Crimadella wrote:
I'm not so sure about Andrew's UBI though, I'm having less faith that it's going to work, it has the potential to devalue every $1000, not just the $1000 they hand out for free. And it's not free, it's an illusion, people will pay more in direct taxes for receiving that $1000, thus it will lower the value of money, which is a bad thing.
I'm pretty sure that's true. Andrew brought up the analogy on Breakfast Club, which I disagree with, to people having $1,000 more to spend on food, a fast food restaurant seeing this and trying to charge more for burgers, and people instead shopping at restaurants that haven't done this - just putting the ruthless company out of business. I don't think it happens that way - rather the input costs of things, everywhere, slowly go up until that $1,000 gets depreciated. From the start of Keynesianism in the late 1940's though that took a few decades.
Where I still agree with UBI - it spins up an infrastructure for having such a thing when we come to a point where more than 60% of the jobs have been replaced by AI, when people really can't work, and gives an adjustable solution to the problem, even long before 60%, if such unemployment and desperation would start pushing us toward revolution with the likelihood of a far-right or far-left demagogue being installed as dictator and making everything irreparably worse. This transformation, ie. from mostly job-based sustenance to mostly non job-based sustenance, is likely to happen over the next few decades hence this hits the target timing.
I think the clearest thing I could say about UBI is its less an attempt at making everything better than it is now and something closer to preventing things from getting far worse in our lifetimes when the full impact of automation hits.
IMHO where we're at is really that scary that I think this is justified, and without it there will be no solution that can be spun up quickly enough if we find ourselves reacting to horrible political events, outbreaks of organized violence, etc..
Crimadella wrote:
I have also heard that his major talking point, truck drivers losing their jobs, will not even happen. Truck drivers will still be required to be in the truck, at the wheel, they are needed to drive in cities and to load and unload the trucks. Therefor, they aren't going to lose their jobs. I'm not sure about all of this, to me it seems that is not a good idea at all.
The only thing I momentarily heard which afforded a bit of optimism was Stuart Russell in an MIT interview suggeting that self-driving cars are where they were in the 1980's and not all that impressive, or at least until he added the caveat that in the 1980's they didn't have the sensory equipment ready or available to actually make safety possible in anything but pristine circumstances whereas now they do.
My understanding of keeping truckers at the ready is that it's an intermediary phase. One of the challenges I do see still occurring is that someone would need to deal with the customer, demurrage charges could likely be automated, if the whole system gets enough traction they could have sales associates for the trucking company on a monitor and talking to the customer's warehouse/receiving team, freight bills / BOL's would probably be electronic, and the issue of the customer trying to game or defraud the vendor could be clamped down relatively easy. One of the concerns perhaps was the complexity of a driver trying to wedge a 14 or 18 wheel rig into a loading bay with an unreasonable amount of room, turn radius, etc. and yet this is a human being trying to use side view mirrors whereas an AI truck would have sensors everywhere including at the roof of the trailer to identify the distance of objects and at other levels to make sure that positioning is right for docking.
I think maybe Uber will be ready for complete replacement of humans on jobs much quicker than heavy haul trucking companies, and especially with heavy haul I would think it will take years maybe before most state highway patrol departments are okay with trucks carrying oversized loads. Still, it's quite likely that standard commercial trucking will be so streamlined that the wages, and amount of work, will plummet in the meantime and it still leaves truckers more as technicians, likely paid much less, rather than doing their full job.
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21 Mar 2019, 8:12 pm
