> This is all just more puff about the massive campaign pushing for autonomous vehicles. Any publicity is good publicity.
Certainly cynical, but not necessarily a wrong interpretation.
> But let's not pretend we're being given a choice about this driverless car thing.
We will not have a choice on whether automation cost are much cheaper than human driving, indeed — but we have two choices:
- should we tax automation? if yes, should it be so that humans remain cheaper (probably a terrible idea) or enough to have enough to help recently out-of-work workers to re-train?
- what should do with recently out-of-work workers? In the case of drivers, that is less essential than it would seem, as many are ageing and retirement is a possible option. (Hence my intuition that Unions are not that worried, and this could be puff for automation.) However, there are two generations who have been trained for a labor-intensive world that will need re-training. What and how we handle that is important, and it is our choice.
Fixing robots, build or design custom furniture, something related to space-exploration?
I work for Deliveroo (an equivalent of DoorDash/Seemless/UberEats) and our riders need a fairly new set of skills — not unlike courier — that are not yet really doable by a drone. Training those riders; being a rider and figuring out which properties drones should have to take some of the workload… all those are skills that are not directly technical, but are empowered by automation.
Certainly cynical, but not necessarily a wrong interpretation.
> But let's not pretend we're being given a choice about this driverless car thing.
We will not have a choice on whether automation cost are much cheaper than human driving, indeed — but we have two choices:
- should we tax automation? if yes, should it be so that humans remain cheaper (probably a terrible idea) or enough to have enough to help recently out-of-work workers to re-train?
- what should do with recently out-of-work workers? In the case of drivers, that is less essential than it would seem, as many are ageing and retirement is a possible option. (Hence my intuition that Unions are not that worried, and this could be puff for automation.) However, there are two generations who have been trained for a labor-intensive world that will need re-training. What and how we handle that is important, and it is our choice.