It's going to be a spectacular, automated race to the bottom. The losers are going to be the 10 million professional drivers in the old trucking and taxi businesses.
Excellent! More efficient shipping benefits a lot of people. The problem isn't the increase in efficiency — are faster CPUs a race to the bottom because worse chip makers go out of business? — it's poor policy that fails to adequately compensate those who lose from this. We should focus on electing officials and supporting policy to turn these Kaldor-Hicks improvements into Pareto ones.
(I know you're not taking a stance against automation, I just think it's important to stress that the correct response is to make everyone better off by using some of the gains to compensate the losers)
http://www.trucking.org/ata%20docs/what%20we%20do/image%20an...
Okay you need to understand that laws come with consequences. And if the consequences are not sufficient to deter an action, then the law does not exist.
Uber finds the consequences possible from state governments and smaller administrative authorities to be negligible. This is an accurate assessment generally due to predictable underfunded nature, deficits, lack of case law and lack of political will that these areas have.
The federal government is not any of that and has unlimited resources to ensure compliance. It also provides the benefit of supplanting state law, good across the entire republic and helps with reciprocal agreements in other republics. So there are both adequate consequences for noncompliance and adequate benefits for compliance.
State autonomy has been irrelevant since interstate commerce became the only form of commerce, and most of the time people are just playing along.
Port automation on the other hand, is an opportunity I'm guessing.
https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom...
Secondly, there's all kinds of regulations. A container vessel is operated 24/7. If 7 is the amount of people working on it at a time, in practice the crew will be twice that.
In any case, your response lacks a lot. The person you replied to talked about big boat shipping and how it is not going to be automated any time soon. You only account for the crew on a vessel. There's the customers (loads of which still like to send a fax), lots of outdated governments, outdated vendors, other companies, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk
Still not a lot of fat to cut for a ship with the capacity of a medium size port.
And with all that gone, you could fit a lot more cargo on the same size boat.
Another thing, crew size would be 3x of needed crew for one shift because in ships there are three shifts, one shift lasts in 8 hours.
(Source: I am originally Naval Architect)
"Where I come from, we call that slavery." - Wonder Woman.
Their customers, corporations guarding themselves against risk want every checkbox checked and rechecked twice. That's why its no surprise they're not pulling off stunts here.
Depending on how they do the accounting for this it could be huge gains to the top line, something much needed to validate a $60bn valuation in the public markets.
…yet
Trucking is vulnerable to Uber. "More than 1 million smallish companies own 90 percent of all trucks, each owning about three trucks on average." That lets Uber be the master and the truckers the slaves, as with their taxi service.
Cargomatic claims 1,811,000 miles traveled. They launched in 2014, so that's under a million miles a year. That's nothing. The average delivery truck travels 12,000 miles a year, so, from their own numbers, Cargomatic represents about 80 trucks, total. They may be run over by Uber.
The biggest freight broker is C.H. Robinson Worldwide, net revenue about $2.2bn. They also organize ocean freight and air freight, which Uber isn't likely to get into because the players there are not small.
Freight brokerage is so fragmented that Uber could roll up the industry.