To wonder what will happen when there are no iobs

[rainandfire]

When technology does everything, driving, deliveries, retail ... what will people do then?

Having seen everyone urged to get diesel cars, but now owning one - according to a recent thread - is not caring about killing children, I am a bit sceptical about electric cars. No doubt there will be some major environmental problem (nuclear fuel?) encountered and electric car owners will be the new pariahs.

Sharing a bank of cars? Well, I suppose that's employment for car valeters. There's no way I'm setting off on holiday (holiday? how so when I'm only on a citizen's wage!) in a crumb-ridden, coffee-sodden, vomit-splattered, dog-haired car pool vehicle.

Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a venture to merge the human brain with AI God help us all.

I drove an hour to work today.
Lovely roads through beautiful countryside.
Why would I want to hand the controls to the car ?
AND
My destination was small and remote.
So a driverless car would have to wait there all day for me
OR
I'd have to book it half an hour in advance of my departure time to come and get me.

And I'm in a different town every day.

So a driverless car would have to wait there all day for me

As your car already is?

And driverless cars could easily have the option of switching to driver. Why not?

While we are speculating about driverless cars, apparently flying taxis are under development. From a technology point of view, I suppose they must be a lot easier than driverless cars. (Not many obstacles to crash into on a pre-planned flight path.)

Uber has taken a step forward in its plan to make autonomous “flying taxis” a reality, signing a contract with Nasa to develop the software to manage them.

The company’s chief product officer, Jeff Holden, announced the new service contract at Web Summit in Lisbon, alongside its intention to begin testing four-passenger, 200mph UberAir flying taxi services across Los Angeles in 2020, its second test market in the US after Dallas.

Uber said its flying taxi service would be purely electric and that a journey that would take 80 minutes by car in rush-hour traffic could be reduced to as little as four minutes. Uber intends to have some form of its air service operational for the 2028 LA Olympics, but experts remain sceptical as to whether autonomous flying taxis will ever become a reality.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/uber-signs-contract-nasa-develop-flying-taxi-software

Truly driverless cars are on the roads already, and will be picking up passengers in a few months.
www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-selfdriving/alphabets-waymo-to-launch-robotaxis-with-no-human-in-drivers-seat-idUSKBN1D72BU

Why assume that driverless cars will also be ‘ownerless’? Why can’t you have your own driverless car in the same way that you have your current car? OK, initially they’ll be expensive but the price will come down as it does with every innovation - when I was a teen the idea that communicators you could carry about with you, one which was your vety own, was as bonkers as the idea that computers could belong to individuals.

I shall eventually have my own driverless car, it will happen in my lifetime. I’m nearly 60 btw. They’ll be here in the next 5-10years.

One good motivation not to own a driverless car is the issue of liability. If you own a driverless car and it crashes into something, causing some damage, who picks up the bill? How about if your home wi-fi was faulty and therefore the car missed a software update?
If the cars are owner by the manufacturer or a fleet operator, and leased to you on demand, then this is much simpler.

It is not technology that takes over people's jobs. Look at the UK back in 1980. I would bet that coal miners, bus conductors and milkmen were not worried about robots taking their jobs, and yet they have all but disappeared. There were 237,000 miners in 1980, just 6,000 in 2010. In 1980 89% of household milk was delivered, in 2015 it was less than 3%. Mind you there were no web designers, app developers, people designing, making and selling mobile phones and satnavs etc. In 30 years time many current occupations will have disappeared and people will be employed doing jobs we can not dream of today.

Haven’t RTFT but it sounds like you listened to the interview with James Burke on Radio 4 (I’m sure it’s a podcast now). It was fascinating and he advocated a universal benefit payment.

not good news for self-driving vehicles!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41923814

it was the other driver's fault, but illustrates the point about mixing drivers/driverless vehicles.

This fundamentally misunderstands human nature (in a capitalist society at least). Anyone with money will want a private car if only because it is more expensive and thereby shows their status and wealth.

Thorstein Veblen.

Ifailed, you did fail.

From the article you linked to:

"Experts have said that even with these incidents, self-driving technology is already capable of making our roads significantly safer. A study from the RAND Corporation, published this week, argued that self-driving technology should be rolled out despite its imperfections."

Nobody is going to tell a new driver they shouldn't be on the road if they are involved in an accident caused by another driver.
If the accidents were not caused by driverless vehicles why is it driverless technology that shouldn't be deployed?
If anything, it shows humans (some) shouldn't be on the road.

If the accidents were not caused by driverless vehicles why is it driverless technology that shouldn't be deployed?

Depends on whether a human driver could have done something to avoid a collision caused by someone else. Eg re the Lag Vegas bus, perhaps a human driver would have sounded his horn to warn the truck driver? Perhaps they could have swerved around it? Perhaps they could have quickly put it in reverse to pull away? Do the driverless vehicles do this, or are they just programmed to stop?

I predict future generations will look back in shock that there were road deaths in the past. They will be horrified and amazed that children had to be taught road safety and that some still lost their life.

Predictions are always difficult especially ones about the future!
Fascinating subject but who knows🤖

Relative is high up in major haulage firm. He was saying that driverless lorries are definitely in the pipeline, and automated unloading/loading of vehicles.

I think future jobs will mostly be in the so-called "gig" economy, ie in bits and pieces. For example, there won't be steady lorry-driver jobs (as it is, a lot have been made to go self-employed) but people will still need removal men on an ad hoc basis, and there will be small delivery jobs. And this goes for many other spheres of work.

I was watching Babylon Berlin (German Netflix thing) set in 1929 and in large office admin workers (women) crowded the foyer in the morning leaping in the air to get the jobs for the day. Similarly to docks etc in the past where they hired men by the day.

I shall eventually have my own driverless car, it will happen in my lifetime. I’m nearly 60 btw. They’ll be here in the next 5-10years

They absolutely one hundred per cent will not.

Doesn't the theory that the roads will only be used by driverless cars ignore the fact that so many people love cars and driving?

Lots of people are huge petrol heads. And most high end cars are either manual or have a shift mechanism to turn an automatic car to manual because the owners want to drive them.

I suppose what I'm saying is that people will only spend their money on tech that adds to their existence. And that can mean cheaper or easier or quicker but it can also mean more fun.

I think, if anything, it'll be public transport that's redundant if driverless cars ever become the norm. Why wait in the rain for a bus/train, which inevitably starts and finishes some distance from your home/destination, when you can hail a door-to-door driverless taxi if pricing is similar?

Turn bus stations into maintenance/charging stations and railway tracks into super-fast driver-less car highways to get from town to town at very high speeds in the safety of a fenced off, virtually straight, corridor.

Why assume that driverless cars will also be ‘ownerless’? Why can’t you have your own driverless car in the same way that you have your current car?

I think some people will own driverless cars, no reason other than cost why they shouldn't.

Assume a privately owned driverless car will do 12,000 miles a year, and assume (in absence of better info) that it will cost the same to buy and run as a current car, then using HMRC mileage rates that works out at an average of 42p per mile.

The same car doing 40K a year (what I think a London Uber driver would do if they worked every day) would cost 28p per mile.

So owning should not be outrageously more expensive than using taxis. It comes down to mileage, the closer people's mileage to whatever a driverless taxi clocks up, the less the premium for owning.

So I take back what I said up-thread about 99% of driverless cars being taxis. I still think more than half will be, but there's still room for substantial private ownership.

I predict that all of these predictions will be wrong

Oooh, good idea badbadbunny! Love that use of tracks!

Ok, crumpets, maybe not quite that fast. There’s always hope though!