Comment by lawrenceyan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lawrenceyan | Hacker News Reader

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I have to disagree with the author here if only because the majority of applications he talks about are transitionary in the sense that they are dependent on AI/ML that's at the cusp of fruition. Self-driving is probably the best example I can come up with, where currently something like an Uber or DoorDash relies on a gig-worker underclass in order to drive things. But once autonomous vehicles come online, as they already are starting to, that opportunity will also soon disappear.

I think the more meaningful question to ask here is what happens when even the menial labor made available through gig work[0] starts to dry up. The discussion, in my opinion, should really no longer be about the legitimacy of automation which I believe is being argued here, but what we will do as a society in response to the inevitability of automation and its ramifications for the average person as a result.

[0]: I see gig work as the culmination of peak labor efficiency, short of perhaps slavery / indentured servitude, which even then isn't enough to compete after a certain point

2014 called, they want their unbridled optimism about the inevitability of self-driving back

> But once autonomous vehicles come online, as they already are starting to

The current status of autonomous vehicles is pretty miserable on city streets. Tesla's new "full self driving" has a reported error rate of one incident requiring manual intervention per 2 miles. Nobody is going to get into a taxi that tries to drive into a wall or onto train tracks a couple of times every hour.

Uber and Lyft have already given up on them, selling off their AI divisions. They have no near-term automation plans.

You're looking in the wrong places for the cutting edge of self-driving. While I greatly respect Tesla for energy storage/generation, you should really be looking at companies like Waymo or Cruise.

If you live in San Francisco or the Bay Area, I'm sure you've seen many of their vehicles being driven around.

While OK, cutting edge might be better but big questions still are open.

It is not about making road safer...

Question is, if it will be more cost effective to have self driving car or not. Cutting edge is currently not cost effective as developing and operating such car is costing loads of money.

There are still operation costs that are not obvious like insurance. I don't think there is sane company anywhere that wants to put 100's of cars on the same roads as insurance scammers.

And even so cost effectiveness isn't obvious. The hardware results in quite expensive vehicles that additionally won't be owned and maintained by gig workers for free.

to me, a self flying plane is a lot easier problem to solve but i don't hear about anyone getting into a plane without a pilot (and co-pilot) at the controls. I know we have auto-pilots but there's always a human and backup in case something goes wrong. Flying a plane is a lot easier on a computer than navigating the ground and ground traffic (IMO). I would think we'd see self-flying planes before self-driving cars.

I think the main issue is that in case of a problem you can't just gradually slow down and get out of a plane. A lot of things can go wrong and a broken autopilot == crash.

If the self-driving car breaks down completely it could still slow down until stopped with some emergency lights on. This is the worst case scenario and in many cases wouldn't end up with anyone being hurt.

That is not the worst case scenario.

Dangerous acceleration, braking, steering, or some combination of the three are far, far worse.

I've repeatedly had lane-keeping veer off-road while adapative cruise control accelerated at the same time. That's incredibly dangerous and if I hadn't had my hands on the wheel and my foot resting on the brake pedal I may have driven into a tree/sign/parked car. I don't use lane-keeping anymore.

Slowing down until stopped with some emergency lights on is also plenty dangerous if it happens on a high-speed road.

Are you confident that self driving cars will not work even in 2034 or 2044 ?

I'm not the OP, but personally I just can't see it, not on all roads and at a level that most people would consider "self driving". And as for fully self driving such that there are no manual controls, absolutely no chance.

I think self-driving cars are realistically only going to work in conjunction with other technologies embedded in roads, signs and other vehicles - and even then, it's still a massively challenging problem, with potentially dire consequences when things go l wrong.

Uber and DoorDash don't rely on the workers just as labor, but also as capital -- the drivers provide the cars.

Also, Uber at least doesn't even rely on making money from customers, just raising money from investors.

So they're complicated situations and not easy to generalize.

> what we will do as a society in response to the inevitability of automation and its ramifications to humanity as a result.

We already automated production in the 20th century, "the service economy" is what resulted.

As long as people can be prevented from accessing the product, they can be kept working for it.

The framing that Uber and Doordash are exploiting the workers' own capital because workers also supply their own cars completely ignores that the cars were unproductive, sunk cost capital until these platforms arrived, and that people desire flexibility and autonomy, and it was dead weight regulation of monopoly (taxi) licensing that kept these people out of the labour market. People aren't "workers," even if the establishment has defined them into classes of workers and employers as a means to further manage them.

Even if gig economy companies were pyramid schemes for investment as you suggest, their redistrbitive function would still be way more efficient than any other scheme.

The crux of this view is the belief in and characterization of literally everything as exploitation. It's the axiom in the logic of that idea. People want jobs that provide some balance of economic security, status, and freedom, but if you discover need, desire, and value that creates jobs for them and risk your own capital to grow it, you're exploiting them? Personally, I'd reject that premise.

> The framing that Uber and Doordash are exploiting the workers' own capital

Where did you get any such "framing"?

I'm saying that, since the capital and labor BOTH are "crowdsourced," you can't analyze it as exemplifying just labor relations.

> completely ignores that the cars were unproductive, sunk cost capital until these platforms arrived

That's false in general and also a very stupid way of thinking about it.

The idea of people making use of their cars as capital is just so commonplace, you have to be actively seeking out stupidity to overlook it.

Someone owning a car without using it to generate income, leverage, or opportunity is the definition of unproductive capital rotting in a driveway. The uber for x platforms are market makers, which is about as valuable a service as it gets. The only ones it seems to bother are those who would seek to exploit people politically.

The platforms have pernicious pratices, certainly, but the political outrage about the the gig economy has served mainly to discourage competitors from entering the market to make it better.

I'd argue the critics of the gig economy are ensconcing the very platforms they're complaining about by threatening the market - and they have never solved a problem they didn't first invent by characterizing everything as exploitation from the outset.

This is about par for the course for people who don't solve problems with discovery, technology, or consensus, but rather, invent problems to leverage them politically and add them to the portfolio of things they create rules for and manage. These are not reconcilable world views, but when one is committed to the logic of an idea, I sympathize with how they might interpret inconsistency with it as stupid.

> Someone owning a car without using it to generate income

The point is you're just _making up_ the "fact" of people not using their cars to generate income.

Cars depreciate when you drive them, people recognize their value as capital, the IRS recognizes their value as capital.

You're idiotically trying to pretend that they don't count as capital. For no real reason either. Just because you said something stupid before and you can't admit it.

> market makers, which is about as valuable a service as it gets

LOL!!

Isn't any business always looking to "add to the portfolio of things they create rules for and manage"

People already get leverage on their car via car loans

What do you see as the primary pathway for people after we automate away the major components of the service economy?

it's not possible to automate away all components of the concept of "service". there will always be time consuming or tedious tasks that people will pay other people to do. they likely won't look like anything we can imagine now

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