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I'll chime in with regards to one concern with self-driving cars someone brought up: cyclists.

I am one(when I'm not being a lazy bus user), I don't drive, I don't even have a valid license. I also think most car drivers act like inconsiderate c***s around cyclists on the road, using the tiny, fractional minority of bad cyclists as an excuse to treat all cyclists like gak because car drivers often think they own the roads(sitting right on your back wheel revving at lights, purposefully passing as close as possible, blaring their horn when passing for no actual reason to try and make you jump - I've been screamed at, had lit cigarettes thrown at me, and had drivers slow down to spit on me, all this happens at a far higher rate than anybody I know experiences gakky behaviour from other drivers when they're in cars themselves, and I'm a careful cyclist).

All that said, I'd rather we spent less money trying to teach AI drivers to recognise cyclists(thought it's nice to see they're at least thinking about that kind of thing, I guess corporations worrying about liability end up being more considerate than normal people in some circumstances), and more developing parallel infrastructure. Right now I'm firmly of the view that the car vs bikes issue is mostly down to the subset of people driving the cars who hold cycling and public transport in active contempt(the Top Gear, Clarksonite sect), but if the cars start being driven by AI's the fact of the matter is it would be the cyclists puttering along under flawed human control who would become the primary danger to road safety.

Yet we're still designing or reworking roads without even considering putting dedicated cycle lanes in(and by dedicated, I mean not just some lines half-arsedly painted on next to the kerb that most drivers just ignore, I mean an actual distinct lane physically separated from the main roadway with a kerb of its own). Frankly AI cars need more than just cleverer coding, they should be prompting a fundamental review of how we construct, maintain, and renovate our transport infrastructure, but the political side of things doesn't seem remotely interested in that aspect.

Here's another one - livestock and horses.
In the countryside many a farmer still crosses the road with cattle and sheep; horse rider still use the roads and there's always potential of an escape. The riding community is actually getting rather hot on drivers at present as even the country lanes are getting more and more filled with traffic and often fast moving traffic (its not just all those Amazon and other delivery companies running around all hours of the day - its regular public too).

Sure the machine will be able to detect a horse and rider (or horse and walker and should be able to tell it from other animals; however can it detect if the horse is getting agitated or worried about the car. A driver would be expected to back off; to even keep moving until a hand signal allows them to safely pass; would the machine keep trying to push through - or even miss the hand signal and end up stalking the horse and rider until they entered a road that allowed the car to move past with a full cars width


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 Yodhrin wrote:
.

Yet we're still designing or reworking roads without even considering putting dedicated cycle lanes in(and by dedicated, I mean not just some lines half-arsedly painted on next to the kerb that most drivers just ignore, I mean an actual distinct lane physically separated from the main roadway with a kerb of its own). Frankly AI cars need more than just cleverer coding, they should be prompting a fundamental review of how we construct, maintain, and renovate our transport infrastructure, but the political side of things doesn't seem remotely interested in that aspect.

The problem is space and too many drivers.
Ignoring the issues with widening roads in the countryside where they might wind and wriggle around a lot; even in urban areas there's only so much space on the roads; and they are already full of cars. Many of the infrastructure issues we see are mostly because the roads are simply bloated with too many vehicles.

In the UK especially we stripped out our rail networks so now all freight has to go via lorries; and it makes everyone rely on cars to get to a large number of places*. Honestly self driving cars are a nice idea; but they'd only make the problem even worse as they'd encourage everyone to be on the roads. Even if we all downsized to smart-cars there'd still be a huge amount of traffic on road networks.

Personally I'd rather see them address that issue much more so to the point where instead of building MORE infrastructure we could consider taking some down.


*to say nothing of the fact that ticket prices for train travel are rather nuts. Discounts can be found if you book months in advance; trawl through multiple websites and accept that you'll have a rather odd route and have to carry a dozen tickets.

It will have to be an absolutely fundamental flaw, because all the different models of cars will be running different software on different processors.

And if they talk they will be easier to hack.

Just Tony wrote:The point is that the machine couldn't make a judgment call in that situation, and the babysitter inside the car failed to, more than likely out of complacency. Will this drive the AI field to try to make reactionary software? Probably, but it's still a black eye that the tech doesn't need right now.

I don't think it'll be a big problem for the industry in general. Self-driving cars are still a bit away and that's Uber we're talking about here. They were sued by a Google subsidiary for stealing AI tech for their cars and they were already caught illegally testing self-driving cars (I think in California). As a company they seem to live in perpetual panic mode. They got big VC funding that they used to subsidise their drivers and undercut regular taxi services (so they could show "customer adoption" and "growth" to the next batch of investors) while in parallel developing their self-driving car tech (swiping stuff from Google and partnering with Carnegie Mellon University before hiring the whole department away). They are aggressively trying to get it working because they need to make their own drivers obsolete if they ever want to see profitability. And before that they need to be able to show some sort of progress to their potential future investors or the company will just crash and burn. Nobody's going to invest in a company that's burning through billions a year without seeing some possibility of profit in the future.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But who do you hold responsible for the accident?

At what point does the AI mean the driver is simply a passenger? If your vehicle is determined to be the cause of an accident - is the manufacturer responsible, or the programmer? Where does the true liability lie? Where does the causal break kick in?

I think it will prompt a shift away from blame focused settlements. Afterall, if drivers are now just passengers there's no moral hazard argument that we would be failing to punish reckless driving. At the same time, I doubt large car manufacturers would be happy selling a car, taking a nice profit now but being liable for that car for the next 20 or 30 years. So they would also prefer a model where a state road fund compensates victims, and it is paid in to by some combination of a tax on the sale of each car, and fees paid along with registration.


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 Kilkrazy wrote:
Perhaps car manufacturers will accept liability as standard, and form a mututal fund to compensate victims. Criminal interference with the safety programming will invalidate this of course, but we have people driving without insurance or valid licences right now.

This opens up issues on right to repair. If I have the manufacturer or their approved dealer service my car, I'll pay five times what I should. If I go to Dave on the corner, and then the car has an accident, I understand the manufacturer wanting nothing to do with the accident.

Bit of a mess, potentially.

 sebster wrote:
This opens up issues on right to repair. If I have the manufacturer or their approved dealer service my car, I'll pay five times what I should. If I go to Dave on the corner, and then the car has an accident, I understand the manufacturer wanting nothing to do with the accident.

Bit of a mess, potentially.

I literally just got an email from my company (a large manufacturer) stating they were officially supporting Right to Repair, and then stating specific bullet points they opposed, which was pretty much everything Right to Repair encompasses. So, they support Right to Repair by coming out against any legislation that would give that any useful meaning. Heh.

The specific exceptions they stated were safety, as well as conforming to emissions standards and so on.

Bit of a sticky widget, as I believe the British say.

 Ouze wrote:
I literally just got an email from my company (a large manufacturer) stating they were officially supporting Right to Repair, and then stating specific bullet points they opposed, which was pretty much everything Right to Repair encompasses.

Heh. Sounds about right

So, they support Right to Repair by coming out against any legislation that would give that any useful meaning. Heh.

The specific exceptions they stated were safety, as well as conforming to emissions standards and so on.

There's a level of sympathy I have for companies on the issue. You build something incredibly complex, then just letting any random person tinker away at it opens a whole can of worms. And as I understand it if the company has a policy of allowing anyone to repair the product, but those repairs regularly create safety failures, the company is liable.

However, obviously we can't have a world where every product I buy can only be fixed by the stupidly expensive manufacturer's own service. I owned a Honda and got angry enough paying extra because the only available parts were manufacturer built, I can't imagine being a farmer having to fly out a John Deere serviceman at a cost of tens of thousands, with a three day wait while the crop goes unplanted.

So there needs to be some other kind of solution, somehow.

Bit of a sticky widget, as I believe the British say.

Sticky wicket. Its a cricket reference, the wicket is a term for the 22 yards of turf that form the main playing area, with the batsman at one end and the bowler at the other. The bowler will bowl the ball in to the wicket, and in normal conditions the batsman can expect a somewhat consistent bounce off the wicket as he tries to hit the ball. But sometimes rain will affect the pitch - a wet pitch can be quite inconsistent, often the ball will hit a spot and bounce normally, then hit seemingly the same spot and hardly bounce at all, making it very hard to play. So a sticky wicket is a situation that is very difficult, with all sorts of traps and surprises lurking in there.

Thanks - TIL

I get the concerns around liability, but surely it is the same as other industries and comes down to public liability insurance?

For example, I need some electrical work done to my house. You would never go back to the original builders (unless it was a brand new house in a warranty period), but you employ a trained and registered electrician.

If something goes wrong with the electrics and burns my house down, it’s the responsibility of the electrician and I sue their ass off. If they are a responsible company, they have public liability insurance that covers such incidents or, if they were negligent, they go to jail.

I think the key bit is around mechanics having to be trained and registered, which, at the moment (and as far as I can see), isn’t as rigorous as other safety critical trades. (For example, in the UK we have a “gas safe” register of technicians qualified to work on domestic gas appliances.). Of course, self-driving cars are a tad more complex, which makes the qualification more difficult.

To be honest, the easiest way out maybe to change the whole way we think about car ownership; rather than literally buying a self-driving car, some form of lease arrangement may be more practical. The manufacturer/supplier retains responsibility for correct maintenance as part of the package.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Counter argument there is that a flaw in programming is unlikely to cause just a single accident...

Indeed. This is why automated cars are a bad idea. Manufacturing defects with a driverless car will result in far worse levels of damage than defects can currently cause with regular cars. Frankly, I would think that car companies wouldn't want to touch self-driving cars for this reason. All the liability would be on their shoulders as the manufacturer for both general construction as well as day to day actions that the car takes, as opposed to regular cars where you can pass the buck to the driver or on failed maintenance.

And even if you force driverless cars to always have a human be able to take control of the vehicle, in situations like this one it won't do any good. The human would never realize the car is making an error till it is too late.

Furthermore, you will have issues while trying to transition to a purely driverless car society. Driverless cars reducing accidents as an idea is entirely dependent on ALL cars being driverless. When there is a mix of driverless and regular, then things will likely become more dangerous due to ripple effects like a driverless car misinterpreting a human driver's actions causing a sudden braking, which results in another human driver plowing into the driverless car. Or a driverless car failing to detect an obstacle which is approaching out of its sensor detection.

Basically, the idea of all cars being driverless is good in a vacuum. But it is impossible to actually implement in practice without somehow magically transforming all cars at the same time. Otherwise, you're just going to have a massive amount of carnage on the journey there, which will sour everybody on the idea.

I know it´s bad taste but this is the first thing that came to mind:

Skynet just killed John Connor´s mother.


Despite this accident, automation won´t stop. Mankind will make itself superfluous in the end just to save a few bucks.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Otherwise, you're just going to have a massive amount of carnage on the journey there, which will sour everybody on the idea.

As opposed to the even more massive carnage of cars with human drivers that we take for granted?

I think automation is the future. Of course it is. Never mind the industrial revolution. Go back further than the agricultural revolution. Since records began, man has been finding ways to make things just that little bit easier. Slightly more efficient.

Early industrial stuff is shockingly unsafe - but modern equivalents, not so much when used properly (obviously anyone sticking their diddler in an active toaster is going to have a very bad day).

All this demonstrates is that the technology is still in its teething phase. That so few accidents have occurred is really quite remarkable when you think about it.

And the very risks involved to the programming company is going to mean they do a good job. Lets, for a moment, assume that Google become the dominant force in vehicular AI, yeah? If there's a fatal flaw, and their software is in 90% of self-driving vehicles....that's a helluva class action lawsuit, and not one they could ever successfully defend.

So it's in the interests of those developing this technology to be exceptionally thorough.

To be fair one reason a lot of early industrial stuff was shockingly unsafe was because many of those in power didn't actually care "too much" about their workers.

In farming it was also made worse because many farm labourers were paid in cider, so they'd be operating machines whilst intoxicated.

 Strg Alt wrote:

Despite this accident, automation won´t stop. Mankind will make itself superfluous in the end just to save a few bucks.

Depends. There will also be more jobs, and many jobs are not going anywhere for a very long time. Many process driven jobs will be going, but more problem solving jobs will say. People talk about low paid jobs, but I can see more high level jobs going. For example, I can see the industry I work in accountancy, being gutted. Most of accounting is fixing errors by other people. Once we start to automate a lot more of the input it will have a big impact. Like printing, graphic design and technical drawing 50 years ago with the advent of the computer, many jobs will go and only the most demanding (ad best paid) will stay. Equally however I cannot see jobs like plumbers and electricians going anywhere anytime soon.

However this may mean we see mass unemployment, or it may be that we see a shift in employment, with different jobs being done, or possibly reduction in working hours. 200 years ago many people worked 10-12 hours a day 7 days a week. 100 years ago people were more likely to work a 6 day week and 8 hours a day, with no holidays. Now in the developed world 5 day weeks and paid holidays are the norm. I can see us going to 6 hour days with more holidays, or a 4 day working week.

 Overread wrote:
In farming it was also made worse because many farm labourers were paid in cider, so they'd be operating machines whilst intoxicated.

To be fair most people were half cut from drinking up to 10 pints of small beer a day.

Another angle is that machine built production lines work great; until you want to change the production design. Right now this requires an almost full rebuild of the factory, which make any serious redesign of a product a major investment and undertaking for any company.

Now if you've got human operators and builders you can instead just give them the new schematics; train them up and in a fraction of the time and cost the design can be altered significantly.


So automation isn't always a cost saving venture, esp when viewed in the very long term. OF course part of this is the complexity of the machines involved and one can envision that production machines in the future will be more easily adapted to new designs and even new functions. So its a wobbly line of advance rather than a single clear cut path.


Work is indeed an issue and it wouldn't surprise me if we might even reach a point in the west where we consider paying most people a standard fixed living wage; enough to support rent rates and bills. Ergo that work would be on-top of that payment. Thus making a lot more low end low pay work viable for people to undertake so that people remain in employment; that the system keeps working whilst being paid for by the larger income generated from efficient factories, production and high end business that generates vast incomes but has fewer job opportunities. Esp in the light of rising world populations (even if western nations are actually decreasing in many native populations the overall world trend is for more migration and greater population increase)

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Early industrial stuff is shockingly unsafe - but modern equivalents, not so much when used properly (obviously anyone sticking their diddler in an active toaster is going to have a very bad day).

You specify active. So as long as I make sure the power is off it's pretty good?

All this demonstrates is that the technology is still in its teething phase. That so few accidents have occurred is really quite remarkable when you think about it.

Definitely. It's rare for brand new kinds of tech to be this much of an improvement even at the first roll out, and we're still years away.

I would have thought normally tech like this would spend a long period grinding its way up from simple applications. They have self driving rigs out on the mines now, but I'd have thought it'd be years before lessons learned there were applied to more complex environments, only reaching passenger cars after many years. But at the same time this stuff is being rolled out commerically on mines, we already have prototypes working as well or better than human drivers in real world tests.

Maybe this tech is coming fast because humans are so crap at driving, it was a very low bad for cars to beat?

And the very risks involved to the programming company is going to mean they do a good job. Lets, for a moment, assume that Google become the dominant force in vehicular AI, yeah? If there's a fatal flaw, and their software is in 90% of self-driving vehicles....that's a helluva class action lawsuit, and not one they could ever successfully defend.

I guess there's two sides to this. Looking at the air bag company that went bust when the recalls for a massive number of their products started rolling in, we can see the risk of a massive, company wide product failure. Put across a whole car industry, and with lives lost it could bankrupt even Google. So the fact that all these huge companies are piling in implies they must be very confident their cars will not fail to those risks.

But the flipside is that airbag manufacturer was probably very confident as well

 sebster wrote:


Sticky wicket. Its a cricket reference, the wicket is a term for the 22 yards of turf that form the main playing area, with the batsman at one end and the bowler at the other. The bowler will bowl the ball in to the wicket, and in normal conditions the batsman can expect a somewhat consistent bounce off the wicket as he tries to hit the ball. But sometimes rain will affect the pitch - a wet pitch can be quite inconsistent, often the ball will hit a spot and bounce normally, then hit seemingly the same spot and hardly bounce at all, making it very hard to play. So a sticky wicket is a situation that is very difficult, with all sorts of traps and surprises lurking in there.

Cricket! I always thought it was a Croquet reference!

Foiled again!

....as for self-driving cars. I beleive Self-Driving Trucks have all ready been deployed int he Atlanta area as well.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-selfdriving-waymo/waymos-self-driving-trucks-to-haul-cargo-for-google-in-atlanta-idUSKCN1GL20W

I think the bigger threat from automation is that our society/culture is not ready for all the job losses for blue collar works that are coming. That will lead to political and economic uncertainity which will lead to violence like we saw at the dawn of the labor movement.

I for one am ready for Anarchist Bombers to make a comeback..... maybe they all ready have?

I think the main issue is that it's hard to really blame someone, there's no catharsis in "Bloody robot killed my grandma".

is not ready for all the job losses for blue collar works that are coming

There'll be new ones. If mankind is good at anything it's inventing bs jobs so that technical advances never actually reduce the amount of time that people spend at work. We all know that ideally Mr. Robot would do everything so we had leisure time all day, but that's never going to happen. So, taxi drivers, prepare to become Managers of Phone Desinfection (although, as the HHGTTG told us: those guys are really important).

 sebster wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Early industrial stuff is shockingly unsafe - but modern equivalents, not so much when used properly (obviously anyone sticking their diddler in an active toaster is going to have a very bad day).

You specify active. So as long as I make sure the power is off it's pretty good?

Are you just now discovering you are a latent appliance fetishist?

Automation is on the horizon. Elevators used to driven by people at first, too.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Frankly, I would think that car companies wouldn't want to touch self-driving cars for this reason.

And yet, Ford, GM, BMW, VW, Mercedes, Volvo and other companies besides are ALL developing driverless cars right now.


I think the key difference between what manufacturers are doing, and what Uber was doing, is that manufacturers have a better idea of their liabilities (I mean hell, Uber's entire business model is predicated on breaking the law) and are approaching driverless cars with an air of caution and the idea of preventing things like the OP from happening in the first place.

XuQishi wrote:
I think the main issue is that it's hard to really blame someone, there's no catharsis in "Bloody robot killed my grandma".

is not ready for all the job losses for blue collar works that are coming

There'll be new ones. If mankind is good at anything it's inventing bs jobs so that technical advances never actually reduce the amount of time that people spend at work. We all know that ideally Mr. Robot would do everything so we had leisure time all day, but that's never going to happen. So, taxi drivers, prepare to become Managers of Phone Desinfection (although, as the HHGTTG told us: those guys are really important).

Yeah, just ask the Coal Miners!

Not sure if they are applicable. Those aren't lost jobs (as in "nobody does this anymore"), there's just somebody else who does it for a lot less in a different place. You can mine coal anywhere where there is some, a taxi driver is not something you can outsource, though. You need him here, not in China. So if the cabbie is obsolete, he's going to be obsolete everywhere very quickly, and he will have to look for a different job.
That is painful. The Ruhr area could sing you a nice song about it - but it only sucks there now because the politicians that governed it stubbornly refused to incite a change 30 years ago, when the death of the mining industry was clear; they were scared of the miner's unions and rode that dying horse way too long while making establishing new and different businesses so expensive to prop up the mining subsidies with tax money that businesses went elsewhere. The state I used to live in got a major influx of industry because the Ruhr people apparently didn't want it. Now half of it is basically a slum. Great job, guys. And that includes the unions, too. They should have fought for better education, different vocational training. Instead they fought for digging in the dirt until the money ran out. A waste of 20 years.

That said, there have never been as many people working in Germany at the same time as now, so substitution is a thing even with all the ex coal people, the failed electronics industry, the waste of the leadership in nuclear power technology (we used to be about 18 months in front of other countries science- and developmentwise there, which doesn't sound like a lot, but the guy who has it first gets to sell it first) etc. There have been lots of industries that went belly up over the last few decades here because we became to expensive to do it (just check out what a Loewe TV set costs, Loewe is the last surviving German TV maker and they do the only thing that is sustainable for them: super-luxury). Siemens screwed up mobile phone development (who wants one of those, right?), that cost thousands of jobs. In the end, however, most of the workers found something else to do or retired early. And there are tons of jobs that people wouldn't have believed to exist 20 years ago.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Otherwise, you're just going to have a massive amount of carnage on the journey there, which will sour everybody on the idea.

As opposed to the even more massive carnage of cars with human drivers that we take for granted?

Stick a bunch of driverless cars on the road now and fatalities will likely increase. At least perceptionwise.

It’s going to sort of be a prisoners dilemma situation. If we bear with the teething phase we will probably be safer, but we likely won’t. So we will end up worse off than we logically should have been.

XuQishi wrote:
I think the main issue is that it's hard to really blame someone, there's no catharsis in "Bloody robot killed my grandma".

is not ready for all the job losses for blue collar works that are coming

There'll be new ones. If mankind is good at anything it's inventing bs jobs so that technical advances never actually reduce the amount of time that people spend at work. We all know that ideally Mr. Robot would do everything so we had leisure time all day, but that's never going to happen. So, taxi drivers, prepare to become Managers of Phone Desinfection (although, as the HHGTTG told us: those guys are really important).

People keep saying this kind of thing, but it keeps not happening. The Great Job Replacement Wave is always just over the horizon of the next financial year, but what actually happens is another wave of redundancies. A lot of developed economies are hiding the extent of the issue by fudging unemployment numbers(people not claiming an actual unemployment benefit don't get counted, more & more people being classed as "self-employed" for doing work that in no way compensates for a proper full-time job, people counting as employed while on "zero-hours" contracts and not actually being given any hours to work, etc etc) - and for the record, I don't think it's a grand conspiracy or anything, they've always fudged the numbers like that because they're politicians who want to look like they're managing the economy well, but it's now breeding dangerous complacency about automation's effect on the labour market. EDIT: And in reply to the "but Germany..." comment above - uhuh, because there's no other factors affecting the German economy at all. None. Nada. Zippo. Wind up the Eurozone so normal currency factors begin impacting the German economy and then we can talk.

A *lot* of people have been getting hard, menial, fairly low-paid work but still part- or full-time in places like Amazon Warehouses as other areas of the economy have declined, so what's going to happen when Amazon's currently-being-trialled automated warehouses roll out globally? Hundreds of thousands of people made unemployed at a stroke, and at best a few hundred management, programming, and physical repair jobs to replace them. Supermarkets are pushing self-service checkouts *hard*, allowing them to replace a whole line of cashiers with a single "helper" for people getting stuck. Retail is centralising more and more using online distribution. And it's not just "blue collar" stuff - small businesses that used to hire accountants now just use software that will auto-generate their tax returns for them, more & more sophisticated development tools reduce the need for any given type of programmer on a specific project more every year, even legal research jobs are being eroded by basic automation that allows one person to do the job of several.

Right now every job gained through technological advancement is coming at the expense of multiple other jobs, the promised glut of tech jobs that will supposedly replace them(a plan that will leave a ton of people behind anyway, because not everyone can just retrain on a dime as a sodding programmer) are nowhere to be seen, and nevermind adequately addressing the issue we're not even acknowledging its existence.

All the benefits of automation are accruing to rentier capital, ie the people who own the machines and the people who own the software the machines run. That situation can only continue for so long until it undermines the basic structure of the economy - you can use machines to make things as cheaply as you like, doesn't matter if nobody can earn any money to buy them. The only two practicable solutions are either the institution of substantial, specific, and purposefully unavoidable new taxes on the beneficiaries of automation to fund a universal basic income, or a conscious(and potentially legally-enforced) decision to split up the well-paid high-tech jobs created by automation into multiple reasonably-paid part time jobs so that there's no net loss of employment or earning power, but corporations and politicians and media won't even admit there's a problem let along begin discussing solutions, it's maddening.

XuQishi wrote:
Not sure if they are applicable. Those aren't lost jobs (as in "nobody does this anymore"), there's just somebody else who does it for a lot less in a different place. You can mine coal anywhere where there is some, a taxi driver is not something you can outsource, though. You need him here, not in China. So if the cabbie is obsolete, he's going to be obsolete everywhere very quickly, and he will have to look for a different job.
That is painful. The Ruhr area could sing you a nice song about it - but it only sucks there now because the politicians that governed it stubbornly refused to incite a change 30 years ago, when the death of the mining industry was clear; they were scared of the miner's unions and rode that dying horse way too long while making establishing new and different businesses so expensive to prop up the mining subsidies with tax money that businesses went elsewhere. The state I used to live in got a major influx of industry because the Ruhr people apparently didn't want it. Now half of it is basically a slum. Great job, guys. And that includes the unions, too. They should have fought for better education, different vocational training. Instead they fought for digging in the dirt until the money ran out. A waste of 20 years.

That said, there have never been as many people working in Germany at the same time as now, so substitution is a thing even with all the ex coal people, the failed electronics industry, the waste of the leadership in nuclear power technology (we used to be about 18 months in front of other countries science- and developmentwise there, which doesn't sound like a lot, but the guy who has it first gets to sell it first) etc. There have been lots of industries that went belly up over the last few decades here because we became to expensive to do it (just check out what a Loewe TV set costs, Loewe is the last surviving German TV maker and they do the only thing that is sustainable for them: super-luxury). Siemens screwed up mobile phone development (who wants one of those, right?), that cost thousands of jobs. In the end, however, most of the workers found something else to do or retired early. And there are tons of jobs that people wouldn't have believed to exist 20 years ago.

Slightly off topic, but wow, that sounds exactly like a lot of the gripes here in the UK! Nice to know misery has company, I guess?

Wind up the Eurozone so normal currency factors begin impacting the German economy and then we can talk.

The main reason why I think that is not happening is because in that case we'd have to ask for theTarget II money and that would murder the other EU countries who owe us roughly a trillion Euros for the stuff we sold them (not including "normal" national debt).

All the benefits of automation are accruing to rentier capital, ie the people who own the machines and the people who own the software the machines run.

Yeah, in any case there will have to be a giant robot tax if there are no proper substitutions or there will be torches and forks at some point.


edited. tired, headache, not sure what I was arguing for or against.

XuQishi wrote:

Wind up the Eurozone so normal currency factors begin impacting the German economy and then we can talk.

The main reason why I think that is not happening is because in that case we'd have to ask for theTarget II money and that would murder the other EU countries who owe us roughly a trillion Euros for the stuff we sold them (not including "normal" national debt).

All I meant by that was you can't really use the German economy as a basis for analysing loss of employment due to automation, because the specific effects of the Eurozone on that economy - essentially allowing it to run with a focus on advanced manufacturing with almost none of the accompanying downsides - have massively insulated it from a lot of the secondary effects automation is having on other advanced economies.

All the benefits of automation are accruing to rentier capital, ie the people who own the machines and the people who own the software the machines run.

Yeah, in any case there will have to be a giant robot tax if there are no proper substitutions or there will be torches and forks at some point.


edited. tired, headache, not sure what I was arguing for or against.

Sadly, like with everything else it seems, people always seem to forget the reasons why things happened. The whole "postwar consensus"/social democratic compact in Europe wasn't a triumph of the socialists, it was capitalism acting in self-defence, doing *just* enough to avoid the torches & pitchforkes stage that they could clearly see happening in other countries at the time. Between the rightwing mythmaking of the Thatcher & Blair eras and the lack these days of a clear, actually-communist "other" to look upon in horror though I don't think enough of the corporate-political class are capable of looking far enough beyond the next financial report/election to realise that failing to adequately address the fallout of automation immediately could well bring on a nasty case of the Robespierres in the general working populace.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Yup. And if they can talk to each other, it could, potentially, banish Phantom Traffic Jams.

It wont, slowing down for any reason causes slowdowns elsewhere.
Here it is explained better than I could:




Now in order to have defacto safety the visual inputting for a car will need to break first the ascertain visual anomaly later. Humans do, but humans can proccess visual data better than a robot because they can adapt to unusual situations with human rationality, everything a robot does is processed through programming, and this has the habit of getting things VERY wrong when it goes wrong.

However this isnt the main problem, the problem is that networking car AI means thet they become corruptable or hackable. You dont never need to hack the car and cause an accident, you only need to have the signal between cars and convince a car that another car a hundred metres ahead has had to stop due to a spillage and cautions all cars to move at 1kph. Traffic jammers will become a viable reality.