I get the idea that you no longer need a driver for a cab, but in my mind all that means is there's an unemployed former cab driver who is explicitly worse off now. The likelihood of that person having tons of great options to go do now that they aren't burdened by driving a cab is pretty low imo?
There's probably a name for this somewhere, some kind of automation paradox that makes "society" better but many individuals lives worse.
As an individual it's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about it though
This is why our standard of living is much better now than it was 150 years ago. Even though we have autoamted pretty much all of the jobs since then, except teacher and lawyer (there is another term in economics for what happens here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
Personally I think it's fine, even as my own profession undergoes the same transition. We now have new jobs in running the waymo fleet in various capacities - the cars still need to be serviced, cleaned, supported, scheduled, etc - and the highly compensated jobs designing what are essentially real-world robots that can safely coexist with humans on the road. This is how technology has always worked and it's always made us better off on the whole.
Also, the new product is just better. When a human is not in the car, it's ok for to leave them waiting for a few minutes to pick me up if it's not a busy street, and I don't have to deal with the risk of an unsafe or unsavory person hosting me in their personal vehicle. I can control the music and the AC, and tap a button to have the car pull over. I can and do still take Lyfts and Ubers when I need to - it's cheaper for anything involving the highway, still, and better when I need to get somewhere in a hurry.
IMHO jobs were far less specialized in the past. Working in a factory is not that different from working in a kitchen or laying tile.
Take Muhammad, a fresh arrival from Syria, who drives a taxi. What will his next job be that is that easy and he already knows how to do?
But actually, what I've commonly heard from immigrants from developing countries is not having their certifications recognised. What was once a surgeon/lawyer/accountant is now forced to do menial labour. So maybe that's one problem to consider solving.
Never as good pay and many end up on the system.
My grandparents performed jobs that now are rarely performed in the US due to there being better jobs for those qualified to perform them.
I am much happier working with AI and distributed systems than as a carpenter or steel mill foreman like my grandfathers. Everybody on my father's side of the family had these white marks all over their forearms from molten metal splashing on them and burning them as they worked.
This is only possible because of technological progress. It creates new jobs.
My grandfather was a sailor, then cook. Father drives a taxi. Mom is a seamstress. Stepdad worked at the same factory for 65 years. As I was coming of age in the 90s, they chastised me for spending all my time in front of the computer. Yet here I am still sitting in front of one, making more money than they could've ever imagined.
Society progresses whether or not you want it.
Living standards would be a lot worse today if we still had to pick crops in the field by hand.
They still have to pay the Waymo though, it didn't become free. :/
You're kidding yourself if you think autonomous taxis will be cheaper in the long run just because they don't pay a driver.
They will outcompete human drivers on cost and once they are dominant they will raise prices. This has happened every other time human labor was replaced too. It is practically the Silicon Valley playbook.
The cost to watch a movie today through streaming is not more than it was when you had to go to a movie theater to see one.
The cost to buy and sell financial instruments today through Robinhood or similar products is not more than when you had to have a broker to place orders for you.
The cost to find vast amounts of information through search engines is negligible today. To do so previously would take immense amounts of time, effort, and money parsing through encyclopedias is the information even existed at the time.
The cost to print a few drafts of a memo today requires a single session typing into Microsoft word and then printing to your office printer. Previously you had to pay a typist to put together multiple drafts for you.
On autonomous vehicles:
Yes they will absolutely be cheaper, as long as a complete monopoly is avoided. It's not just that you don't have to pay the driver. You also will have vastly lower insurance rates due to how safe they are. Maintenance costs will be lower due to economies of scale when fleet operators can have the car deliver itself to a dedicated massive maintenance facility.
Now you just have to maintain multiple subscriptions to streaming services so you can watch the movie you want. $22/month for Hulu, $27/month for Netflix, Amazon Prime where you pay for the privilege of paying to rent some movies.
So you might be able to watch more with your subscription, but the nexus isn't quite that simple.
I mean, every complex large-scale change to society has upsides and downsides. Very few things are purely good. So it makes very little sense just to name the upsides and pretend it's all good, or just to name the downsides and pretend it's all bad. You need to do the actual cost-benefit analysis.
And when you do, net-net, generally speaking, technological progress does does much more good for humanity than bad, even though there is some bad.
We tend to get things that make our lives easier, more efficient, safer, and more comfortable at ever cheaper prices.
Yes yes I'm aware of the fallacy
It's obviously not the whole picture though. When Number of Jobs automated approaches 100% then what?
Large scale automation is only a problem if society allows it to become a problem.
When I look around me I see a society that I think would happily have jackboots round up excess labor and execute us rather than redistribute money fairly
So I wish I had your optimism
If you gave everyone $10k a month UBI, who is going to change your tire? How much you have to pay them to go to work if they get $10k while sitting at home?
If a town has a lack of apartments, how much will an apartment cost if a young couple has $20k a month to spend?
Currently, people need money to pay for necessities like food and shelter. Therefore either money is redistributed somehow or people have jobs to earn money, or we change the paradigm entirely to something else
We cannot have both no wealth redistribution AND replace all labour with automation without really messing this system up
This seems pretty obvious to me?
When was that? Or hypothetical? Why would that be and not that new jobs being created?
Personally, I work hard to minimize my car usage in general but they're something society is absolutely enamored with, so if we need to have cars around we could at least get rid of the drivers.
With driving specifically - human-driven cars are perhaps the greatest danger to my life. I very much would prefer to live in a future where human beings are not in charge of piloting multi-ton vehicles at life threatening speeds in the same areas I walk around.
Agreed. So lets build dense cities and efficient mass public transit, right? ...Right?
You don't have to be "productive" all the time. As you put it, driving the car is not just a chore - things happen along the way. It can be a chore - I just contest the most unproductive label here.
By this token, sleeping is the most unproductive thing in the world. Except you recharge.
Turns out, spend a couple hours on the road everyday and you'll quickly get sick of podcasts or ebooks. You can't stop to look up details or check out the code/math/design because you're driving. You can't really do anything else too because you really should be focusing your attention on the road.