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Designing and building robots requires labor. So increased demand for robots will drive employment and create many higher paid jobs.
It's just like when farm equipment replaced manual labor. Society benefited. And like when computers replaced typewriters. Improved productivity always benefits society.
Its not a 1-1 replacement, or we wouldnt automate. More importantly is how many people here dont comprehend just how different this is going to become. Its not going to be as gradual in the past, and its going to cover a MASSIVE number of people being replaced.
Even worse as time goes by what we as humans can be better at will rapidly run out. Society would benefit if we were a socialist society. But we're not, this is going to benefit one group only...the people with the capital. Eventually it will swing the other way, but I have to admit I see some grim times til we figure that out.
I have to challenge you on this one, having experience in dispatching and traffic control in both road and rail operation. We have a number of improvements which clearly remove the stress on the operator and improve overall safety, and the trucking industry is "on board" toward several further improvements. And we might one day see the first real progress toward complete "self-driving" vehicles on those major traffic arteries where grades and curvature fall within well-defined limits.
But Google's experimental cars are likewise limited to very tightly-controlled conditions. One intersecting road that doesn't "fit into the pattern", or an outside event not anticipated by the designers, can throw a large "monkey wrench" into the works. That is not the sort of thing that the fans of Oprah, Ellen and Katie, (who've been led to believe that something will be available to drive the kids to soccer practice within a few years) want to hear.
700,000 miles is not trivial.
Google’s self-driving car passes 700,000 accident-free miles, can now avoid cyclists, stop at railroad crossings
You don't have a good grasp on history, labor, and technological innovation. Each technological leap produced quite a bit of negative consequences before reaching an equilibrium.
I never said it didn't. But that's no reason to oppose automation. Using your attitude, we would have banned automobiles because it put blacksmiths out of business.
Its not a 1-1 replacement, or we wouldnt automate. More importantly is how many people here dont comprehend just how different this is going to become. Its not going to be as gradual in the past, and its going to cover a MASSIVE number of people being replaced.
I never said it's a 1 - 1 replacement.
Predicting our future is risky at best and is probably a useless exercise. We don't really know how society will change as automation continues to mature. I think you are making the mistake of linear thinking and projecting trends one dimensional.
When cars replaced wagons, hundreds of thousands of new jobs were created because people found uses of cars that were way beyond the wagons they replaced. Nobody could predict the technical innovation that has occurred over the past 30 years and we cannot predict what will happen over the next 30 years.
I never said it didn't. But that's no reason to oppose automation. Using your attitude, we would have banned automobiles because it put blacksmiths out of business.
LOL. No one can successfully oppose automation. The technical term for people that try to is "speed bump".
Predicting our future is risky at best and is probably a useless exercise. We don't really know how society will change as automation continues to mature. I think you are making the mistake of linear thinking and projecting trends one dimensional.
When cars replaced wagons, hundreds of thousands of new jobs were created because people found uses of cars that were way beyond the wagons they replaced. Nobody could predict the technical innovation that has occurred over the past 30 years and we cannot predict what will happen over the next 30 years.
I hope you are correct. However, I think its different this time. When cars replaced wagons what happened to horses? And I suspect thats the more relevant question. The horses were completely outclassed by cars, just as we will be by Expert systems, then later AI's. And I do believe thats the better comparison.
Expert systems in the 5-10 year time range, AI's within 15 from today. Thats my guess. Although it could be sooner.
And yes...this time its different. This time we are losing in a direct competition like the horses did. Last time for the horses it was "aren't carriages and wagons so much nicer then riding horseback?" This time it was cars. Same for us, last time it was mechanical automation that could replace parts of what we do, this time its everything.
I think thats not a bad comparison. Normally those sorts of comparisons are pretty flawed.
Sorry, but when you factor in the millions of drivers producing hundreds of millions of vehicle-miles, and any number of spontaneous (and unique) situation every day, 700,000 miles is a drop in the bucket -- or maybe a drop in the barrel. I knew veteran truckers who had driven three times that amount, and free of "chargeable" accidents, within their careers alone.
I'm not saying this to belittle Google's effort -- or their motivation; the benefits of a truly self-driving vehicle would be an advance at a par with the development of the computer, for example. And as evidenced by the link to the article below, the freight-transportation industry is quite aware of this:
The evolution of "autonomous" rather than "self-driving" vehicles has been under way since the innovation of antilock brakes in the early Seventies, but the path toward automation to a degree which would free Suzie Suburbanite from driving an aging grandparent to a doctor's appointment is a long ways off -- and that's not a message that can generate more viewers at the tea-time talk shows.
If you took away all the fast food jobs in this country, would the economy collapse? If you have millions and millions of young workers that are essentially unemployable due to little to no experience, the economy would probably not be able to recover.
Hmm...millions of teens and young adults fired. No job, more time on their hands and resentment than money, zero income to support themselves, a bunch of them all in the same boat...what could possibly go wrong???
1. No, getting rid of fast food workers will not crash the economy; they're already only a marginal part of it. It will, however, make those fast food workers destitute and dependent upon government assistance.
2. The notion that these people will all get great educations and become robot engineers or whatever is idiotic. There is a reason why many of them are in fast food full time and not already Harvard graduates; not everyone is cut out to be that kind of a white collar type. Additionally, thanks to automation these days, white collar jobs themselves are not nearly numerous enough to employ all of these fast food workers. Fast food workers are on the bottom rung of the job ladder, and unfortunately they have no real upward mobility and nothing else to fall back on. They are a symptom of the globalization and automation that has taken blue collar jobs from the middle class.
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