Tesla is reportedly planning a reveal of its self-driving robotaxi on the Warner Bros. lot amid widespread anger in the industry over the brand’s controversial CEO, Elon Musk, resulting in a rejection of its cars.
What’s the plan when all the low skill low pay jobs are automated? With each new advancement, it doesn’t feel cool and futuristic but sad and distopian. Like we all see it…
Eventually they end up homeless and then they can be arrested?
I mean, it’s not a problem until it’s my problem, and then it’s an urgent one. Am I doing this right?
If only there was a way to Know the crisis is here…
And it’s fully constitutional to enslave convicts. So tons of free labor for every company who wants it, and then I guess export everything they help to make since nobody here can buy anything?
I often wonder this. Who do these companies think will be paying for their goods and services when nobody can afford them? And a little further down that stretch, when they pay so little that working full time still doesn’t cover rent and groceries, who will bother with showing up to work at all? If you’re gonna be homeless and starving anyway, might as well just own your own time and find your own food and shelter on your own terms.
I don’t think they understand that if they exploit much harder, they’ll be causing a societal collapse that will render their power meaningless. They’re stripmining both America’s labor pools and consumer pools in one fell swoop, and they won’t be invited to neighboring mines afterward. And then the most capable people will understand what is happening and leave, so only poor, uneducated, and underskilled people will remain. Basically Mississippi, but for the whole country.
Death for poor people thru war, disease, or famine.
Classic story.
This would be a good opportunity to highlight free education and/or technical certification for all. Whether it be college (white collar), trade school (blue collar), or something else, an educated work force will be well-equipped to handle such dramatic shifts in advancement.
free education
Best I can do is siphon more tax dollars away for private education.
Can we parlay this into some school vouchers?
Yes, but they’re expired because the private school they were for closed due to due to being forced to accept more low-income students.
If you’re not aware, look up the automation paradox: https://ideas.ted.com/will-automation-take-away-all-our-jobs/
Every* automation advancement has lead to an increase in employment, not decrease. Most often jobs in the immediate sector are lost, but the rise in supporting sector jobs are bolstered.
Classic examples are the cotton mill and combine harvester. The number of agricultural workers declined, but the number of jobs processing agricultural product increased. Or with ATMs, the number of tellers needed per bank location decreased, but the total employment in the banking sector increased (banks opened more branches, namely in places where it was previously cost prohibitive).
As more things are automated, what’s being automated becomes cheaper and more prolific, often increasing (or creating) new opportunities. There are so many historic examples of this, it’s hard to justify “this time is different” predictions… Even for things like AI automating white collar jobs.
*Edit: almost every. It depends a bit on how you count the secondary jobs, and where those are located (automation combined with offshoring results in a net decline in some countries, but increase overall).
I think the underlying dynamic there is that automation in one industry led to cheaper goods, which led to consumer savings, which led to greater demand, which led to increased employment in other industries that eventually absorbed the displaced workers.
The differences with the current situation are that, firstly, decades of corporate consolidation have reduced competition and enabled automators to channel most of the savings to corporate profits instead of lower prices; and secondly, the fact that automation is affecting the whole economy at once instead of a specific industry means that an economy-wide increase in demand doesn’t cause a corresponding increase in the demand for labor.
So if the difference is corporate consolidation… Sounds like that’s the real underlying issue then, not automation.
Economics has well established that monopolistic behavior by firms harms consumers & the overall economy (that’s why we have anti-trust laws in the first place).
Don’t conflate the one problem with another, as I agree the erosion of anti-trust laws is a bad thing and needs to be reversed. But that doesn’t mean firms further automating things is now also bad.
I’d also say “automation affecting the whole economy at once” isn’t unique. The industrial revolution was not isolated to one industry, its effects were economy-wide. Also true for the transportation revolution (trains & steam boats moved everything), telecommunications, and the internet…
No one’s been arguing against automation per se—the comment you originally replied to was asking what the plan was after automation. Because the marginal effect of automation in the current economy, if corporations are left to their own devices, stands to harm as many as it benefits.
And yes, the industrial revolution isn’t a bad parallel for what we’re potentially facing now. It brought about some of the most miserable conditions working people have ever endured short of slavery, and it took the labor movement several bloody generations to end the worst of it.
Recent studies suggest the science on this is less clear than that TED talk suggests. So I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on either the idea that automation will or won’t take away net jobs.
They can’t get their cars to self-drive on their own closed-loop tunnel in Vegas, but they’re revealing a car with no steering wheel…
Tesla is a marketing company at this point
Honest question. At what point will Tesla execs look at Musk and decide that keeping him at the helm is not in the company’s best interests?
The board recommended that shareholders vote to give him his 50 something billion compensation package and move the incorporation to Texas. Shareholders seemed divided on the package award due to his erratic behavior, that there isn’t a dedicated captain of the Tesla ship (among other things such as shareholder governance) - but he got the package.
Hopefully they’re taking a harder look after sales took a massive hit, the Cyberturd launch was a flop and vehicles are filling lots unsold. I’m not holding my breath though.
I’m looking forward to the Tesla “Loss” memes.
They just decided he should be paid $56 billion dollars for his contribution… So, not anytime soon
I mean, he’s been doing stupid shit the past decade and REALLY stupid shit the last few years… and yet the shareholders STILL voted to approve his 50 billion dollar bonus from the execs.
This suggests that many stockholders are fanboys.
Wild guess, early 2025?
Trump is heading towards a loss. Trump is likely to do some really stupid (and dangerous) things between losing and inauguration. Musk is likely to help facilitate.
He’s either going to do something really stupid and just get cut off or quickly backtrack and get weirdly quiet, followed by a “graceful” exit.
Musk can suck a dick. What a piece of fucking trash.
I have a lot of safety questions about a driverless taxi. Unless the car gets inspected between every ride (doubtful), what’s to stop someone from staying in the car past their stop? Will I get jumped by the previous passenger? What if someone left something dangerous in it? People innocently forget things all the time, which sucks on its own, but malicious actors could easily exploit an unmanned public(ish) vehicle.
Hell, who cleans it? If someone vomited on their trip home from a bar, will I be greeted by their mess when the taxi comes to me? From what I know of people, rules for passengers can and will be swiftly ignored without a driver in charge to make sure the rules are followed. Cameras wouldn’t stop everything, and honestly, who would want to be monitored by a camera throughout a taxi ride?
It’s obvious that Elon’s never ridden in a taxi in his life.
Sure but those are solvable. Personally I’m nowhere near as optimistic about the self-driving. I hope we eventually get it and current tech is truly amazing but it’s just not acceptable.
So far self-driving has mainly proven
- driving is all edge cases. Handling normal conditions is only the starting point
- it’s all about liability. Even if it’s provably safer than human driving, what human will accept their loved ones being killed by a self-driving car and what manufacturer will shoulder that liability?
They already exist in San Francisco: https://waymo.com/waymo-one-san-francisco/
Not sure they’ve been around long enough for the problems you suggested to come up.
Okay, dweeb lord.
Everyone cool just pays Elon for the vomit taxi.
There are cameras in the cab. In the event of someone vomiting in the cab, it’ll be taken out of rotation and cleaned.
But how does the company know that someone vomited? There aren’t smell sensors, and even if there are enough cameras to get a view of the floor, the tech for detecting spills and other issues is not really there yet. Unless you think a person is going to remotely inspect each vehicle between each ride. But that seems highly unlikely. If a company is not wanting to spend money on a driver, then they aren’t going to spend money on someone to watch the cameras at all times. The point is they don’t want to hire people at all. Just have computers that don’t have to take bathroom breaks or food breaks or have any downtime and can work in unpleasant conditions. Customer service is a big part of what drivers do, even if that doesn’t mean talking to the customers directly, just knowing how to make then comfortable, not just the driving. If it’s just the driving, then public transportation makes more sense to automate than individual cars.
I’m guessing it’s done in part by customer feedback? If I order a cab and it’s not a condition I would approve of to ride in, I should have the ability to flag that cab at which point it’s pulled out of the rotation until it’s in a suitable condition for service.
Yeah, not the best service though, if the customer now has to wait for another cab. It will end up like how often I get opened, likely returned items from Amazon a lot these days because they just put returns back in the pile even if they were returned for defects or were returned after opening/use.
They don’t care to fix the problem and rely on enough people accepting the defective items eventually, because it’s too much trouble for them to return. But it’s a pain in the butt for someone who wants a new, non-defective item and has to return things all the time. I so often don’t get what I paid for the first time so with anything I order for a project, I always have to figure in double the time for it to arrive so I can get a replacement.
So, I’d rather have a human driver monitoring it so that I get a clean cab the first time rather than having to budget the time for getting to my destination so a second cab can arrive in case the first is too unsanitary to handle.
I think you have to weigh the probabilities.
Are vomit cabs really so frequent that we need a human present at all times just to avoid a single failed pickup?
Providing X free rides after an incident is likely more economical than a full time human vomit detector.
I’m in the market for an electric car. I won’t even consider a Tesla. Mostly because of Musk, and partly because of the shit build quality.
I remember seeing reports that Tesla models outside of the cybertruck have tanked. Goes to show which assholes are still clinging to this turd of a brand. Btw I saw that the panels above the door are glued to the body. Lol
Enjoy your shit cars folks.
It’s honestly quite sad to see what the brand has become. I have a model 3 that I got back when elon was just weirdo that smoked weed on rogan’s show and made sophomoric sex jokes. My car is a solid vehicle that feels fun to drive. There were a lot of really talented engineers that built a great product. I’d never buy another though.
So basically they’re telling Elon to go fuck himself?
Nice. There are other options, but pulling a drive train out of one and putting it in a better car will become cheaper.
OP link got hugged to death
The entire problem with Musk is people giving him an audience, every twit turning into a headline. Y’all are still doing it. Make any car purchasing decisions on what is right for you, rather than the ramblings of some celebrity. He has a right to an opinion but we don’t have to listen to it. Stop listening.
And here’s where everyone jumps all over me …… evaluate the car on its own merits. Personally I found a Tesla still the best EV available where I live, for the best price, and with similar quality to any other vehicle.
The internet also has way too short of attention span. Try to remember a few years back where Tesla was first struggling to scale up production of Model 3. There were many mistakes, many issues, poor build quality. But it’s like every other Tesla/SpaceX product: build something ambitious, test in public or even on customers, crash and burn until you get it right, continually increment. They have worked out their production issues, have continually incremented, and current products are much better than the ones from those headlines. Be open minded enough to make your decision on what you see now
And here’s where everyone jumps all over me …… evaluate the car on its own merits.
One of the car’s merits (or not) is resale value. Musk’s bullshit is highly related to that merit. Another merit (or not) is reliability, and again Musk’s bullshit is highly related to that merit.
Like it or not, people will make purchasing decisions based upon these (and other) things.
Cars are as much a trendy fashion piece for many as they are an item you use to get to places. I mean the grade-school thinking of this dude had him spell out “S3XY” with his car models…so, Tesla and its board are aware of this and have benefited from it. But it’s a double-edged sword, if you’re buying a car as a fashion symbol, you stand a high risk of it becoming pretty worthless if it goes out of style.
Leon had the chance to be the Steve Jobs of EVs, and was for a while. But a cult of personality is also a double-edged sword, and he made the mistake of letting his innermost dumpster fire edgelord personality roam into the public sphere.
