To wonder what will happen when there are no iobs

[rainandfire]

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

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?

I'm sure plenty of people used to love riding their horse and cart... people will adapt.

The only way to make driverless vehicles work is to switch from one to the other in a very short timescale. The transitional period where you have both driverless and manual cars will be a nightmare. Once all road vehicles are driverless and "talking" to eachother, then it'll be fine. But if they're having to create these cars with the ability to deal with manual vehicles around them, the costs and development to facilitate that will be astronomical and unaffordable.

When people say about "what jobs" - there'll be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers needed to deal with the transition towards driverless cars. Design and manufacture of them, production, redesigning road layouts, scrappage of the old cars, maintenance of the new fleet, power generation, etc. Short term, there won't even be enough workers to enable it.

former surely people switched from horse and cart to car because it was a better experience in all sorts of ways: convenience, comfort, speed ?

But how will a driverless car be a better experience for all the people who love cars and driving. It's still a car. But without the fun bit.

But how will a driverless car be a better experience for all the people who love cars and driving. It's still a car. But without the fun bit.

I assume that, like now, people who want to drive cars for fun will be able to go to a closed circuit. For the vast majority for whom it's just a way of getting from A to B, it would be less stressful and they can get on and do something else whilst travelling.

I really don't see why people are imagining all cars would become driverless. There is no particular reason why they should do.

I really don't see why people are imagining all cars would become driverless. There is no particular reason why they should do.

One of the main drivers towards driverless is to reduce congestion and make better use of the roads, i.e. divert vehicles on different routes, set them at same speeds to avoid stop-start, "link" a line of them electronically to reduce distance between vehicles, near instantaneous reaction when cars around them have to take evasive action, etc. That whole ethos is compromised when you mix driver-less with manually driven cars. The driverless ones will have to keep themselves further away from manual ones as they won't know where they're going or what they're about to do.

That may be the ideology, but what about practically? How are you going to achieve that? Ban all cars that can be driven? That kind of control tends not to go down very well with voters.

People are mixing up technological possibilities and ideologies with practicalities. What could happen is not usually what does happen, in the end.

People are mixing up technological possibilities and ideologies with practicalities.

The practicalities have to be considered from the outset. Time and time again, there are good ideas, whether political, technological, or whatever, for which it's blatantly obvious that they're not practical and have all kinds of entirely foreseeable "unforeseeable" consequences - AKA common sense. Pure research and development is obviously absolutely fine and essential, but far too many people seem to miss the reality that some things are simply not going to happen, even though it's possible and probably beneficial to do them.

They are, by the people working them. They are not HERE.

I saw today in paper that at tonight's England v Germany game there will be a video referee. So in the future no bloke puffing up and down the pitch and being abused by the crowd.

Also just saw first driverless bus has just crashed...

The driverless ones will have to keep themselves further away from manual ones as they won't know where they're going or what they're about to do.

It depends on how driverless works. But I don't see it as compromising the benefits of having driverless cars on the road.
Today I drove to work and I'd rather have taken the time to have a nap or work for the whole hour I had to drive.
A driverless car could have travelled closer than me to other driven cars because its reaction time would be faster than mine.

What I would really like to see in the future is conveyor belts. All large deliveries to be moved by a series of underground conveyors to major distribution points, where they are broken down to go to smaller distribution points, and then to smaller etc etc.

I would also love to have underground conveyor belts for people too, so you step onto a slow one and move gradually to faster ones depending upon where you're going/how far it is. I envisage wide belts with the outside edges going slower and the inside track going faster. I think that one's a pipe dream, though.

The video referee does not replace a person! It means Vic screams with replay that the assistant refs can watch from the side of the pitch to give better decisions when the red is not sure/didn’t see! They already use them in Tennis & cricket

I was cogitating on this issue while reviewing some tax files today.
Frankly most of the people who think there will be no jobs due to technology merely demonstrate a spectacular unawareness of what the millions of low paid do ...

Cleaning :
Vacuum cleaners will never replace the person who actually does the tidying.
Developing an AI to scrub toilet bowls will never be economic.
Domestic staff :
How long till a robot can change the bedding in a hotel room?
How long till an AI can tidy tat up off a floor
Gardening :
A robot that can weed and deal with seedlings outdoors is still a long way off.
Agriculture :
Picking fruit and veg is done by hand - developing an AI that can distinguish between ripe and unripe strawberries is again uneconomic.
Topping and tailing sheep is not an easy one to automate
Construction :
Much groundworks are done by hand because people are cheaper than machines, even in the developed world.
Decorating houses : an AI that can hang wallpaper was well as my deccy does is a ways off
Modern buildings :
rely on an army of maintenance engineers to debug them each week

and as I say, accountants are proliferating despite the technology

That whole ethos is compromised when you mix driver-less with manually driven cars. The driverless ones will have to keep themselves further away from manual ones as they won't know where they're going or what they're about to do

This is exactly the point that you aren't getting. Unless you are somehow imagining that when the first driverless cars appear they will instantly replace every car in existence in one day, then of course there will be a mixture of driven and driverless cars! So obviously the ideal ethos HAS to be comprimised from the start.

of course there will be a mixture of driven and driverless cars

Indeed, there will, but it's that which will cause it to be decades away, as the tech needed to enable them to share roads will need to be far more advanced and complicated than if, as you say, there was an "instant" changeover, as the tech would be massively simpler and quicker to introduced if they didn't have to share. The tech may be here to have driverless cars on wide, quiet roads in Arizona, but when you put them into the typical congestion town centre, they'll probably never move - how do you program a driverless car to inch out from a side street into a queue of stop/start nose to tail traffic? It's safety measures would mean it would be stuck on the side road! How do you program a driver-less car to react to driving on a country road when it's faced with a herd of sheep coming in the opposite direction - it'll stop and wait for the hazard to move, but what it needs to do is to reverse to a passing place or past the farmer's field - will there need to be a "reverse" button on it's bonnet for the farmer to press? The tech may be here, but the practicalities are decades away, that's why we don't need to worry about driverless cars any time soon.

Which is what I have been saying from the start! People are only considering the basic idea of the tech, and not the social, economical, political and practical aspects of the implementation of the tech.

Which is why the premise of the thread "there being no jobs as they have all been automated" is so faulty.

I never knew people felt so strongly about driverless cars.

It's called having an informed opinion and talking about it properly.