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0 pointscondercet8y ago0 comments

"evidence presented to support this is very thin"

Autonomous cars are on the roads today. They're a ways off from serving as reliable truckers or taxis, but that's in our future. We're seeing rapid advancements in machine learning, especially in computer vision and abstract strategy games.

Trucking alone accounts for 5% of the US GDP [1], and employs 1.7 million Americans annually [2]. That's about 1/10 of the total US workforce. Taxi drivers and support staff for trucking are smaller occupations that are also at risk. What happens if all those jobs disappear overnight?

Hopefully the people in those jobs will successfully transition to other careers, as many did after the industrial revolution. But it might not be pretty in the short-term. I don't think it's irrational to be concerned about this.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trucking_industry_in_the_Unite...

2. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes533032.htm

aside: Wikipedia has some nice graphs, but shouldn't be considered reliable. What's the best source of economic and labor data in the US (or other advanced economies), aside from Bureau of Labor Statistics?

0 comments

njarboe8y ago

Only 17 million US workers with a population of 320 million. That can't be right. Maybe 1/100?

condercetOP8y ago

yup, I dropped a 0 there. Should be 1/100.

crdoconnor8y ago

>We're seeing rapid advancements in machine learning, especially in computer vision and abstract strategy games.

This roughly translates to "we've programmed a computer to beat a human at go and trawl your facebook pictures and identify pictures of flowers but have yet to build a robot that will clean your bathroom".

>Autonomous cars are on the roads today. They're a ways off from serving as reliable truckers or taxis, but that's in our future.

I'll become a real and true believer that autonomous cars are the future the minute an executive at an autonomous driving company agrees to shoulder criminal liability for crashes caused by defects in the cars they sell. If I can go to prison for reckless driving, an exec should go to prison because their cars engaged in reckless driving. That's fair, right?

What I have seen currently is a lot of backroom lobbying to try and shift liability in order to open the floodgates to this "brave new world". To me that's sending a clear signal that the executives themselves aren't totally convinced of the safety of their new technology.

Ultimately where the legal liability falls is going to determine how, when and if self driving vehicles become more than just toys, and, ultimately, how many people they will kill.

>What happens if all those jobs disappear overnight?

1) Jobs never disappear overnight.

2) Trucking involves a lot more than just driving.

3) Even if it did happen a 5% increase in employment to counteract "the end of trucking" could be enacted relatively easily by the government simply by removing the fiscal spending brakes. The deflationary impact of trucking being automated (and presumably much cheaper) will presumably counteract the inflationary impact of any increase in govt spending.

4) They can get other jobs? Typists used to be a very common job too. The world didn't end for them when computers came along, did it?

Meanwhile, still patiently waiting for that robot that will clean my bathroom. I mean, if a robot can beat me at go, how hard could it be?

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