They would side against the unemployment but be for the cheaper prices it produces and ultimately vote with their wallets. Same way people decry the working conditions in Apple's factories but buy the products made in those factories anyways. This is not a SV bubble, it's just the facts of human nature. No one (or a tiny fraction) pays more for something when an identical service is available for cheaper.
What’s to say it would ever lead to lower prices and not simply higher executive pay, stock buybacks etc? That certainly seems to be far more the order of the day.
It's possible but that seems to be a fully general argument against ever making things more efficient? Why bother with any innovation at all if the profits are eaten by execs?
For lowering prices vs. eating the profits, I think a bit of both happens in most industries. There are plenty of examples where better tech constantly leads to lower prices - basically most PC hardware like SSDs today. IMO these kinds of things never get media attention but yeah prices do get lower in many areas. The dynamics of whether they extract profits or pass on savings are complex and vary over time depending on competition etc. but over the long term its hard to argue that some industry will get more efficient but no one else will start competing with the same tech to bring prices down. For self driving cars we have 2-3 players in the field too which is a good sign.
Overall this argument has been rehashed for different technologies many times. Horse drivers vs. cars, scribes vs. typewriters blah blah. Its difficult to argue we would have been better off today by protecting jobs over letting the technology help everyone eventually. Personally i think this transition will be rough though, a lot of people including programmers are going to lose their jobs and we might have years of pain ahead before things stabilize. But in the long term yeah its better than just hiding AI in a box and pretending like nothing happened.
I’m not referring to the argument in the abstract, but the specific case of making unemployed 3.5 million truck drivers and the cost savings getting passed onto consumers in the form of lower-priced goods. If this was a realistic scenario (setting aside that the driverless tech is not there) then why are the cost savings from exploiting truck drivers by making them all over-worked, independent contractors being passed on to consumers now? Instead, what we have is unrestrained corporate greed, with companies jacking up the price of goods to obscene levels and keeping the profits for themselves.
I agree grocery prices have been nuts recently. Canada recently completed a study on high prices that concluded there's not enough competition in the market [1]. They made some recommendations but nothing will be done lol..
My problem is that people are increasingly blaming technology for the failures of the government. Self driving trucks SHOULD make things cheaper. Having a robot do things that people used to do SHOULD help us all in the long run the same way washing machines do.
But when it doesn't, people have such low expectations of the government that they don't even consider that option. Like are we supposed to just stop all scientific and technological progress that could endanger jobs now, just freeze society in the state its at now?
The way I see it we need both levers, science and government to make progress. Lately the sentiment is we should burn down the half that works because the other half doesn't work. I think that's the wrong approach.
