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Comment by notNow | Hacker News Reader

I think that the trucking industry is one of the biggest employers in the US. Are you OK with devastating these people's lives for extra efficiency promised safety?

Before we push for more automation and job losses, we need to revamp the whole political/economic/social system to ensure a more egalitarian income distribution since the vast majority of the Earth's population are proletariat who exchange their labor in return for capital to make a living.

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Truck driving is a devastating profession. My dad drove trucks for the better part of 2 decades. It hurt his physical health (immobility for hours on end punctuated by the occasional food/rest break)and did ridiculous damage to his psychological and emotional health. In the end, if you account for the number of hours he had to drive to rack up those mile-dollars, he probably made just north of minimum wage.

There are lots of professions I would be saddened to see made obsolete by automation. Long haul truck driving would not be anywhere on that list.

"It hurt his physical health (immobility for hours on end punctuated by the occasional food/rest break)and did ridiculous damage to his psychological and emotional health."

You realize you're posting this on a site largely dedicated to computer programmers.

My father-in-law has had his health ruined to the point of having is commercial license revoked, from a multitude of largely immobility caused health issues(including a blood clot that ran literally his entire lower leg). As a programmer/computer person, I do sit a lot, but not in conditions anywhere approaching his. I can stand up and stretch every 45 minutes, I have a standing desk, I can move around in my chair. Not to mention my chair is ridiculously comfortable compared to just about any car/truck seat I've sat in, including his work truck.

"You realize you're posting this on a site largely dedicated to computer programmers."

Yes I do. And for any programmer (or any other person) who thinks there's even a remote similarity of experience, I invite you to find the most comfortable chair you can and then sit in it 15 hours a day uninterrupted (minus time to run to your local truck stop for a tasty meal) for a month straight watching you tube videos of a highway. And then rest for 1-2 days and repeat. That will give you a not-so-close approximation of the trucker's experience.

Having said all of this, there's an immense challenge/opportunity here for smart hackers to improve the experience of these truckers...they're not going to get replaced by robots anytime soon.

If everything was going to be automated all at once, this "devastation" might be the case. But it won't happen all at once, it happens over the course of a decade or two.

In almost every case in history, automation has increased jobs and increased the quality of life.

Your post reminds me of this story: "Prof. Friedman visited China in the early 1960s and was taken by a government official to see a public works project. Chinese workers were building a canal. Friedman was struck by seeing everyone digging the canal with shovels. Friedman asked the official, "why no heavy earth-moving equipment?" The official said, "oh, this is a jobs program." So Friedman then says to the official, "then why don't you just give them spoons instead of shovels to create even more jobs?"

History is what it is when it comes to changes in technology. However there have been moments in history which were R3voltionary, where a great deal of people were no longer necessary and that change came with periods of upheaval

Since you quoted that super villain Friedman, it's a futile exercise to discuss this issue with you but touching on the silly analogy cited by Dr. Evil:

Abandoning spoons to shovels ==> 1000X efficiency gain and net positive mass-scale job opportunities

Abandoning shovels to heavy equipment ===> 100X efficiency gain and net positive of mass-scale specialized job opportunities.

Abandoning manual trucks to fully auto ===> ~1X efficiency (disputed) and net negative of job opportunities for the masses save for highly specialized super white collar jobs such as for engineers and developers like us.

Do you really think that it's OK from an economic point of view and not politically as this is almost settled to destroy the livelihoods of these poor & lower middle class people just to get an estimated albeit unrealistic 100% efficiency boost?

Are you ready to pay the price in terms of increasing crime rates and lower median quality of life and seeing decrepit hoods everywhere except inside your gated community where you plan to hide from all those poor people and truckers-turned-criminals on the street?

Look at this the other way - humans shouldn't even be doing this task, the only reason we have truck drivers is because we didn't know how to make trucks drive themselves. Now we do, so there's no point in keeping humans doing what machines could do better.

Yes, this generalizes to all jobs and the entire economy. It's about time we accepted it.

They can band together and start their own transportation companies. It will be significantly cheaper, now that the trucks don't require wages and health coverage.

Any job that is created by automation will later be automated anyway. That's the whole point of automation. It's a recursive function, and in the past it was so that the jobs were created faster that they were automated away. But I don't think it's reasonable to assume this will continue. There's a great qualitative difference between automating muscle power (what we did in past centuries) and brain power (what we're doing now).

Even now more and more jobs that are created are jobs that are harmful to society and shouldn't exist in the first place. Imagine a slight modification of your story - that there are two public works projects; one is digging a canal, the other is filling it up. More and more fuel, material and man hours are being used up as both sides gain access to additional workers and better technologies, and yet the canal stays half-built, as one group cancels out the work of the other.

Now replace canal building with advertising industry, and it's exactly what we have today in the real world. Hell, I'd argue that half of the web industry is also such useless waste of time and resources. This is what we get because we still keep the meme that you need to work to be a decent human being. A lot of unsustainable make-believe work. The so-called "bullshit jobs".

It's high time for the world to embrace that jobs are going away, as they should.

One of the things we need to do, as a society, is to stop yapping about "creating jobs" and start caring more about "ensuring that if your job goes away, you're fine". For most of us, our job will go away at some point.

As a whole, making work less dependent on manpower is progress. And it's a critical failure that societal progress comes with the effect of "devastating lives". And that's because of crappy laws, not because of the technology.

Place the blame where blame is due.

>Before we push for more automation and job losses, we need to revamp the whole political/economic/social system to ensure a more egalitarian income distribution since the vast majority of the Earth's population are proletariat who exchange their labor in return for capital to make a living.

I certainly agree that we're going to need to rework our concepts of work and income to fit a more automated world, but I think that the automation will have to come first, to get people to realize that something needs to be done to make our society more balanced. Artificially limiting the rollout of self driving trucks for the sake of preserving jobs will just cost in lives lost to accidents, and delay what seems to be an inevitable outcome (that trucks will drive themselves and truck driving jobs will start to disappear).

It won't happen all at once because there would be massive pushback.

Even so, the handwriting is on the wall: the meat-guided truck-driving era is almost over and will gradually shrink to niches as automated truck driving systems are deployed across fleets.

Perhaps a private person will be able to invest in a private automated truck as investment, trick it out with chrome and send it out in the world to make money while that owner sleeps in?

That argument can be applied to all automation. I completely agree that it's a huge political and economical problem that owning the means of production becomes more and more important whereas actual labor becomes less important. To me the obvious solution is more socialism and eventually once everything is automated even some form of capitalism. However, especially in the US where due to the cold war anything social is a red flag for many we aren't going to be able to solve this before it becomes a much larger problem. So we either have to play this through and force action or stop all innovation because anything else just slows the process down and makes us less competitive.

If it comes to that, yes.

A top surgeon in Boston was recently crushed under a semi in city traffic. The truck should have had sensors that prevent "right hooking" a cyclist, and the driver should be monitored for standards of sleep and on-duty time, and for alertness behind the wheel.

But really, what most people are calling for here would improve truckers' working conditions.

Cyclists and tractor-trailer trucks really shouldn't be sharing the same roads. But then again, that's Boston, a hellacious death-trap of a city to drive in.

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