Self-driving truck convoy completes its first major journey across Europe

Already in California, I see shops catering to middle-income consumers dying and being replaced by shops catering to the very poor or the very wealthy.

The challenge to keeping the consumer side of the economy seems to be creating a class of consumers who 100-200K but still spend most or all of it. That doesn't seems to be as hard as one might imagine in a city like San Francisco.

'Stuff' is a smaller part of our economy than you might think. Software, Entertainment, Healthcare, Lawyers, Land, Prestige, etc.

Even then raw materials don't show up by magic. So, automation might get rid of low end restaurants, factory's etc but it's going to take high end AI to really kill 'the economy' as we think of it.

Economics will never disappear because many goods are fundamentally scarce. Fortunately, the necessities of life really aren't, so the economy could conceivably be pried away from its current position as holder of both carrot and stick (I'm defining "stick" as "withholding the necessities of life" here) and reduced to simply offering carrots. This would be an extraordinary improvement and would put capitalism on course to actually live up to the "consensual transaction" and "monotonic improvement" rhetoric so frequently brandied about by the younger members of the capitalist camp. And the communist camp? Well, people owning the means of production is what their philosophy was about all along. If it becomes practical to achieve such a state of affairs without government enforcement then the controversial and historically failure-prone side of their beliefs becomes moot. Capitalism and communism become more or less compatible, which will be no surprise at all to the people who have familiarized themselves with both schools of thought but possibly a bit of a shock to anyone who took the highly polarized rhetoric surrounding the issue at face value. In any case, this type of thing has been thought about and discussed before at great length, but there's a strong taboo hanging over the discussion which makes it easy to inadvertently ignore.

> a single person can use automation to make everything he needs

This would require a large amount of infrastructure per person. An intermediate target would be the point at which communes become viable -- share the heavy infrastructure across some number of people larger than 1 but smaller than 8 billion (or 300M if you think the US government is already sufficiently protectionist). The macroscopic trends of "increasing automation capability" and "decreasing market value of many peoples' labor" make it inevitable that this will happen at some point, the big question is when. It's possible we're approaching or have passed the tipping point but don't know it yet because we haven't invested enough effort in developing infrastructure optimized for decentralization, which is the opposite of what current market structures require. Also, there are a few big social sticking points, namely specialists who are necessary at the margin but who are still treated well by the traditional system (doctors). If workable alternatives can't be developed then the whole endeavor will have to wait until the market turns on them as well. One way or another we'll get past the issue, but getting around the social problems could take decades longer than getting around the industrial problems.

The big danger is that we don't get to the point of viable decentralization before the automation economy makes enough people redundant to create large-scale human misery and political unrest. Arguably this has already happened, but it can get a lot worse -- and I sure hope that we don't get a chance to find out just how much worse that is.

None of the automation that we're seeing is making it possible for one person to make everything he needs. Automation is increasing the returns to capital and making it possible for corporations to produce things with fewer employees—none of that implies that you'll suddenly be able to make things yourself.

If anything, increasing automation increases the returns to scale. You might conceivably build your own torch. But you're certainly not going to purchase a million dollar torch-making machine.

Automation poses a threat to the traditional economic model, but on the supply side not the demand side—you'll still be buying as much as before, you just probably won't have a job.

This is why people specialize in one thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

I don't think you have to reach for "economics won't exist" to see the serious problem that schemes like Basic Income would hope to address.

> our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing.

As technology advances, the amount of preparation any of us needs to specialize in something useful/valuable skyrockets.

Rather amazingly, 1% of the population of the US are truck drivers or work directly for trucking companies. With families, we're talking about closer to 2 or 3% of the population of one of the most advanced nations on the planet.

What's the skills and preparation gulf between a truck driver and the person who obsoleted him? Same goes for manufacturing (which is thriving in the United States, but with lights-out machining, where one person babies and maintains a pod of CNC machines) and many other fields.

We need less and less wet robots, and retraining them is close to impossible already -- it may eventually be completely impossible due to specialization.

Visit most places where a factory or trade died...

This sometimes can include whole countries where nothing else came to replace the lost jobs...

Fuel consumption is about the last thing you want to bring to the fore when comparing trucks to trains. You could take all the diesel in a truck, burn it in a oil power plant and use the generated electricity to power a train. You would go much further.

I mean the market forces are failing us, not that train companies are.

Then of course a transportation company with 20% profit margin is very likely the result of market failure...

Throw the fraction of the money used for promoting and developing self-driving and platooning, coupled with the cost of building roads to public transport, trains, tracks and ships and you will have a much more efficient albeit less cool system.

Tangential, but letting (semi) self-driven convoys on the road is quite irresponsible, imagine the headlines if they were to get in an accident.

The last mile is where automated trucks are least likely to work, though. They have to deal with local streets, pedistrians, cyclists, poor roads, unmarked roads, all the things that are most difficult for automated vehicles.

I don't understand how it doesn't save money. If the human drivers are only driving the last few miles and working with loading operations, they can handle many more trucks in a day than they can currently, so the number of drivers needed drops quite a bit. Salaries for those drivers might go up, but not enough to compensate, so the trucking companies stand to benefit.

Let's say a popular shipping route is 300 miles from dock to warehouse, of which 280 are "easy" open road perfect for automating. For the sake of example, let's also say it takes half an hour at the loading/unloading point on either side, the 20 "city miles" take an hour to drive, and the middle 280 miles take 4.5 hours to drive. The total time is then 6.5 hours for a single truck, all of which is currently human labor.

Now let's say the truck drives itself the middle 280 miles, and the human driver is handling the rest. Whereas before the human driver would have been able to handle a single truck in 6.5 hours, the end point operations now only require 2 hours of driver time per truck, so we've cut the need for 2/3 of our human driver hours because one driver could handle 3 trucks in the same time as before. With good scheduling and tracking, that means we've also cut the need for 2/3 of our human drivers.

Obviously it's more in favor of human drivers for shorter hauls, and more in favor of self-driving trucks for longer hauls.