How many of those deaths have you seen in the news?

Out here when there is an accident on the freeways they shut it down for hours and create massive traffic jams.  I keep wondering what they are "investigating."  Are they desperate to make sure that no donuts were harmed in the incident?

[vorlon13]

Criminal and civil litigation attorneys are the driver for long accident investigations.

Lawyers will still be working long after we are 100% automated in manufacturing.

[bennyboy]

The only problem that I have with self driving cars is that they will take away a lot of jobs.

As someone who hires and manages truck drivers, I can't wait for the day when my trucks no longer need drivers. Like yourself, I've wondered who be able to afford to shop at a Walmart when that Walmart only needs to employ two or three people in order to keep the store running at peak efficiency. And when it only takes about ten people throughout the supply chain to keep that store stocked instead of the hundreds of people it requires now. 

This sounds great until you realize that pay represents work done, and in such an efficient world, only company owners will be working for any money worth having.

What do we do with the other 6.9 billion people?