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 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
In before a Driverless Pizza Delivery Vehicle(DPDV) runs someone over and still gets the pizza delivered before it gets cold...

Why use a drone when you can have The Deliverator?

I'm so glad someone made the Snow Crash reference.

This will be a gradual affair. Driverless cars won't take the roads solely probably for at least another five to ten years. And when they do, it will likely be between extremely heavily pre-planned routes which are deliberately made as safe as possible. You'll see lorries heading between set points between warehouses just off of motorways, for example.

But it will likely expand from there. If vehicles become more electric-dependent for fuel sources, I expect the two technologies will combine. You'll have public transport and freight haulage automated in effect, moving between charging points.

Give it another ten or twenty years, and half the freight will be loaded and packed by robots on top. The goal here for all these big companies is ultimately a fully automated supply system from warehouse to front door 24/7. No human error. No pensions to worry about. No health liabilities or large payrolls. Just machines working to precise timetables generating reliable profits.

The 2040 target for cessation of ICE vehicles is a not unreasonable target for introduction of driverless cars and lorries.

 Ketara wrote:
This will be a gradual affair. Driverless cars won't take the roads solely probably for at least another five to ten years. And when they do, it will likely be between extremely heavily pre-planned routes which are deliberately made as safe as possible. You'll see lorries heading between set points between warehouses just off of motorways, for example.

But it will likely expand from there. If vehicles become more electric-dependent for fuel sources, I expect the two technologies will combine. You'll have public transport and freight haulage automated in effect, moving between charging points.

Give it another ten or twenty years, and half the freight will be loaded and packed by robots on top. The goal here for all these big companies is ultimately a fully automated supply system from warehouse to front door 24/7. No human error. No pensions to worry about. No health liabilities or large payrolls. Just machines working to precise timetables generating reliable profits.

Yes, get your universal social income ready. There will be few jobs in such an economy.

 Easy E wrote:

Yes, get your universal social income ready. There will be few jobs in such an economy.

Unfortunately, it'll be only about 10 years before I hope to retire. But since my job isn't even tangentially reliant on that industry, that'll be some extraordinary buying power I will have those last few years.

Yet again, cool for me, kinda sucks for everyone else.

As somebody who's delivered plenty of pizza I say good luck with finding a robot capable of finding difficult house addresses hidden behind bushes, or has badly faded or missing numbers. GPS gives a general idea of where something is but frequently it's inaccurate and takes a brain to figure out, or legs to get out of the car and look around with a spot light as a huge majority of houses have no lights on at night even when they are expecting a delivery.

Then there's dealing with the drunks and pot heads who are incapable of answering the door much less walking out to the driveway or street, the type of idiot who orders food then passes out before it arrives or is in the basement or other areas of the house they can't hear the door and you have to spend 5 minutes beating on the door to get their attention. Quite frequently you need to call the customer to sort out address or get clarification and direction. People forget to give gate codes or provide unit numbers or which apt buzzer to dial etc yet expect the delivery person to magically know all the details of where it has to go. The robots can function flawlessly and still have all sorts of problems because their human customer base is incredibly stupid.

I can just see it setting up for getting sued the first time a customer gets their foot run over, or reaches into their robo delivery vehicle and burns themselves on the unit designed to keep things warm. Dominos uses those heated pizza bags which can get wicked hot and even when you work with those on a daily basis you can still get a scalding hot surprise if you reach into them wrong.

I think this whole Dominos automated driver thing is a pretty stupid gimmick, to be honest. The cost of the delivery driver just isn't that great that a major new tech can be justified. Automated cars, especially ones with purpose built refits for electronically locked, heated storage areas for each pizza order, are not gonna be cheap. Paying some guy minimum wage + mileage to drive his own car around is cheaper.

Automated cars make a lot of sense with long haul trucking, and for taxis depending on local employment costs. But for pizza delivery I just don't see it.

 Da Boss wrote:
Is there gonna come a time when we say no more to increased automation?

This already happens up to a point. When a new investment is proposed governments and voters look at how many jobs it will create, rather than how much it will increase GDP. Often the wrangling to get a project accepted and supported by government will involve having parts of it done manually rather than by machine, just to increase the amount of job creation.

However, that's on the margins and I suspect its unlikely to ever be more than that. People just inherently like the idea of doing things more efficiently. The idea that we just stop improving our processes is not just something that most people will be uncomfortable with, it's also something that's near impossible to control. How exactly would you draft laws or regs that differentiated machinery that increased economic activity from machines that replaced labour?

The answer to this question, should the problem continue as many expect, will be found in either offsetting increased productivity with reduced work hours, or in a greater redistribution scheme that includes a minimum income regardless of work. The former has the great advantage of being incremental.

Based on what is currently happening, I expect to see the benefits of the extra productivity finding their way into the hands of the top levels of management of these companies while the workers continue to work just as much while not benefiting from any of the productivity gains in terms of their wages or time off.

We could already all be working less, but instead people are working crazy hours to keep going, because it benefits those with the power.

So unfortunately I see a dystopian future (which is partially already here) coming our way.

 Da Boss wrote:
This is going to be a big problem. Driving trucks or delivery was one of those steady jobs people with low education could do and earn a living at. As it moves to automation, there's gonna be a lot of people out of work.

Is there gonna come a time when we say no more to increased automation?

Same issues occurred during the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

However, with ever more automation coming, we move closer to a Utopian society where it's all done for us.

Imagine not needing to reward whomever makes your pizza then delivers it? Or if the supply chain removed the cost of worker's wages. That means I'd need less money to buy things, and eventually we could get to the point where money ceases to mean anything.

Take money out of the equation in a society of plenty? Well, less reason to sue for ludicrious amounts of money. Less reason for maniacs to trigger wars to control other resources. If society becomes truly abundant, crime would go down (this is clearly seen in crime stats. Deprived areas have far higher levels of crime than wealthy ones) and could even cease altogether outside of crimes of passion (certainly with no real resources to be controlled, organised crime would go down).

I say bring it on. Automate as much as we can, and let humanity become an indolent species.

Moneyt maybe gone, but access to resource will still be a thing.

I agree with the sentiment that for now, it's a marketing gimmick. In 10 years, though...

Drones are so early-21st century.

My new franchise witll deliver a pizza that can fly itself to the destination using the aerodynamic properties of a disc.

Launched at supersonic speed it cooks on the way due to air friction.

 Laughing Man wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Laughing Man wrote:

And yet we already have driverless cars on the road, and so far they've caused one accident. At the time it occurred, said cars had accrued over 1.3 million miles on the road.

Yes, and they're still being heavily monitored for bugs. And it's far more than 1 accident.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/10/31/study-self-driving-cars-accidents/74946614/

Driverless cars have a higher accident rate than non-driverless cars. You can't just consider situations where they were "at fault". Because many of these accidents would have been avoided if the car had not been driverless, simply because the Driverless car will always move if it has the right of way, even if that would lead to an accident. It lacks the critical thinking of a human who might decide not to do something, even though they have the right of way, because it would cause an accident.

Except they don't have more accidents than human-operated vehicles.

As that study admits, there is massive uncertainty and tons of other issues associated with the Driverless car data. They basically admit that their study doesn't mean much of anything.

I don't even think in 10 years it would matter. Since pizza deliverers generally provide their own vehicle, as well as (as I understand it) incur the cost of insuring that vehicle for commercial use there's zero market gain to replace them with automated vehicles unless vehicles becomes orders of magnitude cheaper than they currently are. Why would any company, least of all pizza deliverers, want to incur the massive financial strain of maintaining a fleet of vehicles numbering in the millions to replace sub-minimum wage workers whose pay is more the responsibility of the customer than said employer?

No companies aren't going to replace pizza delivery people with machines. They'll replace them by outsourcing the job to automated fleets operated by other companies who do everyone's deliveries for a fee. Which is of course something that would greatly benefit delivery services and car manufacturers. Delivery services get to not only maintain their nil capital investment in the delivery service, they get to completely cut HR and make it a simple service charge that's part of their overhead and car makers get an entirely new market for wholesale. So of course they're going to team up to try and show the basic idea works rather than wait for someone to take the bold and blind step of trying to kick start the idea with no footing.

 reds8n wrote:

...... pizza delivery based porn films are gonna be well weird.

I don't think "Autosexuality" means what they think it does ... "D

I think the biggest potential market for these kinds of "driverless pizza delivery" is when we're talking about areas really close to the Domino's in question on well-mapped/marked streets.

Who ends up in court when one of these driverless cars runs someone down and kills them?

Dominos "pizza" is horrible.
Why anyone would order it is beyond me.

If you cannot impress me with the pizza, don't even try to impress me with the tech gimmicks

Drone (aerial) pizza delivery won't take off around where I live.

I'm inside the CASA no-drone-fly-zone (approach and TO zones for rescue helicopters).

That said, at least Dominos was better than Eagle boys.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Same issues occurred during the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

However, with ever more automation coming, we move closer to a Utopian society where it's all done for us.

Imagine not needing to reward whomever makes your pizza then delivers it? Or if the supply chain removed the cost of worker's wages. That means I'd need less money to buy things, and eventually we could get to the point where money ceases to mean anything.

Take money out of the equation in a society of plenty? Well, less reason to sue for ludicrious amounts of money. Less reason for maniacs to trigger wars to control other resources. If society becomes truly abundant, crime would go down (this is clearly seen in crime stats. Deprived areas have far higher levels of crime than wealthy ones) and could even cease altogether outside of crimes of passion (certainly with no real resources to be controlled, organised crime would go down).

I say bring it on. Automate as much as we can, and let humanity become an indolent species.

There are quite a lot of steps between robot pizza delivery and the end of material needs. The issue is the transition. Because while the end state where money means nothing is great, in the immediate future we still need to encourage work through pay, and encourage harder and more skilled work through greater pay. We're already seeing a lot of issues with a growing underclass income inquality from just a small shift towards a smaller, higher skilled workforce, so how do we transition to a society where 7 billion people can have their needs met by the labour of only 3 billion workers, then 2 billion workers, then 1 billion etc.

 chromedog wrote:
That said, at least Dominos was better than Eagle boys.

That's a pretty low bar to pass.

Pizza franchises in Australia are in general awful. You're better off trying to find an nice local pizza place.

But then, people in Australia have awful ideas of what good pizza is.

I live near a really good Italian pizzeria. They are situated next to a Dominos. Their Pizzas are $20au for a large, while Dominos are... I think $8au? But Tuesday to Friday this Italian place has theirs at $10au. A difference of $2 gets you an infinitely better Pizza with better ingredients from a local business. Yet Dominos is hammered until they run out of food (happens usually on big game nights) with queues up the pathway (this isn't even a case of delivery, people are driving there), while the Italian pizzeria struggles to get customers.

At least when I go there, I get my nice Italian pizza in about 10 minutes while people are waiting 1 hour or more at the overcrowded Dominos.

sebster wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Same issues occurred during the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

However, with ever more automation coming, we move closer to a Utopian society where it's all done for us.

Imagine not needing to reward whomever makes your pizza then delivers it? Or if the supply chain removed the cost of worker's wages. That means I'd need less money to buy things, and eventually we could get to the point where money ceases to mean anything.

Take money out of the equation in a society of plenty? Well, less reason to sue for ludicrious amounts of money. Less reason for maniacs to trigger wars to control other resources. If society becomes truly abundant, crime would go down (this is clearly seen in crime stats. Deprived areas have far higher levels of crime than wealthy ones) and could even cease altogether outside of crimes of passion (certainly with no real resources to be controlled, organised crime would go down).

I say bring it on. Automate as much as we can, and let humanity become an indolent species.

There are quite a lot of steps between robot pizza delivery and the end of material needs. The issue is the transition. Because while the end state where money means nothing is great, in the immediate future we still need to encourage work through pay, and encourage harder and more skilled work through greater pay. We're already seeing a lot of issues with a growing underclass income inquality from just a small shift towards a smaller, higher skilled workforce, so how do we transition to a society where 7 billion people can have their needs met by the labour of only 3 billion workers, then 2 billion workers, then 1 billion etc.

Even IF we were able to perfect automation to that point, how do we decide who gets to sit on their ass all day and who gets to be the labor force? And what motivates that force to work? This part of the whole "Transition to utopian communits perfection" falls apart fast as the only possible way to make that sort of dream a reality is to have a mass implimentation of the tech, have it tried AND true before the switch over, and then shift en masse like a bandage being ripped off. Anything less with turn into an open revolt.


Then, what happens to all the luxury items? Toys, our wargaming stuff, the like? If nobody works, what motivates someone to create something for absolutely no reward?

 Just Tony wrote:
Even IF we were able to perfect automation to that point, how do we decide who gets to sit on their ass all day and who gets to be the labor force? And what motivates that force to work? This part of the whole "Transition to utopian communits perfection" falls apart fast as the only possible way to make that sort of dream a reality is to have a mass implimentation of the tech, have it tried AND true before the switch over, and then shift en masse like a bandage being ripped off. Anything less with turn into an open revolt.

Then, what happens to all the luxury items? Toys, our wargaming stuff, the like? If nobody works, what motivates someone to create something for absolutely no reward?

I don't know how or why you decided that this was about people no longer working and everyone getting the same amount of money no matter what. There is absolutely nothing that would allow you to even speculate that was what was being discussed. Nor is what's being discussed about 'perfecting automation', or any other kind of vaguely utopian anything.

It is about recognising noticing that automation improves productivity, and productivity allows you to produce the same number of goods with a reduced supply of labour. Historically this led to economic expansion, as we either kept the amount of labour used the same and produced more of the product, or we reduced the amount of labour, but saw that labour get drawn in to new industries. However, that process of economic expansion requires increasing the use of natural resources, and as such it hits a hard limit as the marginal cost of natural resources starts to spike. This has already been observed with raw minerals and many forms of energy, as well as many self generating assets like timber. As such, new automation becomes more likely to replace labour than supplement it.

What we do about this is the question.

The outcomes are, in no particular order;
1) We find new untapped natural resources and carry on much as we have been.
2) We respond by making work. Have huge government agencies that employ people just for the sake of employing people. Companies will be expected to employ loads of people to justify their existence. This might be done by government mandate or by social expectation. It is possible the latter is already happening, just a little bit.
3) We put a cap on productivity improvements, stopping automation and other improvements that let us do our jobs more easily. This might be done by either government mandate or social expectation. Its really just a variation on 2, except instead of having people employed to do nothing, we employ people to do work that shouldn't really be necessary.
4) We have a lot of people simply drop out of the economy. Their labour simply isn't needed, and we let them scrabble for a subsistence existence as best they can. One new form of employment is police to guard this vast starving rabble.
5) We have a lot of people drop out of the economy, and we provide a basic level of income for them. They don't get anything like the wealth or living standards of working people, but they can cover basic necessities.
6) Most people work, but they each work less. Whether this is because people reduce their working hours, or they retire sooner, or they take longer periods of leave, or more couples only have one full time worker, or some other variation will be determined.

The answer will probably be some combination of all the above, the question is how much of each we'll see. Events 4) and 5) will probably both happen, in different places in the world. The next question is how much the solution comes from natural cultural chagnes, and how much from government changes.

 sebster wrote:

5) We have a lot of people drop out of the economy, and we provide a basic level of income for them. They don't get anything like the wealth or living standards of working people, but they can cover basic necessities.

And where does that money come from?

I guarantee that you could not make it by taxing the few people who would still be working and making wages in this hypothetical situation. And since all your government functions would have to be funded by taxing the few working people, you'd have even less $$$ than you might have otherwise.

It's the problem that Post-Scarcity has. It's self-defeating on multiple counts. 1st, it can never come into existence because the transitional system between a Capitalist system and a Post-Scarcity system will immediately, and without exception, fail. The social turmoil will simply result in a regression back to ordinary economic systems.

The 2nd pitfall is that, in a theoretical Post-Scarcity society which has somehow actually come into existence, this society requires a complex governing system to simply dole out the resources, but no individual person has any motivation to contribute to it's function. Nobody will want to do maintenance on the army of robots which actually do the manual labor, after all he doesn't get paid. Everybody gets the same "compensation". He has no motivation to do anything other than entertain himself. He'll always get fed and have the same luxuries as everybody else.

It's a paradox. The system can only function if humans were robots. Yet if humans were robots, there would be no need for this system.

And you are working on the false assumption that people only do things for their own monetary benefit. That is patently false. There will be less people trying to work, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, that's kind of the point of the system.

And even with UBI, there is a reason to try to earn money. That is to better yourself and get more stuff.

There is definitely room to produce more than people need for a comfortable survival.

 skyth wrote:
And you are working on the false assumption that people only do things for their own monetary benefit. That is patently false. There will be less people trying to work, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, that's kind of the point of the system.

And even with UBI, there is a reason to try to earn money. That is to better yourself and get more stuff.

There is definitely room to produce more than people need for a comfortable survival.

Sure, there might be some number of altruists who just do it "for the greater good" of society. But those people will not be enough to keep this society functioning. We will never have Star Trek.

And if there is sufficient motivation for people to not want just the guaranteed income, then you'll have people clamoring for the few jobs which are available. You'll have job riots of unemployed people wanting to fill non-existence positions. Either way, this society collapses.

That is WAY off the deep end and not likely to happen.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 sebster wrote:

5) We have a lot of people drop out of the economy, and we provide a basic level of income for them. They don't get anything like the wealth or living standards of working people, but they can cover basic necessities.

And where does that money come from?

I guarantee that you could not make it by taxing the few people who would still be working and making wages in this hypothetical situation. And since all your government functions would have to be funded by taxing the few working people, you'd have even less $$$ than you might have otherwise.

It's the problem that Post-Scarcity has. It's self-defeating on multiple counts. 1st, it can never come into existence because the transitional system between a Capitalist system and a Post-Scarcity system will immediately, and without exception, fail. The social turmoil will simply result in a regression back to ordinary economic systems.

The 2nd pitfall is that, in a theoretical Post-Scarcity society which has somehow actually come into existence, this society requires a complex governing system to simply dole out the resources, but no individual person has any motivation to contribute to it's function. Nobody will want to do maintenance on the army of robots which actually do the manual labor, after all he doesn't get paid. Everybody gets the same "compensation". He has no motivation to do anything other than entertain himself. He'll always get fed and have the same luxuries as everybody else.

It's a paradox. The system can only function if humans were robots. Yet if humans were robots, there would be no need for this system.

Alternatively, it may require a reshaping of society, as previous technological booms have done. We have already seen the nuclear family radically change over the last several hundred years. It was not unusual for couples to have five, seven, ten or more children, with the understanding that many would die and many would be required simply for their manual labor to reach a minimum level of subsistence through agriculture. Now, we see family sizes edging ever downward in developed economies, and completely childless couples becoming increasingly common.

Gone are the days of Farmers Bob and Sarah who had 12 children, 7 of whom survived past the age of four, 4 of whom survived to adulthood, while Bob and Sarah die in their late 40's during a particularly harsh winter, while their neighbors have seven children before the wife dies in childbirth and only one survives to adulthood. These days Bob and Sarah may have two kids, maybe even just one, get a vasectomy at 33, and live to be 80 while their children face few doubts about surviving to adulthood, while their friends Stacy and Jorge choose not to have kids entirely, while the people who have 12 kids get put on TV as a unique novelty that most people find impossible to comprehend.

Given such trends, it's possible society evolves yet again into a different paradigm such that there simply is no excess population because reproduction needs and attitudes shift further down that route and we end up with relatively small populations living in highly automated societies where human labor is primarily in creation, research, and exploration, while other economic sectors become increasingly automated, including the maintenance of said automation.

Sure, but just saying "society will reshape!" isn't some magic wand you can use here.

Plus this isn't anything comparable to "Families used to have 10+ kids and now only have 0-2". This is a much more fundamental shift.


As for automated maintenance, this isn't completely 100% possible. Because something has to maintain the Maintenance systems. You can reduce the maintenance that humans would have to do, but you can't eliminate it.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Sure, but just saying "society will reshape!" isn't some magic wand you can use here.

I didn't say it would, I'm saying it's possible, and that we have a long track record of societies doing such things. It could also boil over into any number of other possibilities, good, bad, weird or indifferent.

Plus this isn't anything comparable to "Families used to have 10+ kids and now only have 0-2". This is a much more fundamental shift.

Hrm, perhaps, perhaps not. Go back a thousand years and people would say a society like that we live in currently is impossible for all sorts of reasons. And, at the time, such would have been true.

Lets also realize that in almost all developed nations, reproduction rates are below replacement needs today, and have been dropping for some time. Those with growing populations do so primarily through immigration from less developed nations. In many ways, we're already at this point. Japan's population, for instance, peaked about seven years ago and is now about back to where they were 20 years ago and continues to decline, and they're some of the world leaders in automation of all sorts of things people used to do.