alt Hacker News"safety" is usually the first point out of the mouth of a self-driving advocate. If safety = preservation of life, I wonder how truly "safe" full Waymo supremacy would be when there are millions of Americans who drive for a living [1], in a country where working age adults need a full-time job to get basic healthcare.
Through that lens, I honestly don't know if Waymo's future would lead to preservation of life. I actually think it might increase physical harm to Americans, only that harm is laundered out of our roadways and into our failing healthcare system.
This is an important aspect of any tech that threatens whole sectors of employment.. "safety" is always thrown into question when you cut & consolidate economic lifelines without a societal safety net. If it happens to truckers it can happen to you, too.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps... This article lists 3.5 MILLION truckers, not even counting rideshare drivers and other CDL holders.
Replies
You can say the same for most of the technology progress. For example, self-propelled combine harvesters caused mass migration of Americans in 1940s from rural areas to cities because they were out of job. With your logic, it should have not happened.
The better approach is to ask government to come up with a solutions that does not involve limiting science and tech.
I fundamentally agree with you, but at the same time I don't want the answer to be preserving labor sinks when the answer could instead be more fairly distributing the value produced by labor so that we just don't need to work as much in the first place.
Should we have also not cheered on electric computers replacing all the expensive, skilled mathematician/computing jobs that used to exist? Keypunch operators? Telephone switchboard operators? Advanced printers replacing the vast majority of the typesetting work and tons of maintenance involved with early printers? Bowling Pinspotters? Tollbooth collectors?
Should we smash the machines in the factories and go back to everything being handmade? Get rid of the pick-and-place machines for our electronics and have everything hand-soldered on hand-drawn boards? Think of the jobs!
I hear these new-fangled steam locomotives can move as much freight as hundreds of horse-drawn carts. That's hundreds of jobs being replaced by just a few on the train. Think of the jobs for all those horse drivers, all the barn workers, and more!
There are tons of jobs that used to exist that don't anymore. Many were very common. We used to have to pay people to go light all the street lights. Can you imagine having to pay an army of people to walk all the city streets every night to go light all the lights and every morning to extinguish them?
To be fair, I am a bit of a skeptic of driverless cars taking over 100% of the driving industry. I think as long as roads are open to the public there will be some humans behind the wheel. There's probably just going to be enough "odd" kinds of transportation needs that don't map well to the automation that cover 90% of people and trips just fine.
If health care is the only problem, then Medicare for all is the solution. We can have better health care and possibly fewer automobile deaths.
It is yet to be seen whether waymo can really drive everywhere that humans drive, though.