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Comment by AlexC04 | Hacker News Reader

> Eventually, Facebook says, it OK’d proposed terms of the contract, which hiked drivers’ average pay by half, to $27.50 an hour, and for the first time provided fully paid family health care.

For those people doing the driving that's pretty great news. I hope they also took care of those working conditions issues too. Split shifts etc...

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Won't last long. Few more years, and it will be a autonomous fleet anyways.

You might have missed this discussion from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15116861

That discussion is extremely weird. Posters are claiming that since Speech recognition took decades so must self driving cars. Speech recognition decades ago has nothing to do with speech recognition today.

I understand the skepticism but I hope HN posters can make stronger arguments in the future.

I agree. Transformative technology has this effect on people. The other day I was arguing with someone that said we need true Artificial General Intellegence before full autonomy is available.

I'm fine with skepticism, but these types of unfounded claims drive me crazy. If you want to argue the companies aren't really moving the tech as fast as they claim, post actual evidence, not some nonsense about speech recognition in the 90s.

Technologists have a bad habit of not taking consideration the political and social sides of innovation. The success of autonomous cars depends less on the tech as much as it would depends more on politics. As tech don't mix well with politics and the interests of the majority, autonomous cars will only happen when the tech is good enough to overcome politics. Some people think that this will take decades if not centuries.

Infrastructure support is not there yet either, which is kind of a political issue as well, but also a future need.

Sigh, I don't know how that comment got to the top. This[0] for me was a more interesting discussion (and I ranted in a reply). Basically, level 5 automation (the kind that would require no human interaction, which is what the comment above is referring to, is a long way off according to [0], but it's not like other things like level 4 automation can't happen soon and be immensely helpful for society.

But it isn't going to put hundreds of drivers out of work.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15116991

We are far from "few years."

I may have missed this discussion but if any place will have it first it most likely will be the tech communities. And may even involve cars being converted, and some sort of smart network technology. Instead of every card attempting to do this independently.

In the meantime this gives them enough to save for night classes / secondary education so that when automation inevitably comes, they'll have other options.

Or did you just always want to discard these people regardless, paying them the minimum required for their entire working lives?

Tech companies should help these people transition out of wage slavery in a dying field.

in that case they've got to get it while the getting's good.

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