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'No Drones or Driverless Trucks', Demands Teamsters Labor Union (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNBC:
No drones or driverless vehicles for delivering packages -- that's one of the major demands from the Teamsters labor union in the big contract negotiation it's undertaking with UPS this week. The union wants to ban UPS from using such new-fangled technology, which the logistics company has been reportedly testing... The current agreement affects 260,000 full and part-time UPS employees and expires in July. "UPS is focused on a contract that provides the flexibility needed to remain highly competitive, given the challenge of an increasingly crowded logistics segment," the company told CNBC.
The Drive notes the smaller carbon footprint of drone deliveries, while adding that "one completely understands and empathizes with the aversion truck drivers have toward this stark, autonomous future.
"If it feels like their jobs are being endangered by the incredible exponential growth in technology, it's because they are."
The Drive notes the smaller carbon footprint of drone deliveries, while adding that "one completely understands and empathizes with the aversion truck drivers have toward this stark, autonomous future.
"If it feels like their jobs are being endangered by the incredible exponential growth in technology, it's because they are."
Good old featherbedding.. Tell me what else is new.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If their contract still protected animal drivers, none of them would have a job.
They built this country.
We should tell them that we will put "no drones" or driverless trucks into their contract as soon as we finish putting the "no horse-less carriage" rule into effect that the stablemen are demanding.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Even if they get their way and UPS doesn't use drones or driver-less trucks, other companies around the world will continue to develop the technology. When a the new technology is ready, they will get everything in place and then layoff every driver all at once. That will be far more devastating to them than if they are have a period of time to actually get new jobs.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It's the fundamental concept of how the economy is supposed to work, if you don't pay anyone!
If you automate all the jobs away, then where, precisely, is the money supposed to come from, that your potential clients would use, to buy your stuff in the first place? In other words: How would you make money in the first place?
Everybody would be fine with full automation, if the wealth that that causes would go to those, who actually worked to generate it. Instead of those, who merely leeched on them, mooching off of society, taking bailouts, causing inflation, stifling the free market by doing everything they can, to prevent their victims and their enemies to gain a lever that would keep it healthy and balanced.
People always teach kids that example with the lemonade stand, where $1 goes around in circles, and you end up with the same $1, making no money.
But that's how the entire economy works in the real world too! (At least the legitimate parts.) It's so much more complex, that it's well obfuscated.
The only way it can be different, is when money is literally made up out of thin air. (Like stock markets, bank loans, abused crypto-currencies, etc) And that's actually still the same, because by doing it, the money itself loses value. So the wealth still doesn't magically appear out of thin air, but comes out of the pockets of everyone who owns some of that money, via inflation.)
Frankly, the union should STFU, collect some money from its members, buy their own driverless trucks and drones, and spread the profits among the members, in return for their investment.
That would be compatible with the philosophies of the most extreme capitalists, libertarians, socialists and communists.
The only ones who would absolutely hate it, would be those who want to keep leeching. Be it the capitalist or the socialist kind.
We need to engage in the unsexy business of building a lot more rail. If something has to move from a port to 800 miles inland, barring it being military equipment that the military deems too sensitive to send by rail (ie things like nuclear weapons), it should be sent by rail most of the way. That is way more cost-effective than fleets of trucks for the same purpose and much more environmentally sound.
I'm actually surprised Musk hasn't hedged his bets on this and offered to have the Boring Company help build small networks of tunnels to make direct routes by rail cheaper and less reliant on eminent domain. (It wouldn't be big business, but it would be a great way to test the tech)
I guarantee you there are not 260,000 engineers doing this.
More likely, it'll be the coordinators who (from a central location) make sure the automated fleets are available where they're needed, when they're needed, and in good repair to function as needed.
With automated transport, the basic challenge of logistics changes from having transportation at a given place to having a large enough pool of transportation in a given area to provide a level of service. Computing services went through the same transition over the last decade, as we've moved from having colocated dedicated servers to cloud-hosted virtualized data centers. The same ops engineers who used to manage racks of servers for one company are now managing racks of servers for the cloud provider, just using different tools and being much more efficient.
In the end, this higher efficiency has led to a huge boom in demand for hosting services, in turn raising the demand for computing infrastructure. It's a perfect example of the old adage "if you build it, they will come". I expect that with automated transport, we'll start seeing huge fleets of delivery vehicles roaming the streets - even to the scale of having multiple delivery vehicles on the same street at the same time - and the workforce that used to drive will then move towards maintaining and managing the vast fleet.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Itâ(TM)s time we fire up the first Soylent Green factory.
Those angry men are more likely to put you in the meat grinder than the opposite.
Those angry old men are rather ignorant and stuck in their ways, much like the societal reward system.
Progress with no benefit to society as a whole is pointless.
Oh, but there IS a point to all of this. Just ask the owners of companies embracing autonomous/AI solutions. Greed is once again getting rewarded by the "employee" who never complains about minimum wage, getting sick, or at risk of creating a sexual harassment issue (that last one adopted for 2018). Believe me, the rich will be rewarded.
Science and technology is supposed to service us, not the other way around.
Most humans are wasting 40 - 60 hours a week doing a job that automation/AI will soon come along and do. The "service" would be to create a utopia where humans can do whatever they want to do in life, not merely accept what they can do, and turn it into a shitty lifetime of servitude.
Science and technology can deliver. The question is can a society hell-bent on greed adapt.
Problem 1: We can't get the economy to grow at a sustainable 3% because we already have 4% unemployment. Without productivity growth or population growth, the economy is not capable of 3% growth long term. The labor is just not available.
Problem 2: Automation at restaurants, grocery store checkouts, and with driverless cars and trucks will allow businesses to do the same work with fewer workers. This huge increase in productivity will put millions of cashiers and drivers out of work.
Each problem is the solution to the other -- unless government steps in and prevents it from happening.
Drones and Driverless Vehicles are going to be the death of the Teamster's Union.
If UPS agrees to the Teamster's demands then UPS will be killed off along with the union as competitors undercut UPS by having lower costs of delivery.
If UPS balks then the Teamster's threat is they'll kill UPS now by striking. That in turn will hasten UPS to adopt drones and driverless vehicles quickening the death of the Teamsters.
Either way the Teamsters lose. They had their time and place. They are no longer needed and are now a parasite on the system. They are like the dinosaur lice that specialized to suck the blood of dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs died off so did those lice.
The only question is can UPS find a path forward that lets them get from here and now to then and there where they will have to go: drones and driverless vehicles.
I like my UPS driver. He's a great guy. But it is a job that is facing extinction. I wish him the best in finding a new and exciting job.
It'll be so nice when AI takes over all contract and civil legal proceedures and 99% of the lawyers are unemployed homeless.
Brave future coming chaps, hold tight!