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Self-Driving Cars Likely Won't Steal Your Job (Until 2040) (wired.com)
The self-driving robots are coming to transform your job. Kind of. Also, very slowly. From a report: That's the not-quite-exclamatory upshot of a new report from the Washington, DC-based Securing America's Future Energy. The group advocates for a countrywide pivot away from oil dependency, one it hopes will be aided by the speedy adoption of electric, self-driving vehicles. So it commissioned a wide-ranging study by a phalanx of labor economists to discover how that could happen, and whether America might transform into a Mad Max-like desert hell along the way. The news, mostly, is good. For one, self-driving vehicles probably won't wreck the labor market to the point where gig economy workers are hired out as mobile blood bags.
In fact, they'll eventually feed the economy, accruing an estimated $800 billion in annual benefits by 2050, a number mostly in line with previous researchers' projections. Two, robo-cars won't disappear the jobs all at once. "We have a labor market characterized by churning -- continual job creation and destruction," says Erica Groshen, a visiting labor economist at Cornell University and former Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who worked on the report. "The challenge is to make the transition as smooth as possible."
In fact, they'll eventually feed the economy, accruing an estimated $800 billion in annual benefits by 2050, a number mostly in line with previous researchers' projections. Two, robo-cars won't disappear the jobs all at once. "We have a labor market characterized by churning -- continual job creation and destruction," says Erica Groshen, a visiting labor economist at Cornell University and former Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who worked on the report. "The challenge is to make the transition as smooth as possible."
There is a lot of potential and not just on the road. Out here on the farm and in the forests self-driving tractors, skidders, buncher grabbers, conveyers, wagons and delivery vehicles have a lot of potential. They are levers that amplify us. Just as it is easier to hammer in a nail with a hammer than your hand it is easier to move round bales of hay with a tractor than by hand. Self driving tractors would let me instruct them to put out hay to our pastured pigs in the winter (hay replaces fresh pasture) rather than my having to drive the tractor. Then I am freed up for other tasks.
Uber or not, it's going to take a long time to work out who takes responsibility when something bad happens and there is no steering wheel. You can't hold a person responsible for an accident when they are always just a passenger and never a driver. It's their property and they should cover it against theft and damage by vandalism and other unfortunate events. But someone else has decided how that vehicle will behave in every possible situation, so a person should not insure for what it does.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.