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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."
sure sounds more reasonable than what I have been hearing.
;)
Just my 2 cents
the legal framework self driving cars will take time as well the uber death likely slowed things down.
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.
"We have a labor market characterized by churning -- continual job creation and destruction,"
That is OLD SCHOOL THINKING. No longer applicable.
That will no longer be true once AI and automated systems capabilities generally get better than the corresponding human ability.
Example: There's a technology that is better now at detecting certain types of tumours in images than radiologists.
We have to change our analysis of future job prospects, and not just rely on "something else will come up for people to do."
There will be a cross-over point for each type of job when automated system will be better at it and more cost effective than a person.
That will start happening to more and more job categories (or at least their most important tasks) faster and faster, as AI and automation continue their rapid advancement in capability.
Automation and AI are improving fast.
People are not.
Get used to it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.
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I challenge anyone who says they do work to cross the street on a dark, windy, snowy night while self-driving cars are coming at them.
Then there is the liability aspect. Who is responsible when a self-driving car goes awry?
Toast.
Retirees will outnumber workers in 2030. More retirees mean fewer jobs.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
most of the people reading this will still be alive then. For the older set who actually have the time an inclination to vote now's the time to do something about it. If the younger lot can't work your retirement's going to collapse with the rest of the economy. If you let that happen then you won't even be left with dog food.
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One of the companies in the self driving car space I follow news from is Voyage. One of the areas they have a test vehicle in right now is a retirement community.
This is a really great use I think of self-driving car tech, because it gives residents who may have trouble driving as they age a convenient and safe taxi they can use 24x7.
These are public roads but are a good first step as retirement community roads are more laid back than most neighborhoods...
There are a ton of older drivers that self-driving car tech would help get around, and even better it is replacing drivers that are usually among the more dangerous compared to the average driver so even growing pains of self driving car tech still make for a net win overall.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Semi intelligent cars will not be fully autonomous for a long time. But they can be driven remotely. One operator in Mexico could monitor several trucks at the same time while the drive down the freeway. If the computers get confused they call for help and stop if none is forthcoming.
Missile firing drones have been flown remotely for years. A car/truck is harder because reaction times need to be faster. But a computer in the loop can solve that.
That is the future. Outsourcing to cheap labor.
Securing America's Future Energy is a lobbying organization that represents oil companies like Chevron. So this is just junk. Slashdot needs to stop reposting this drivel.
responsibility for their own education 50K a year + the cert treadmill = big loans with small hope of paying them back.
Those displaced by new technologies on average do not recover back to the level they were. They take an economic hit. Similar applies to offshored careers.
Therefore, just because new jobs are created by new technologies or offshoring, that does not mean people don't suffer.
You are whacking one group to benefit another. Imaging robbing $1000 from 100 people each, but giving a different group of 100 people $1200 each. There first 100 are not going to be happy just because the average benefits to the aggregate population have increased. They'll tell you to stick your averages where your aggregates don't shine.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm a coder - and this is the first time I've heard that self-driving cars would be moving into my field!
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Maybe in 2040, there will be no jobs, but in the 2020's driving as a job will be in a steady decline.
This is just like printing over that last several decades. It hasn't gone away, but is a fraction of what it used to be.
Greed is the root of all evil.
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.
This is already "worked out". Manufacturers are responsible for their products. When brakes failed on Toyotas, it was Toyota's problem. When Tesla Autopilot crashed into a truck the same color as the sky, it was Tesla's problem.
Cars that can park themselves, and a kiosk for customers to select various services. Hertz has one of these two items already
how long
Take any of those long cross-country trips you're talking about with a lot of highway miles and you're probably going to come across at least one place where the road is under construction, probably several. Often enough, that's out in the boonies where there isn't a continuous feeder, so there is a detour through the town square - exactly the kinds of situations automated systems can't deal with are going to happen. Drive across several states and very likely part of the journey is going to be through a snowstorm or downpour. Not just on SOME trips, which would be a deal killer, but on MOST cross-country trips you'll run into one or more of these things.
Self driving will be an unreliable novelty until major road improvements are made. A system of cameras/radar fails under too many circumstances. There will have to be road bed sensors marking out the lanes. There will have to be a central control unit that controls traffic flow. There will have to be 5g wireless comm that has very little lag and very high reliability. None of this is happening in under 20 years, and gov't hasn't started the clock yet.
Electric cars will be a drain on the economy. Higher adoption rates will run smack against grid improvements. There will be a need for many more charging stations. Since charging takes hours, we would need probably 10x as many as there are gas stations. Once again, the clock hasn't started on this yet.
Where will the money come from in a sluggish economy with debt out the kazoo at every level? Answer, it won't. Not for decades.
This is not true. You are only responsible if you are NEGLIGENT. Look up the legal meaning of that word.
If your toaster causes a fire, that is not your fault unless you were careless or used it improperly. For example you were using it to light newspapers. Or you knew it was faulty (perhaps it sparked before) and you didn't do anything about it.
There is no way you could be held responsible for a self driving car with no user controls. Unless there was reason to believe you didn't properly maintain it, or you hacked the software, etc...
-That, or when we turn into Mad Max world and have guitar flamethrower cars.
So these are self-drining. And while I agree they won't take my job any time soon - after all, I'm a computer experts of sorts - I know for a fact that the ones shown already have taken ~300 jobs.
As soon as it is economically 10x more feasible to do automated driving - be it little bots or human-transporting "car-like" things it will happen. Even if that requires standardizing street signs and perhaps some guidance system for automated cars. Transport is 70 million jobs globally. At least. The incentive to cut those costs is presuring and it will happen once self-driving cars are feasible. And they are about to become.
I recommend this video for a different take on this issue.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I would argue that the churning labor market idea isn't just obsolete, it's flawed to begin with, hiding what really happened. What they fail to mention is that the people whose jobs were destroyed in previous technological revolutions struggled mightily to gain one of those newly created jobs. Much like how today you can't take an old mill worker and turn them into a AI coder, they couldn't simply take a serf, farmer or craftsman and turn them into a skilled factory worker. In the end, those people were lost, shuffled into slums or revolted in the political upheavals of the 19th century. The problem only "resolved" itself as they died out and their children, who grew up in the new technological age, took on those new jobs.
You're doing inference from stupid. It's like wisdom of the crowds in reverse: round up all the people who've been gloriously wrong (over and over again) into a small pen, and then go opposite George.
News flash: you can't squeeze a correct prediction out of a teapot of stupid people.
The fall of Rome was predicted many times. These predictions were wrong every time—until it actually happened (only some historians dispute that this did ever happen; it kind of depends on how you choose to view Byzantium). Either way, the heyday years of the Roman empire did, indeed, come to an abrupt end (only historians dispute this too: some claim the end arrived in gradual stages).
One of the rationales floating around before the crash of 2008 was "well, the housing market has never gone done, everywhere, all at once." Until it did.
Let's just look at this from the point of view of sampling bias.
Get a large group of people, have them all make predictions about some future bright line, sort those predictions into time sequence.
Here's something that's guaranteed: if you get to the median prediction without it having come true (yet), half of all of the people can be entirely written off as Chicken Littles, while the other half can not (yet) be written off as Chicken Lates. Interesting asymmetry, isn't it?
False positive, false negative; Chicken Little, Chicken Latte (as in, Nero cozied up to an espresso bar while Rome burned).
And here your are trumpeting navigating through the rear-view mirror as some kind of great, refined wisdom.
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Last night I was reading Sapiens (2014) by Yuval Noah Harari. I was really looking forward to this book, but to be honest, halfway into the second chapter, I'm pretty bummed out by his cavalier roll-ups. Such an enormous step down after Sapolsky's Behave (2017).
In any case, Sapiens is nothing but a litany of enduring, world-redefining change.
It's one of the main reasons people tend to predict alarming change Real Soon Now: because that's what history is actually made from. (Only people tend to forget that history is denominated on a log scale, while the future is usually denominated on a linear scale, which goes a long way toward accounting for the tragic surplus on the Chicken Little side of the fence; that, and thrill-seeking eschatology boners.)
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I generally try to root my predictions about the future in the perceptions of people who can successfully translate from a log to a linear scale. Try it sometime. You might discover that No Change Ever is not the Bayesian all-world prior you imagine it to be.
Over the last century or so, the number of borderline unemployable males in Western democracy has gone from about 5% to about 15% due to the relentless inflation in the norms of educational attainment.
But a man could get by without an education, if he had physical competence and a work ethic, because there was always roofing to fall back on.
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Society is already failing to manufacture enough meaningful work to employ industrious, boisterous males who don't finish school.
I suspect we're more likely to address this problem in future by changing the broken educational system (broken for those whom it least serves) than by making the demands of the modern workforce less cognitively arduous.
Self driving will be an unreliable novelty until major road improvements are made.
The self driving will remain an unreliable novelty. We can barely fund the repair work needed bring our worst roads up to current standards. Major improvements to all roads to make them easier for automated vehicles that may or may not be coming? Flying cars will happen first.
If you drive a truck on long hauls over the desert, or in flat areas with decent areas, it's going to be sooner than you realize.
If you drive a truck in regions with marginal roads, bad weather (snow, ice, avalanches, floods, etc), it will be a while.
For examples take a look at the current lineup of trucks sold by PACCAR. More than half are now hybrids or fuel cell/electric, with some degree of self-driving automation.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Let me know when you'll have a cogent reply ready.
Ezekiel 23:20
Let me just send you a case of beer by self-driving beer truck https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and delivery drone so we can drink to that proposition.
Oh look at that, Google Tomorrow (next version of Google Now) already scheduled and ordered that on my behalf.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
They could do it remotely. Which makes the AI much, much simpler.
If you are talking about the big combine harvesters. The cost of the operator is relatively small, and you do not want anything to go wrong with that million dollar machine.
But smaller scale things like a strawberry picker have much more potential. Labor is a high proportion of the cost there. Many more jobs to replace for the given amount of research expenditure.
Very well said.
No manufacturer seems prepared to treat software failure and mechanical failure as the same thing; even though with the on vent of self-driving, we are resting most of the passenger's safety on the ability for software to correctly interpret any situation. Feel free to cite references if you find any evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, Tesla has carefully structured their liability such that they can always blame the driver. Every accident by autopilot has been followed by comments to the effect of, "the driver must always pay attention".
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.