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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
Truck jackers too. Oh, unless Robocop’s are in the trailer.
I believe most serious economists would use the term “populist” to describe this popular theory, that a job loss caused by an economic change is like the accidental destruction of a factory, which the state can then beneficiently re-build and hand over to the original owner so that he can resume his life just the way it was before the economic conditions changed. Economic science considers a job loss, if it is the result of a change in economic conditions, a natural corrective response to the change.
My supposition is when the scenario gets odd on the road(ie: standing water, snow accumulation, ice, potholes, construction lane mergers, low bridges, etc.) the driverless truck slows down to a crawl/stop creating massive unnecessary metro area traffic snarls.
I’m just not confident the AI geniuses can program in the myriad of odd ball things one encounters on the road(ie: animals on the road, fog, hard rain/hail, debris falling from other vehicles, other bad drivers, etc.) which are best dealt with by a professional driver using his instincts.
I think that’s a straw man argument.
Try this on for size – regulatory overreach in one industry may stymie innovation in another.
Field hands lost their jobs and city ordinances say no food gardens in your yards. Do you see what action is necessary for government to take to change the dynamic?
Some of the best regulation changes are happening in micro-kitchen regulation – allowing the common citizen to work straight out of their own kitchen to provide an incredibly custom experience with mini restaurants or mini bakeries or mini-take outs.
Do you see where government action is needed? It isn’t in handing out jobs. It is in getting them to remove their interference that 1) sends businesses out of country, 2) locks potential small entrepreneurs out of meeting local needs, and 3) prevents people from being completely self-sufficient.
The second the Soviet Union fell we should have switched to a deflationary monetary system and totally deregulated the economy. Now we have gone way too far the wrong way and it’s showing up in politics and social problems.
The price of shelter is going to the moon in one year. You can’t get any interest on your savings. Collector cars, art and collectibles etc. have been going up 15% a year since the mid-1990s. Something is wrong.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug21/neo-colonialism8-21.html
I wish I’d said it that way.
Autonomous Vehicles is a very hard problem to solve. It is expensive, billions are being spent every year to develop it and the computer and sensor kit required to do it cost upwards of $100k, which is why trucks is the best market because truck drivers earn more than Uber drivers.
It is hard to expand, just because you can drive autonomsly safely on one route, doesn’t mean you can on any route. They require highly detailed 3D maps to operate safely.
It does not do great in poor weather because the optical sensors need to stay clean, so all AV companies are starting in the south west where there is little rain and no snow. Which is another reason why trucks is the best starting market because you can pull over and wait and won’t have an impatient passenger in the back.
But it is going to happen. Initial driverless operation will start within the next two years, but it will expand slowly. Think thousands of additional driverless trucks per year not millions, and all of those concentrated in CA to TX.
My prediction is that there will be more people employed at the companies developing driverless cars than there will be driverless vehicles on the road in 2025.
With COVID lockdowns it already is.
See Australia and New Zealand.
Fits good.
It is correct. This phenomenon of stymieing innovation in every other area must occur, and is among the effects called “That Which is Unseen”.
Yes. In fact, I mentioned it in an earlier Comment.
When many unanticipated pains are created by an intervention, the political class ought to cancel that intervention. It shouldn’t create a new nest of interventions to attempt to fix the unanticipated consequences of the first one. Doing that makes things worse, by multiplying the unanticipated consequences, most of which are “That Which is Not Seen”.
This is an example of the policy I recommended earlier. Politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists should not take new coercive action to try to relieve the new plague of pains caused by their first violation. They should stop the first action.
When it comes to proposed and existing interventions to eliminate the pains caused by economic change, the political class should follow the two rules I mentioned in the earlier Comment: (1) Don’t act, and (2) Stop acting.
Yes, but these changes tend to happen a lot faster now, which adversely affects the ability of people and populations to adjust.
Yes.
Agree.
All three of those are examples of the policy I recommended. There are many others.
If you agree with everything I say in a Comment, you can just write “I agree” ;-)
But we will adjust. Humanity always has.
Not so sure this is an apt comparison because back in the day of field hands the work was drudgery and paid poorly in an era when the field hand had zero political voice, and communication was limited to the newspaper.
Mark my word, to suddenly have millions of unemployable unemployed dispersed evenly throughout the world who formerly made an adequate living will in fact be an enormous problem for the those in power when this big switch occurs.
I have some news for you guys. You are going to get a UBI no matter what because society can only hold together if they force inflation when technology and trade is taking away so many jobs and destroying so many small businesses.
Inflationism is a bad policy and we are way past the point of fixing it in a way that conservatives would approve of.
***Because there is so much debt and thee government and the financial system requires inflation to not fall apart.
I’ve seen no evidence for that one way or the other. But I think the fear is overblown. The adjustment will be several orders of magnitude smaller and an order of magnitude slower than recurring dislocations caused by government, like all large-scale wars, the mass confinement orders that were supposed to eliminate covid, or the Great Recession, all of which (not counting the mass detentions) society adjusted to within a few years or less.
But sure, the faster the change happens, the sharper and painful are the temporary dislocations (and the faster the benefits accrue to the people as a whole). That fact doesn’t make moving society farther from universal freedom and closer to universal slavery a good idea, to my way of thinking. The claimed benefits of reduced freedom and responsibility are in the long run illusory, and the costs are enormous.
You guys can say whatever you want, but the whole system has to figure out how it’s going to deal with the deflation from trade and automation. It’s going to be brutal.
Not all truck driving is long-haul. The share is going to vary by area of the country, as with so many other things. But the drivers who move stuff from a warehouse to local stores for final sale, may not even have to put in a full 8 hour day unless they deliver to multiple stores.
This is something I’ve commented on before too, and I think it’s an increasing problem as there become fewer and fewer jobs that some people are capable of performing. I don’t see the logic in requiring that everyone have A Job when there may be literally nothing they are needed for, but the Guaranteed Income type things have problems of their own. You could say they are required to pick up litter in the parks or something, but then you get the Litter Picker-Uppers Union on your case.
But part of the problem is that the newer jobs that open up, tend to require higher levels of thinking etc, which means an ever-growing share of the population is simply incapable of performing them. Not because the population is becoming stupider (which may also be happening, but that’s a different subject) but because the jobs are becoming smarter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Overdrive
You were misrepresenting “populist” sentiment. And implying government need not act at all. People want jobs and have a limited vocabulary to express that desire. They were happy with trump removing regulations, so I don’t think holding people to the limitations of their expression and straw manning them is helpful in these discussions.
No one wants the government to hand them jobs. But they do want the government to stop being so hostile to jobs.
Okay, that’s the answer. All the no-longer-needed truck drivers have to be social workers. :-)
I can see that happening to renters, for sure. Not so much for owners.
For a scythe-wielder to find a job one step up from scythe-wielding is a lot easier than, say, a truck driver finding a job in programming the automated trucks.
Here’s hoping they do something about it. Maybe even before it actually happens.
It’s been said of the Democrats especially, that they (supposedly/claim to) love employees, but they hate employERS.
Automation and cheap globalized labor wipes out jobs and businesses. This is better living through purchasing power. This is deflation. Every central bank on the planet is forcing inflation. Right now it’s mostly going into asset markets and not the CPI.
There is going to be a human cost among other things.
I think we’ve been over this before. Even in deflation, people need to earn money SOMEHOW just to support themselves. Falling prices doesn’t help someone who has NO MONEY. And if there are no jobs for them simply because workers aren’t needed due to automation, or because the available jobs are more complex than some proportion of people are capable of, then they either get left behind, or they have to be provided with subsistence another way.
When they force inflation they are speeding up the bad dynamics. This would all take care of itself humanely if they were just bomb the Eccles building.
I have some news for you. The GOP is going to force inflation so the whole system doesn’t fall apart. They are also going to re-distribute. You need to learn the term “Nominal GDP”.
Mises.org is right about everything.