With the amount of profit surrounding cancer treatments
So, how much profit is there in cancer treatments? Articles I found trying to google the subject spent a lot of time conflating "cost to patient (or insurance company)" with "profits" (no, income is not the same as profit, even if you don't like the people you're giving money to), without bothering to provide any numbers for actual, you know, profits....
The numbers are a bit dated (2014), but greed has been brought into question for years when it comes to the Cancer Industrial Complex. Here's an interesting read on it:
We've poured billions into cancer research, and what do we have to show for it? 1 in 20 people got cancer a century ago. Now it's 1 in 3, and Greed will never allow a cure.
...1/8-inch jacks have been the only standard for these things for many decades while 1/4-inch has been standard for headphones on hi-fi decks for longer than that. There is no need to reinvent this wheel.
Yes there is a need, and it's summarized in one word; Profits.
Why have a standard connector when you can charge every customer $29.95 for an adapter dongle.
Vote with your wallet against this crap.
Please. This concept died long ago. If it takes even the slightest bit of extra effort, the average consumer won't do it. They take whatever the hell the vendor throws at them and doesn't say a damn word. Consumers are lazy and they don't care to even try and fight for features anymore. And vendors know it, hence the "courage" that has become infectious.
With the amount of profit surrounding cancer treatments, this tends to be a perfect weapon for corrupt business practices. I wouldn't be surprised if we magically start detecting cancer far more than the average after this test becomes part of a routine annual physical.
Take a good hard look at cancer drug revenue patterns over the last five years. Take a look at the mark-ups, and the out-of-pocket costs. It's fucking obscene.
You want to detect and cure the real disease? Cure the strains of greed that bring forth corruption.
You’d be stupid for buying a BMW anyway. Nothing wrong with a luxury car, but “German Engineering” has an abysmal record of reliability and high maintenance. BMW knows they can stick it to the suckers.
I really don't understand where BMW is going with this move. It's really got to piss off their car buyers, or they'll just do what I used to do before CarPlay - just put the phone on a mount, and use it directly with voice commands and the occasional tap. Which will result in more crashes, I'm sure.
It's going to piss off the 1% of potential customers. The other 99% don't give a shit. They're already being ripped off buying an overpriced car, $80/year isn't shit to the average BMW owner. BMW knows this, which is why they're doing it.
A real dick move by BMW.
That dick move is being done everywhere. You'll soon be paying a monthly subscription model for smart TV, iFridge, e-Oven, and smart car. You won't own any software running on the gutted phablet-puter of the future. Everything will run in the cloud, and you'll pay the SaaS mafia to access it.
The concept of one-time fee and ownership, will soon be extinct, all because consumers don't give a shit enough to care to save it.
With the advent of GPS and advancements in ground-based technology able to offer redundancy and higher accuracy, is there a reason we're still this concerned about maintaining a naming schema based on compass readings? Are there that many aircraft still in use today that use nothing but a compass for navigation?
This is kind of like making sure every new car sold comes with a paper map, and every new house comes with a printed copy of the Yellow Pages.
Capitalism isn't a "crisis" to solve for those profiting the most from it. There's a reason oil companies hold a metric fuckton of patents for alternative fuel tech that would create competition and reduce their profits.
Suppression patents is a dangerous game to play. A patent only last 17 years - and it is public in all that time. So you can read up on existing patents, and use whats left of those 17 years to prepare products. Then you start selling the day the patent expires.
Of course, if you're in China selling to non-westerners, you don't have to wait the 17 years.
The largest oil companies in the US earn over $500 billion in annual revenue combined. If they hold patents that provided or secured just 5% of that revenue, that's over $400 billion in revenue generated from suppressing the competition.
Dangerous? No, more like highly profitable. And besides, what CEO in any industry gives a shit what happens 17 years from now? They will have jumped and pulled their golden parachute long before then.
Tell me again how the hell autonomous solutions are worth it from a business perspective?
Not the OP, but thought I'd share a different perspective on this. Putting aside, for the moment, your cost estimates for autonomous vehicles (I'll come back to that), let's look at it from the other side. A $10/hour wage is going to cost the employer somewhere between $14-20/per hour by the time you factor in taxes, insurance (worker's comp and unemployment, I believe, are mandatory throughout the U.S., and as you mentioned, liability insurance), plus the additional fees paid to drivers for their gas/mileage/maintenance, etc.... I may be low-balling a bit, but let's call it $16/hour. And the dominoes nearby whose hours I looked at says they're open from 10:30am to 1am daily, which seems fairly typical -- 14.5 hours per day, 7 days a week comes to 5278 hours per year, but if we consider some holidays and early closing days, let's round it down to 5100. With our $16/hour number, that's $81,600 in costs avoided per year. For having one vehicle, available any time the location is open.
Now, as for your estimates. Non-fuel costs (tires, oil, preventative maintenance) for fleet vehicles tend to run well under $100/per month even for very high mileage vehicles, but let's call it $100 since small business owners may not have all the advantages of a large fleet operation. Now, if we assume a high utilization rate of 50% (driving time) and a high average speed of 20mph, that gives us about 51000 miles per year. At 25mpg (probably on the low side), that's 2040 gallons of gas. At the current national average of $2.528, that's $5157.12 in fuel costs, or $6357.12 when combined with maintenance. Even if that's off by 100%, and the vehicle cost is $30K or more, compared to the $81K driver cost, it's still a big savings in the first year. Other considerations that might offer less obvious advantages include tax treatment of the expenditures (capital and operating expenses vs. payroll) and depreciation.
Of course, that's the best case scenario, where we're comparing the maximum cost for having one driver available during all open hours. But it's obviously not a binary choice, in which a location has to have all autonomous vehicle or all human employee drivers. We won't even get into the discussion of whether the vehicle has to be a "car" in the normal sense, since it only has to carry food, not passengers.
Thank you for taking the time to break this down. I realized that my calculations for maintenance were a bit off, and there is the matter of liability insurance for running a fleet of autonomous vehicles, but I can see the potential savings here. Even if it were merely a 10% reduction in costs to the business, the reliability factor would also probably justify it.
I suppose now the larger question becomes a matter of tax burden; what will be the cost to a business that chooses autonomous solutions over giving humans jobs in order to fund UBI? After we deploy the Driveinator 1000, eCashier, iWaitress, and the Burgertron, there's going to be a lot of young adults out there who are unemployable. If you think back to what jobs people do today in order to fund higher education, this push to get rid of all those "lowly" positions tends to start removing the bottom half of the rungs on the Ladder of Success, making it rather impossible for anyone to climb.
If course, once we have good-enough AI, it will be targeting highly educated and skilled positions as well, so the justification for higher learning begins to erode.
It will be interesting to see how our economy and future survives and thrives with these "cheap" solutions. Greed tends to be short-sighted, and rarely cares about that condition.
The software works for free 24 hours a day, 7 times a week, doesn't need sick days, vacation, maternity leave nor does it want a pension when it ill be replaced by a much better AI version.
137 variables within an algorithm has been running untouched for twenty years now. Had this study not taken place, it would have gone untouched for another twenty years, regardless of AI advancement, because everyone would be sitting back just assuming that it's doing a "good" job.
The most valuable question in the world is Why. Repeat it as many times as necessary until you get stupid people to stop saying "Because we've always done it this way."
Actually, they are cheap. Most cars already have power steering and braking, so no new actuators are needed. Just some cameras and some software. Software has a high NRE, but near zero marginal cost.
5 megapixel cameras cost less than $5 each. Beginning on 1/1/2018, rear facing cameras are mandatory on all new cars, so only the front and side/oblique cameras are an additional expense.
Lidar is expensive (~ $5000 per car) but it isn't necessary. Waymo uses it, but Tesla does not. The cost will likely drop a lot with mass production.
Self driving capability will add between 0% and 10% to the cost of a car.
Let's break this down a bit further to find the justification here:
Cost of each autonomous car: $25K (assuming your estimates only increasing the cost slightly) x number of cars (5) per location: $125K
Annual vehicle costs (maintenance, fuel/electricity, etc.): this varies depending on type of car (EV vs. IC), but I'd estimate $15 - 25K for each. These vehicles will be driven damn near every single day in stop-and-go city traffic. Total annual vehicle costs: $75 - $125K
Now, let's not forget about the inevitable; when an autonomous car screws up and causes an accident. There is no driver behind the wheel, just a rich corporation who owns an asset that harmed or killed someone. Liability insurance good enough to insulate the corporation: $10 - 25K per year (rough estimate, this could be far more, all depends on how shitty rush-to-market autonomous solutions prove to be)
Total annual cost: upwards of $275K per year.
Now, let's look at the traditional alternative; hiring a handful of human drivers at $10/hour who own and maintain their own car, pay for their own gas, and carry their own commercial insurance rider.
Tell me again how the hell autonomous solutions are worth it from a business perspective?
It's funny that this kind of energy couldn't solve America's energy crisis and give you vastly superior weaponry on battlefield. So either the people in charge are scientifically ignorant, totally irrational, or outright crazy (on a supertrumpian level) to willingly cripple their own country by not using such a power source to make the US economically unbeatable.
Capitalism isn't a "crisis" to solve for those profiting the most from it. There's a reason oil companies hold a metric fuckton of patents for alternative fuel tech that would create competition and reduce their profits. Greed will always ensure strategic suppression is a preferred weapon.
Anyway who cares - most people will get a new phone. This is just noise to sue large corporations so lawyers can get cash.
Most people don't have a damn clue what "meltdown" or "spectre" is, nor do they care. People will get a new phone only if they need a new phone for reasons other than having a vulnerable device. Security is about the last priority when it comes to phone hardware replacement.
Best game in America now is using the court system to grab cash. Shoulda been a lawyer instead of an engineer.
Not gonna argue with you there. The real problem with litigation running rampant through our legal system is the end result; a good chunk of our paycheck ends up going towards various flavors of this shit we call "insurance", and none of it is getting any cheaper.
Let's see how the economy defines "progress" when employing a human is the target of obsolescence.
There is a lot of work where we didn't make the employees more efficient, we replaced them entirely. And replacing all work... I do automate things at work. And every time there's a new demand/wish for us to deliver more in like ten different directions. Once upon a time we got the data on floppy discs and people were happy to get a tally. Then they wanted reports. Then they wanted cubes they could slice and dice. Then they wanted correlations and projections and metrics. Then they wanted big data and data mining. And I'm not sure what they'll want next but I'm sure they'll want something.
They'll want something alright; and once the technology exists to get that something exponentially faster and cheaper than any human can deliver, they'll replace the human worker.
A solution with machine precision that works 24 hours a day, never gets sick, and never needs time off? Good luck competing against that. Greed never goes out of style.
And robots beats sweatshops. I mean as long as you got people employing people you need some of them to be poor to have cheap labor. I don't want a bunch of kids with sewing machines making my clothes - at least I'm lucky enough to not be those kids - I want them to do something more productive. But who's left holding the bag if we don't have robots? Without tractors we need people to get back in the fields with shovels. If we're short on work, just admit that what they'd be doing is busywork. But so far I have pretty long list of real work they could pick up...
I agree that some jobs need robotic solutions to eliminate situations that create sweat shops. Unfortunately that "pretty long" list gets rather short when you realize not everyone is mentally or physically cut out for even half of the "real" work left over. I'm not trying to be derogatory here, but don't overlook the more obvious reason some people stay in a rather simple job for life. And remember Greed. Employers don't like paying for "busywork". They like paying for necessary work.
Let's see how the economy defines "progress" when employing a human is the target of obsolescence.
SIgh... nobody seems to comprehend that this is not the case. The target of obsolescence is human JOBS and I [for one] see no reason that people need to be employed when machine productivity is high enough to provide a high-quality lifestyle for everyone.
Sigh...you seem to have forgotten what makes the capitalistic world go 'round. Care to explain exactly how our economy survives and thrives when it is only the automation overlords receiving a paycheck? All the efficiency in the world becomes rather pointless without a massive change in the reward system, which tackling that issue is far from priority.
And please don't try and regurgitate the concept of UBI being our financial savior. As much as we want to believe that will be our utopia, We can't get the 1% to pay their fair share of taxes now, so you can rest assured that those who fund UBI will lobby to ensure it becomes nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. We'll see how the definition of "high-quality" changes when billions live in the Global Welfare State. You think there's a global imbalance of wealth and power now? Look into a future where a dozen trillionaires control the entire planet.
This will happen because we will never find a cure for the disease of obscene greed.
I think part of the problem is that investing in a business is supposed to be risky, but it seems that investors forget this and then put pressure on the business to omit any kind of risk. This is turn causes things like not being willing to train people because they might leave, and people get less interested in the IT industry as a whole. It's always the same fucking race to the bottom when it comes to big money.
Not investing in employees isn't a gamble; it's a death sentence.
If any company fails to understand that basic concept and make wise decisions regarding their most valuable asset, then fuck 'em. They deserve what they get.
Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its “Bang” mug, notes Colin White in his book Strategic Management, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet (not to mention in a customer’s cupboard). After the changes, it was possible to fit 2,204 mugs on a pallet, rather than the original 864, which created a 60 percent reduction in shipping costs.
Where you might need 5 truckers to ship as many mugs as sold in a fortnight, now you can do it with 2 truckers. Never mind that the wooden pallet eliminated 90% of the labor (jobs) associated with shipping an amount of goods in the first place.
It still takes some labor to produce the pallets--lumbering, milling, assembling, and even shipping--and that's much less labor than what you eliminate from the shipping process.
IKEA changing mugs did not cause a global impact in the job force. Even if 50% of the lumber industry were impacted today, that represents 150,000 jobs. That's not even close to what AI and automation is looking to eliminate.
The jobs aren't going away; things are getting cheaper, we can buy more, and we'll end up with the same number of jobs and more stuff.
You can do all this for now. Going forward, automation will continue to march forward and consume jobs that will not be replaced. Automation is targeting the transportation industry. Imagine if 20 - 30 years from now the job of human driver no longer existed. Millions of jobs disappear. And that's but one industry automation is targeting. Automation is working in parallel across many industries, making that impact considerably larger.
I favor recycling some of that new productivity into time by lowering the definition of full-time working hours, though.
Certainly a 20-hour workweek being considered full time would benefit humanity. We would actually learn to enjoy life, as a work/life balance becomes far more reasonable. Unfortunately, this will still not be enough to alleviate the pending impact of automation and AI driving the concept of human employment into extinction. UBI won't be a viable answer either unless you are accepting to an income and lifestyle of welfare, which is what UBI will ultimately pay. Without income, the economy collapses into a shadow of its former self.
What happened was companies would spend time and money training someone only to have that person leave and go work elsewhere.
That's what happens when you hire managers too fucking stupid to understand the concept of contractually securing an employee for a reasonable amount of time after an investment is made.
Obviously it's cheaper for a company to be afforded the flexibility of laying off IT staff any time they want. Can't have it both ways, so companies should stop bitching unless they're willing to secure their investment, which provides a benefit for all parties involved.
Sorry, but this has become an invalid response, because the past does not easily apply to the future.
We're not just targeting lowly repetitive jobs with automation. We're also targeting highly skilled and educated jobs. You won't be able to tell someone to simply go get an education in the future. Even the justification of higher education will start to become weaker and weaker as automation and good-enough AI take hold.
Let's see how the economy defines "progress" when employing a human is the target of obsolescence.
"I think there is going to be a huge industry, probably mostly offshore, in the monitoring of devices in general, whether they're health devices that individuals wear or monitoring pacemakers or whatever it might be."
Let's not try and paint the illusion that this is some massive job creator. There will probably be ten jobs replaced by automation for every one job added to the automation monitoring.
A huge industry is being replaced by something more the size of a cottage industry.
Pop music is not created anymore. It is manufactured, based on a known recipe of repetitive beats, a breathy oversexualized, Autotuned voice track crooned by a pop star that is valued more for their looks than their talent.
Labels don't employ singers or artists anymore. They employ entertainers, because a good portion of revenue comes from touring, where only the best lip-syncing dancers fill sold-out stadiums and pretend to belt out their most popular tracks for two hours. The Loudness Wars confirmed that the quality of the recording no longer mattered; it merely needed to be loud enough for radio airplay.
What is sad is finding Profit always being the #1 priority, which is why pop music is manufactured to fit into a proven revenue model. The fact that it's become simpler and more repetitive tends to show how lazy you can be to entertain the simple masses. Johnny Crooner and his iPad "band" can probably crank out a Top 10 hit in less than an hour these days, and rip off (a.k.a. "sample") a dozen hit songs doing it.
Hell, even the POTUS uses Twitter to get his messages-on-fire out to the masses. Love it or hate it, social media has become the de facto standard to communicate to the masses, so we might as well modify our emergency broadcast systems to accept this fact.
I have seen exactly zero restaurants and businesses that have replaced their televisions with Twitter feeds.
I have seen exactly zero emergency broadcast systems that do not also use some form of social media or cellular broadcast. Reverse 911 systems had to be modified to include cell phones because of the death of the landline phone. Almost every major news outlet now has a live stream channel on YouTube, and an app on a smartphone.
And yeah, our business has a television hanging on the wall. It's full of reporters who scrape social media to report the news. People still watching it will say "did you heard abou...", and the younger generation responds with "yup, already heard about it. Hit social media hours ago."
Not saying television isn't still a communication tool. It's simply not the most effective or timely tool anymore.
Seriously, contact all the major TV and radio stations in the area first. The expectation that everyone should get critical information from "social" media is a joke.
Contact all major TV and radio stations? The GenY/Z'er is still wondering what the fuck a radio is, and they cut the TV and cable cord long ago. They consume all of their "news" via Social Media and streaming now. You got something to say, it better be in an Insta-Netflix-Tweet format. The joke is assuming the younger generation knows about ancient tools of communication.
Hell, even the POTUS uses Twitter to get his messages-on-fire out to the masses. Love it or hate it, social media has become the de facto standard to communicate to the masses, so we might as well modify our emergency broadcast systems to accept this fact.
"In general, we should strive to keep humans involved in the lethal force decision-making process as much as is feasible. What exactly that looks like in practice, I honestly don't know."
So, you tell me don't fear something, and then the expert says this statement.
Gee, I feel so much better that we have no idea how to do anything about the pending robopocalypse other than to wag our finger at the evil in the world and say "Remember to play nice and be honest and fair when trying to kill each other."
The prankster certainly had a part in this and earned his punishment, but he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger and ended an innocent mans life.
Culpability isn't a limited resource. The swatter is 100% responsible for calling a heavily armed force in and pretending a live-and-death situation, thus being fully responsible for an outcome that will occasionally occur in this situation. If you pull the trigger on someone with a single bullet somewhere in six chambers and the gun does kill him, of course you are not just 16% responsible for his death.
That does not change that the policeman is 100% responsible for not being up to the requirements of this situation. There must be consequences for both, but the fault of the respective other does not lessen each of the involved person's blame in any manner.
Your argument about culpability tends to fall flat when we have a legal system that has added aiding, abetting, and accessory as methods of differentiation that also tend to influence punishment. Another example of how hollow that can be is looking at the lack of charges against a bartender who aided the patron who ends up taking a life after driving drunk.
Slashdot Mirror
So, how much profit is there in cancer treatments? Articles I found trying to google the subject spent a lot of time conflating "cost to patient (or insurance company)" with "profits" (no, income is not the same as profit, even if you don't like the people you're giving money to), without bothering to provide any numbers for actual, you know, profits....
The numbers are a bit dated (2014), but greed has been brought into question for years when it comes to the Cancer Industrial Complex. Here's an interesting read on it:
http://healthimpactnews.com/20...
We've poured billions into cancer research, and what do we have to show for it? 1 in 20 people got cancer a century ago. Now it's 1 in 3, and Greed will never allow a cure.
...1/8-inch jacks have been the only standard for these things for many decades while 1/4-inch has been standard for headphones on hi-fi decks for longer than that. There is no need to reinvent this wheel.
Yes there is a need, and it's summarized in one word; Profits.
Why have a standard connector when you can charge every customer $29.95 for an adapter dongle.
Vote with your wallet against this crap.
Please. This concept died long ago. If it takes even the slightest bit of extra effort, the average consumer won't do it. They take whatever the hell the vendor throws at them and doesn't say a damn word. Consumers are lazy and they don't care to even try and fight for features anymore. And vendors know it, hence the "courage" that has become infectious.
With the amount of profit surrounding cancer treatments, this tends to be a perfect weapon for corrupt business practices. I wouldn't be surprised if we magically start detecting cancer far more than the average after this test becomes part of a routine annual physical.
Take a good hard look at cancer drug revenue patterns over the last five years. Take a look at the mark-ups, and the out-of-pocket costs. It's fucking obscene.
You want to detect and cure the real disease? Cure the strains of greed that bring forth corruption.
You’d be stupid for buying a BMW anyway. Nothing wrong with a luxury car, but “German Engineering” has an abysmal record of reliability and high maintenance. BMW knows they can stick it to the suckers.
I really don't understand where BMW is going with this move. It's really got to piss off their car buyers, or they'll just do what I used to do before CarPlay - just put the phone on a mount, and use it directly with voice commands and the occasional tap. Which will result in more crashes, I'm sure.
It's going to piss off the 1% of potential customers. The other 99% don't give a shit. They're already being ripped off buying an overpriced car, $80/year isn't shit to the average BMW owner. BMW knows this, which is why they're doing it.
A real dick move by BMW.
That dick move is being done everywhere. You'll soon be paying a monthly subscription model for smart TV, iFridge, e-Oven, and smart car. You won't own any software running on the gutted phablet-puter of the future. Everything will run in the cloud, and you'll pay the SaaS mafia to access it.
The concept of one-time fee and ownership, will soon be extinct, all because consumers don't give a shit enough to care to save it.
With the advent of GPS and advancements in ground-based technology able to offer redundancy and higher accuracy, is there a reason we're still this concerned about maintaining a naming schema based on compass readings? Are there that many aircraft still in use today that use nothing but a compass for navigation?
This is kind of like making sure every new car sold comes with a paper map, and every new house comes with a printed copy of the Yellow Pages.
Blue meth is so 5 years ago. When i get the printer, my meth is going to be red. Yeah, red meth is the future. Blue is for people living in the past.
Red? Damn are you out of touch.
According to the Starbucks generation, your meth fucking better be organic, gluten free, unicorn colored, and taste like pumpkin spice.
Capitalism isn't a "crisis" to solve for those profiting the most from it. There's a reason oil companies hold a metric fuckton of patents for alternative fuel tech that would create competition and reduce their profits.
Suppression patents is a dangerous game to play. A patent only last 17 years - and it is public in all that time. So you can read up on existing patents, and use whats left of those 17 years to prepare products. Then you start selling the day the patent expires.
Of course, if you're in China selling to non-westerners, you don't have to wait the 17 years.
The largest oil companies in the US earn over $500 billion in annual revenue combined. If they hold patents that provided or secured just 5% of that revenue, that's over $400 billion in revenue generated from suppressing the competition.
Dangerous? No, more like highly profitable. And besides, what CEO in any industry gives a shit what happens 17 years from now? They will have jumped and pulled their golden parachute long before then.
Tell me again how the hell autonomous solutions are worth it from a business perspective?
Not the OP, but thought I'd share a different perspective on this. Putting aside, for the moment, your cost estimates for autonomous vehicles (I'll come back to that), let's look at it from the other side. A $10/hour wage is going to cost the employer somewhere between $14-20/per hour by the time you factor in taxes, insurance (worker's comp and unemployment, I believe, are mandatory throughout the U.S., and as you mentioned, liability insurance), plus the additional fees paid to drivers for their gas/mileage/maintenance, etc.... I may be low-balling a bit, but let's call it $16/hour. And the dominoes nearby whose hours I looked at says they're open from 10:30am to 1am daily, which seems fairly typical -- 14.5 hours per day, 7 days a week comes to 5278 hours per year, but if we consider some holidays and early closing days, let's round it down to 5100. With our $16/hour number, that's $81,600 in costs avoided per year. For having one vehicle, available any time the location is open.
Now, as for your estimates. Non-fuel costs (tires, oil, preventative maintenance) for fleet vehicles tend to run well under $100/per month even for very high mileage vehicles, but let's call it $100 since small business owners may not have all the advantages of a large fleet operation. Now, if we assume a high utilization rate of 50% (driving time) and a high average speed of 20mph, that gives us about 51000 miles per year. At 25mpg (probably on the low side), that's 2040 gallons of gas. At the current national average of $2.528, that's $5157.12 in fuel costs, or $6357.12 when combined with maintenance. Even if that's off by 100%, and the vehicle cost is $30K or more, compared to the $81K driver cost, it's still a big savings in the first year. Other considerations that might offer less obvious advantages include tax treatment of the expenditures (capital and operating expenses vs. payroll) and depreciation.
Of course, that's the best case scenario, where we're comparing the maximum cost for having one driver available during all open hours. But it's obviously not a binary choice, in which a location has to have all autonomous vehicle or all human employee drivers. We won't even get into the discussion of whether the vehicle has to be a "car" in the normal sense, since it only has to carry food, not passengers.
Thank you for taking the time to break this down. I realized that my calculations for maintenance were a bit off, and there is the matter of liability insurance for running a fleet of autonomous vehicles, but I can see the potential savings here. Even if it were merely a 10% reduction in costs to the business, the reliability factor would also probably justify it.
I suppose now the larger question becomes a matter of tax burden; what will be the cost to a business that chooses autonomous solutions over giving humans jobs in order to fund UBI? After we deploy the Driveinator 1000, eCashier, iWaitress, and the Burgertron, there's going to be a lot of young adults out there who are unemployable. If you think back to what jobs people do today in order to fund higher education, this push to get rid of all those "lowly" positions tends to start removing the bottom half of the rungs on the Ladder of Success, making it rather impossible for anyone to climb.
If course, once we have good-enough AI, it will be targeting highly educated and skilled positions as well, so the justification for higher learning begins to erode.
It will be interesting to see how our economy and future survives and thrives with these "cheap" solutions. Greed tends to be short-sighted, and rarely cares about that condition.
The software works for free 24 hours a day, 7 times a week, doesn't need sick days, vacation, maternity leave nor does it want a pension when it ill be replaced by a much better AI version.
137 variables within an algorithm has been running untouched for twenty years now. Had this study not taken place, it would have gone untouched for another twenty years, regardless of AI advancement, because everyone would be sitting back just assuming that it's doing a "good" job.
The most valuable question in the world is Why. Repeat it as many times as necessary until you get stupid people to stop saying "Because we've always done it this way."
Those robots are not cheap to buy or maintain.
Actually, they are cheap. Most cars already have power steering and braking, so no new actuators are needed. Just some cameras and some software. Software has a high NRE, but near zero marginal cost.
5 megapixel cameras cost less than $5 each. Beginning on 1/1/2018, rear facing cameras are mandatory on all new cars, so only the front and side/oblique cameras are an additional expense.
Lidar is expensive (~ $5000 per car) but it isn't necessary. Waymo uses it, but Tesla does not. The cost will likely drop a lot with mass production.
Self driving capability will add between 0% and 10% to the cost of a car.
Let's break this down a bit further to find the justification here:
Cost of each autonomous car: $25K (assuming your estimates only increasing the cost slightly) x number of cars (5) per location: $125K
Annual vehicle costs (maintenance, fuel/electricity, etc.): this varies depending on type of car (EV vs. IC), but I'd estimate $15 - 25K for each. These vehicles will be driven damn near every single day in stop-and-go city traffic. Total annual vehicle costs: $75 - $125K
Now, let's not forget about the inevitable; when an autonomous car screws up and causes an accident. There is no driver behind the wheel, just a rich corporation who owns an asset that harmed or killed someone. Liability insurance good enough to insulate the corporation: $10 - 25K per year (rough estimate, this could be far more, all depends on how shitty rush-to-market autonomous solutions prove to be)
Total annual cost: upwards of $275K per year.
Now, let's look at the traditional alternative; hiring a handful of human drivers at $10/hour who own and maintain their own car, pay for their own gas, and carry their own commercial insurance rider.
Tell me again how the hell autonomous solutions are worth it from a business perspective?
97% speed-of-light capable spacecraft.
It's funny that this kind of energy couldn't solve America's energy crisis and give you vastly superior weaponry on battlefield. So either the people in charge are scientifically ignorant, totally irrational, or outright crazy (on a supertrumpian level) to willingly cripple their own country by not using such a power source to make the US economically unbeatable.
Capitalism isn't a "crisis" to solve for those profiting the most from it. There's a reason oil companies hold a metric fuckton of patents for alternative fuel tech that would create competition and reduce their profits. Greed will always ensure strategic suppression is a preferred weapon.
Anyway who cares - most people will get a new phone. This is just noise to sue large corporations so lawyers can get cash.
Most people don't have a damn clue what "meltdown" or "spectre" is, nor do they care. People will get a new phone only if they need a new phone for reasons other than having a vulnerable device. Security is about the last priority when it comes to phone hardware replacement.
Best game in America now is using the court system to grab cash. Shoulda been a lawyer instead of an engineer.
Not gonna argue with you there. The real problem with litigation running rampant through our legal system is the end result; a good chunk of our paycheck ends up going towards various flavors of this shit we call "insurance", and none of it is getting any cheaper.
Let's see how the economy defines "progress" when employing a human is the target of obsolescence.
There is a lot of work where we didn't make the employees more efficient, we replaced them entirely. And replacing all work... I do automate things at work. And every time there's a new demand/wish for us to deliver more in like ten different directions. Once upon a time we got the data on floppy discs and people were happy to get a tally. Then they wanted reports. Then they wanted cubes they could slice and dice. Then they wanted correlations and projections and metrics. Then they wanted big data and data mining. And I'm not sure what they'll want next but I'm sure they'll want something.
They'll want something alright; and once the technology exists to get that something exponentially faster and cheaper than any human can deliver, they'll replace the human worker.
A solution with machine precision that works 24 hours a day, never gets sick, and never needs time off? Good luck competing against that. Greed never goes out of style.
And robots beats sweatshops. I mean as long as you got people employing people you need some of them to be poor to have cheap labor. I don't want a bunch of kids with sewing machines making my clothes - at least I'm lucky enough to not be those kids - I want them to do something more productive. But who's left holding the bag if we don't have robots? Without tractors we need people to get back in the fields with shovels. If we're short on work, just admit that what they'd be doing is busywork. But so far I have pretty long list of real work they could pick up...
I agree that some jobs need robotic solutions to eliminate situations that create sweat shops. Unfortunately that "pretty long" list gets rather short when you realize not everyone is mentally or physically cut out for even half of the "real" work left over. I'm not trying to be derogatory here, but don't overlook the more obvious reason some people stay in a rather simple job for life. And remember Greed. Employers don't like paying for "busywork". They like paying for necessary work.
Let's see how the economy defines "progress" when employing a human is the target of obsolescence.
SIgh... nobody seems to comprehend that this is not the case. The target of obsolescence is human JOBS and I [for one] see no reason that people need to be employed when machine productivity is high enough to provide a high-quality lifestyle for everyone.
Sigh...you seem to have forgotten what makes the capitalistic world go 'round. Care to explain exactly how our economy survives and thrives when it is only the automation overlords receiving a paycheck? All the efficiency in the world becomes rather pointless without a massive change in the reward system, which tackling that issue is far from priority.
And please don't try and regurgitate the concept of UBI being our financial savior. As much as we want to believe that will be our utopia, We can't get the 1% to pay their fair share of taxes now, so you can rest assured that those who fund UBI will lobby to ensure it becomes nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. We'll see how the definition of "high-quality" changes when billions live in the Global Welfare State. You think there's a global imbalance of wealth and power now? Look into a future where a dozen trillionaires control the entire planet.
This will happen because we will never find a cure for the disease of obscene greed.
I think part of the problem is that investing in a business is supposed to be risky, but it seems that investors forget this and then put pressure on the business to omit any kind of risk. This is turn causes things like not being willing to train people because they might leave, and people get less interested in the IT industry as a whole. It's always the same fucking race to the bottom when it comes to big money.
Not investing in employees isn't a gamble; it's a death sentence.
If any company fails to understand that basic concept and make wise decisions regarding their most valuable asset, then fuck 'em. They deserve what they get.
Yes, that's what technology does. Ikea even changed the shape of its mugs:
Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its “Bang” mug, notes Colin White in his book Strategic Management, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet (not to mention in a customer’s cupboard). After the changes, it was possible to fit 2,204 mugs on a pallet, rather than the original 864, which created a 60 percent reduction in shipping costs.
Where you might need 5 truckers to ship as many mugs as sold in a fortnight, now you can do it with 2 truckers. Never mind that the wooden pallet eliminated 90% of the labor (jobs) associated with shipping an amount of goods in the first place.
It still takes some labor to produce the pallets--lumbering, milling, assembling, and even shipping--and that's much less labor than what you eliminate from the shipping process.
IKEA changing mugs did not cause a global impact in the job force. Even if 50% of the lumber industry were impacted today, that represents 150,000 jobs. That's not even close to what AI and automation is looking to eliminate.
The jobs aren't going away; things are getting cheaper, we can buy more, and we'll end up with the same number of jobs and more stuff.
You can do all this for now. Going forward, automation will continue to march forward and consume jobs that will not be replaced. Automation is targeting the transportation industry. Imagine if 20 - 30 years from now the job of human driver no longer existed. Millions of jobs disappear. And that's but one industry automation is targeting. Automation is working in parallel across many industries, making that impact considerably larger.
I favor recycling some of that new productivity into time by lowering the definition of full-time working hours, though.
Certainly a 20-hour workweek being considered full time would benefit humanity. We would actually learn to enjoy life, as a work/life balance becomes far more reasonable. Unfortunately, this will still not be enough to alleviate the pending impact of automation and AI driving the concept of human employment into extinction. UBI won't be a viable answer either unless you are accepting to an income and lifestyle of welfare, which is what UBI will ultimately pay. Without income, the economy collapses into a shadow of its former self.
What happened was companies would spend time and money training someone only to have that person leave and go work elsewhere.
That's what happens when you hire managers too fucking stupid to understand the concept of contractually securing an employee for a reasonable amount of time after an investment is made.
Obviously it's cheaper for a company to be afforded the flexibility of laying off IT staff any time they want. Can't have it both ways, so companies should stop bitching unless they're willing to secure their investment, which provides a benefit for all parties involved.
Otherwise known as progress.
Sorry, but this has become an invalid response, because the past does not easily apply to the future.
We're not just targeting lowly repetitive jobs with automation. We're also targeting highly skilled and educated jobs. You won't be able to tell someone to simply go get an education in the future. Even the justification of higher education will start to become weaker and weaker as automation and good-enough AI take hold.
Let's see how the economy defines "progress" when employing a human is the target of obsolescence.
"I think there is going to be a huge industry, probably mostly offshore, in the monitoring of devices in general, whether they're health devices that individuals wear or monitoring pacemakers or whatever it might be."
Let's not try and paint the illusion that this is some massive job creator. There will probably be ten jobs replaced by automation for every one job added to the automation monitoring.
A huge industry is being replaced by something more the size of a cottage industry.
Pop music is not created anymore. It is manufactured, based on a known recipe of repetitive beats, a breathy oversexualized, Autotuned voice track crooned by a pop star that is valued more for their looks than their talent.
Labels don't employ singers or artists anymore. They employ entertainers, because a good portion of revenue comes from touring, where only the best lip-syncing dancers fill sold-out stadiums and pretend to belt out their most popular tracks for two hours. The Loudness Wars confirmed that the quality of the recording no longer mattered; it merely needed to be loud enough for radio airplay.
What is sad is finding Profit always being the #1 priority, which is why pop music is manufactured to fit into a proven revenue model. The fact that it's become simpler and more repetitive tends to show how lazy you can be to entertain the simple masses. Johnny Crooner and his iPad "band" can probably crank out a Top 10 hit in less than an hour these days, and rip off (a.k.a. "sample") a dozen hit songs doing it.
Hell, even the POTUS uses Twitter to get his messages-on-fire out to the masses. Love it or hate it, social media has become the de facto standard to communicate to the masses, so we might as well modify our emergency broadcast systems to accept this fact.
I have seen exactly zero restaurants and businesses that have replaced their televisions with Twitter feeds.
I have seen exactly zero emergency broadcast systems that do not also use some form of social media or cellular broadcast. Reverse 911 systems had to be modified to include cell phones because of the death of the landline phone. Almost every major news outlet now has a live stream channel on YouTube, and an app on a smartphone.
And yeah, our business has a television hanging on the wall. It's full of reporters who scrape social media to report the news. People still watching it will say "did you heard abou...", and the younger generation responds with "yup, already heard about it. Hit social media hours ago."
Not saying television isn't still a communication tool. It's simply not the most effective or timely tool anymore.
Seriously, contact all the major TV and radio stations in the area first. The expectation that everyone should get critical information from "social" media is a joke.
Contact all major TV and radio stations? The GenY/Z'er is still wondering what the fuck a radio is, and they cut the TV and cable cord long ago. They consume all of their "news" via Social Media and streaming now. You got something to say, it better be in an Insta-Netflix-Tweet format. The joke is assuming the younger generation knows about ancient tools of communication.
Hell, even the POTUS uses Twitter to get his messages-on-fire out to the masses. Love it or hate it, social media has become the de facto standard to communicate to the masses, so we might as well modify our emergency broadcast systems to accept this fact.
let hem battle it out on a deserted remote island, whoever's AI robot army is still standing in the end wins.
General Zaroff and the BattleBots? That's one hell of a mash-up. Cool band name.
ofcourse, then the question becomes, why not just run a computer simultation instead.
Telling the kids it's just a game will be the prescription to prevent PTSD. Let's just hope they don't talk to Ender Wiggin.
"In general, we should strive to keep humans involved in the lethal force decision-making process as much as is feasible. What exactly that looks like in practice, I honestly don't know."
So, you tell me don't fear something, and then the expert says this statement.
Gee, I feel so much better that we have no idea how to do anything about the pending robopocalypse other than to wag our finger at the evil in the world and say "Remember to play nice and be honest and fair when trying to kill each other."
The prankster certainly had a part in this and earned his punishment, but he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger and ended an innocent mans life.
Culpability isn't a limited resource. The swatter is 100% responsible for calling a heavily armed force in and pretending a live-and-death situation, thus being fully responsible for an outcome that will occasionally occur in this situation. If you pull the trigger on someone with a single bullet somewhere in six chambers and the gun does kill him, of course you are not just 16% responsible for his death.
That does not change that the policeman is 100% responsible for not being up to the requirements of this situation. There must be consequences for both, but the fault of the respective other does not lessen each of the involved person's blame in any manner.
Your argument about culpability tends to fall flat when we have a legal system that has added aiding, abetting, and accessory as methods of differentiation that also tend to influence punishment. Another example of how hollow that can be is looking at the lack of charges against a bartender who aided the patron who ends up taking a life after driving drunk.