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While You Were Watching Afghanistan, This Aired on 60 Minutes
Amazon testing a driverless truck.
We all see the big transporters on the highways delivering the very lifeblood of our nation’s products — food, building supplies, car parts — everything that we use to function as a nation. Unbeknownst to the truckers, driverless trucks, guided by AI — sophisticated computer systems that include WI-FI and GPS — are guiding these big rigs down American highways at high rates of speed (of course, observing the speed limit), while also recording the license plates around them, and everything else.
When asked by the interviewer, where does this information go, they evaded answering the question and other serious questions. In addition, the truckers don’t understand why they have not been made aware of this new technology, which could possibly eliminate at least 2 million jobs. Why do I sense China is in this new industry? Because I watched a documentary where driverless cars, and elimination of jobs was on the horizon as a consequence, and the Chinese presenter laughed and said, “Driverless vehicles coming soon – within the next ten years.” Why? Because they are very involved in this “green new deal” that we are being sold as a method to “save the planet.” Many jobs, not just truckers, will be erased thanks to robotics and AI, of which they are at the forefront. Do you think they have an interest in Afghanistan and its resources? Keep that thought.
Someone recently posted a video of Elon Musk saying AI is more of a threat than nuclear weapons. Why did he say that?
I think this is hook, line, and sinker part of the Great Reset.
These are unelected people who are transforming our world under our noses while we are being distracted. There are many names that you would be familiar with on these boards. Corporations and individuals, and countries who do not necessarily endorse the work ethic, family values, or the engines that have driven the West, America, and freedom to accomplish all that it has. See what you think – I am interested in your thoughts. I feel this will continue unless we grasp the scope of the global New World Order and its intended agenda.
Published in General
If traffic lights can have sensors that detect oncoming emergency lights and turn green, self-driving trucks can too.
Much love for this.
What we used to call “vaporware.”
Given what the public has witnessed repeatedly, from the non-science approach to COVID, to the dismemberment of a sane medical establishment, to the abdication of elected government officials, such that they worship the slush funds Fauci/Gates have distributed, to the weather wars that have disabled the natural winter rain systems yet people are entrained to think “forest mismanagement” has somehow brought about 12 years of Californian and Australian droughts, such that our winter rainfall is now one-third of what it once was, I venture to state:
Any human suffering brought about by driverless vehicles is not a bug but a feature!
OK. Heres my pitch. (Pleasant classical music starts with an animation of various double helixes.)
Allele profiles are a guide to what kind of genetic traits you have. Some allele profiles lead to greater health, happiness and academic and financial success. Other allele profiles lead to jail, divorce and misery. One of the reasons poor families stay poor is that they often have genes that make it more difficult to succeed. Currently at Glory industries, we can improve the genes of your child to become more intelligent. Less prone to physical and mental disabilities.
Nearly a century of research indicates that the biggest advantage or disadvantage you have in life come from your genetics.
We at Glory industries are devoted to providing opportunities to the genetically disadvantaged in order to advance the genetic health and wellness to their next generation in order to give them every advantage in the competitive cutting-edge world that we are living in and will live in.
Glory, to an improved mankind.
Actually, I meant tell the elites that it is to their benefit not to make everyone else useless.
I don’t think it is to their benefit. But elites derive disgusting and terrible pleasure by feeling superior. To be fair I’ve felt that myself and it’s as seductive as it is corrupting. Having historically poor families with a penchant for drug addiction suddenly rise up and honestly compete with other people would make everyone richer. But the psychic benefits of feeling superior are like a mental heroin.
It probably is true we useless eaters have some value, and we should not be made useless, but they don’t give a damn. Their mind is made up.
Orwell couldn’t figure out why the Elite feel this way. Then he figured out that once they have everything money can buy, what they want and convince themselves they need is power. And suffering offers full control. Suffering offers the Elite the satisfaction that their control is almost total. (While fear means their control is only partially completed.)
What’s an eater?
What problem do AI trucks solve?
Is that problem really a problem?
Yes, say the automation advocates, imagining a world of autonomous vehicles zipping along in perfect harmony, everything up on the big board, all the data flowing in like tributaries of a great river.
No, say the humans, who see the eradication of a job, a culture, a thousand oases where the drivers stop to gas up and eat.
But who are these humans, really? Why do they have this archaic attachment to toil, when they could stay home and compose cowboy poetry?
The problem that AI trucks solve, for the elites, is the problem of employing people, and putting up with their needs for not working 24/7, etc. The diners etc are “collateral damage.” They don’t even see it.
No the Elite don’t see it. And of course, there is not much of a problem at all as long as Lileks can convince the Elite Globalists to be patrons of the cowboy poetry writers, and as long as the half billion people so displaced decide to write it.
Nobody’s taking the opposite view? Well.
When’s the last time you’ve passed a Semi on the road and it didn’t have a “Drivers wanted!” advertisement painted on the back door? Truck driving is a hard, demanding job. Aside from the long hours of driving across more Dakota you’ve also got long stretches of time away from the wife and kids. There’s a reason all those jobs are open. How many of y’all would encourage your kids to take that college fund and buy a big rig with it instead?
The thing about automation is that it’s usually easiest to automate the worst jobs away. Your steam shovel takes jobs from ditch diggers. Charlie Chaplin from Modern Times gets replaced by a machine that’s not even that complicated to build. The less creativity, judgement, adaptability a job requires the easy it is to get a program to do it. I wouldn’t mind truck driving being automated away because, like I said, it’s a hard, demanding job.
There is a larger scale societal problem where you can’t even employ the bottom end of the bell curve anymore. Frankly, I’ve got no idea how that will play out (I suspect that we’ll have to wait on that answer as more immediate problems, ah, divert our attention.) It may be that there comes a time where we ought to stand athwart history and hold up the stop sign, but I don’t think this is it.
Carol, 250 million delivery drivers seems like a lot in a nation of 330 million souls. Is this a World-Wide estimate, or an order of magnitude error?
I’d like to know how these driverless trucks handle merging onto an Interstate after going up a ramp . . .
This line of reasoning is very common among Ricocheteers today. Fortunately for humans lucky enough to live in a society with a relatively high degree of respect for human rights, it is based on a belief about how an economic system works that is fundamentally in error. It is a set of magical beliefs which take the place of the result of curiosity and rational inquiry.
If the theory were true, 250 years of continuous productivity improvements caused by capitalism would have resulted in most of the population being without a source of income today, waiting for the State to “create jobs” and distribute those newly manufactured jobs (which to the populist thinker are concrete objects, like packages of food and sundries) to those individuals.
Every year, populists believe the new technologies produced that year will cause the laws of economics all of a sudden to stop working, because the are concretely different from the technologies of last year. To understand the economic laws which explain why capitalism has in fact NOT kept the world in permanent poverty requires thinking abstractly.
Now imagine the big rigs are controlled by a hostile or criminal force.
For what it’s worth, I know one person who got out of a high-pressure social-service-type job and is now driving trucks, . . . and loves it.
But… we DO have that today… they wait on welfare checks.
*What makes this a populist thought? That you think it’s stilupid?
There is some truth to what you say. However, you poo poo the other side of the equation.
When all the factories in the rust belt went to cheep labor countries . Many of those people retooled into poverty. Then there were those who retooled into the fentanyl industry. Economics doesn’t always work like we think it should.
My husband is an OTR driver there is a lot to unpack here.
1st drivers are very much aware of the technology, we have been watching it for about 2 years.
2nd, no its not going to be happening this year. Small cars are not allowed to drive without a human behind the wheel, you think they are going to let 40 tons of truck drive at 65 mph down the highway?
3rd, the current AI in trucks, and there is a lot, is very flawed. Lane departure sensors freak out when passing an off ramp because it “sees” the line leave and thinks you are departing the lane. The eye that reads speed limit signs sometimes read signs on off ramps and roads that veer off. My husband has horror stories about the self breaking system as well.
4th the Truck has no idea when the trailer gets hit. It doesnt know that an accident just happened and needs to stop.
5th the truck doesn’t know to pull over for police,
6th GPS sucks for current construction. I don’t know how many times GPS says to go straight, except that road no longer exists, or a detour.
Also, to the uneducated guy that suggested that truck drivers are a bunch of delinquents… just kidding your right, for the most part. But there are a lot out there that are not a bag of issues, try not to place all in a box.
Right, and the shortage of drivers seems to be way worse than it used to be. Not for me in my particular job, but at the company I work for it’s a regular source of stress trying to get timely deliveries due to a nationwide shortage of truck drivers, even though the rates being paid are higher than ever. Drivers have told me that if a driver is unhappy with the outfit he is working for, he can find a new job in no time flat because everyone is so understaffed.
I haven’t watched it, but I learned a very long time ago that 60 Minutes is not a good source for unbiased journalism.
When people live comfortably without major threats to their survival and have very little need, the drive to industry and economic engagement is limited. I’m not just talking about making money, but innovating, too. There’s only so far you can innovate the iPhone to give us astoundingly more benefit we can’t live without. The only places we are intensely weak is in human relationships. That’s the biggest threat to life these days. Maybe we should start churning out missionaries.
You mean like a corrupt and extortive union?
I keep trying to explain this to you guys. You cannot have central banks trying to create inflation when technology and global trade is creating so much deflation. This deflation is nothing but better living through purchasing power. Ostensibly, conservatives are for trade and progress lol.
If the government followed what I’m talking about, you would not get all of this Socialism, populism, and all of these social problems.
Everybody would make plenty of money under a deflationary system even if robots were doing more and more.
This all should have been done by the middle 1990s. Now all you are going to get is social problems, inequality and asset bubbles.
Here is the other problem. The government cannot collect enough taxes unless it’s constantly creating CPI inflation or asset inflation or both. I’ve actually heard a worse explanation of this but I don’t really understand it.
Furthermore, our global hegemony depends on inflation, so this is a real mess.
The only way out is Austrian libertarianism or this.
Depends on how much I want to think about it.
If I think only about “That Which is Seen”, then my answer is this. We should give our Washington politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists permission to either “create a job” for each newly unemployed trucker, or provide a similar standard of living via handouts. (This includes subsidized variations like offering job training. These historically almost always fail in the end, but fortunately that is not part of “That Which is Seen”.)
If I think about both “That Which is Seen” and “That Which is Unseen”, my answer is this. We should demand that the political class do nothing except remove anti-market obstacles that are hurting the affected drivers. And each of us should tell a newly-unemployed trucker who asks, “What should I do?” this: “Well, you were looking for a job when you found this one…” unless we have some way to help that particular individual.
How many field hands have been put out of work by tractors? A whole lot, and yet it didn’t all happen overnight and we are not a nation of unemployed field hands. They presumably got jobs that were better than swinging a scythe from sun-up until sun-down.
I haven’t finished this yet, but here is another one that talks about similar issues.
I need to say something else about my posts. I am not for going back to a Libertarian system in a direct way anymore. The last chance was 2004. People need to get rid of all kinds of idealism about government. MAGA makes more sense for a variety of reasons.
Driverless trucks . . . a terrorist’s dream!