If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation.

But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough.

Protect against the unknown, and people will be less anxious about rapid change. Don't protect them, and risk social instability. This is what government, social programs, and taxes are for. Or we can wait for the 21st century equivalent of the guillotines to come out.

[1] http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleto...

It depends on their form. People aren't on drugs because they don't have enough money. People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply getting a government check won't change that. A man cannot provide for his family by simply being alive to cash a check.

There are things that look a lot like welfare to the government that don't look like it to the recipients, though. Wage subsidies could keep a lot of the people who are below the threshold of self-sustainment actually engaged with their communities.

And, for better or for worse, most people engage through their communities with employment. Unemployed people, especially unemployed men, do not suddenly become poets or volunteers for Meals on Wheels.

I know I don't want parents/grandparents ODing on heroin in a parking lot with a child in the back of the car. [1] So where does society start to fix this? How do you give people purpose and the means to embrace that purpose?

What good are self driving cars/trucks, machine learning/AI, and all that comes with it if you've hollowed out any substance your species had? EDIT: Maybe the Amish had it right the whole time. Social fabric above "progress".

[1] http://ktla.com/2016/09/09/ohio-police-post-photos-of-adults...

1. Wage subsidy. Tax people like me more to increase the EITC. At the extreme this is make-work jobs, but there is a lot of ground to cover between here and there.

2. Make employment cheaper. Cut down on employment taxes and other expenses associated with employing people.

3. Make employment easier. This won't happen overnight, but, after coming to wage and term agreement with someone, I should be able to hire someone by clicking a few links on a government webpage. And I say "I should" as a person, not as a corporation. Make everyone in the country able to hire another person quickly and easily. If I see too much trash on a street in my neighborhood, let me hire people to clean it up a few times a week. I shouldn't need any kind of HR department.

I have yet to see an employer who is friendly to labor, so that's where I'm coming from why I don't trust employers to be the solution (removing minimum wage, wage subsidies, etc). Labor regulation should walk softly but carry a big stick.

Example: We subsidize Walmart employees pretty heavily with government resources. We should not be doing that, and I highly doubt most people in those jobs feel as useful as they could be.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/walmart-government-subsidies-stud...

http://americansfortaxfairness.org/files/Walmart-on-Tax-Day-...

You are hitting on one of my concerns, though: make labor cheap, and people could be hired to basically annoy other people. I want to keep it simple, but there are certain categories of jobs that need to be ineligible for wage subsidy: anything that involves attempting to grab someone else's attention or time. So no sandwich board walkers, no demonstrators, no telemarketers, no door-to-door salesman, no picket walkers. Those can still be employed by businesses if they want, but without subsidy.

If you don't trust employers, you can bid up the wages of labor yourself by hiring people. Think what a non-profit interested in increasing recycling rates could do with access to cheap labor. In fact, all sorts of environmental issues are reduced by cheap labor. We can stop dumping old VCRs on China to disassemble. A local environmental group can collect them, and then use a disassembly line to teach workers the basics of technology repair while breaking out all the components for responsible disposal.

If you want to keep people employed but not willing to risk employers possibly benefiting in any way, well, it indicates that improving the standards of living of the workers wasn't your real concern. Keep in mind that "the government should take care of paying for health care" would fit in with my recommendations but run afoul of your objections.

I don't remember the exact numbers but it was some kind of custom combination like that designed specifically for the type of business.

Interesting idea, I think to some degree we already do this in an roundabout manner. We provide subsidizes (corporate tax exemptions for R&D) and billions of dollars of direct grants to scientific research for example, that can be thought as a wage subsidy for scientists. We definitely need to increase the EITC, and expand it to singles and couples without children. The EITC is probably one of the best ideas to counter an increasingly automated economy.

    Cut down on employment taxes

The outlawing of slavery made cotton more expensive. We still have cheap t-shirts.

There is no excuse for rolling back labor protections when there is so much wealth available to society; its the distribution that's the problem.

1. Provide universal access to free abortions and contraception so that people who do not want to have children will not be forced into childbirth.

2. End the war on drugs so that people can have access to safe opiates and clean needless. When both are available at your liquor store for less than the cost of a six-pack of beer, you will find that suddenly addicts can both hold down a job because they do not have problems with withdrawal symptoms due to uncertain supply, and the violent and larceny crime rates plummet because affordability and price gouging by dealers is no longer an issue.

You separate purpose and a meaningful life from wage-labor.

That's a cultural issue. A man can very much provide for his family "by simply being alive to cash a check" and not think twice about it.

Unless the culture finds meaning only in the workplace -- and not in tons of other activities and pursuits.

I think a lot of this has to do with perception. As in, "how am I perceived if I take a check from the government."

We have cultural norms as to what is "valuable". Maybe someone focusing on their art will one day have more meaning, and you won't have to feel bad taking a check from Uncle Sam while you work on your painting, sculpting, or woodworking skills.

You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough.

There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas.

Without jumping to either extreme, since such policy decisions are definitely not "all or nothing" -- I'd just suggest that it's a matter of where you focus your resources. Focusing on social safety net leaves other things unaddressed. Focusing on innovation and individualism clearly leaves some people's needs unaddressed too.

Ultimately, the best (for me) is to have a wide dispersion of countries who make different choices, with the freedom to move between them to find the fit that's right for you.

I have a few critiques of this hypothesis.

First, I do not think it's true. If by "innovation" you mean tech unicorns, then sure. But those same places tend to have world class universities churning out highly useful technological advances and scientific insights. Burning huge piles of VC cash to create a monopoly a dozen other companies are also competing for seems like a weird metric for measurng innovation... But I guess that word means different things to different people.

Second, these countries often but not always have strong economies. Necessity is the mother of innovation, and lack of necessity often coincides with wealth.

Third, Germany seems like an obvious counter example to this, as long as you're willing to consider innovation as something that encompasses a lot more sectors than young Internet services targeting highly aggressive growth curves... Their energy industry is highly innovative, for example.

There have been plenty of tech startups in Northern Europe, which is reputed to have the best social safety-nets on Earth right now. They also have some of the best academic institutions in scientific subjects.

I have never seen a libertarian argue for social safety nets. Instead they argue that private charity would somehow rise up out of nowhere and people would give more than they currently do in taxes, all to help the needy. Of course, this doesn't make sense to anyone that knows a) people and b) history.

Libertarianism is a way to say "fuck off, what's mine is mine and you can't take it", dressed up in flowery language. There is no provision in there to help our hypothetical unfortunate who is dying in the street. In fact, libertarianism argues that anything other than some random citizen helping in a purely voluntary manner would result in a trip to the courts.

In short, libertarianism is a caricature. It requires a lot of willful ignorance of how people behave, and a lot of magical thinking about what would result from a libertarian society and how humans behave. Something like Poe's law applies here.

If you get your libertarianism from cartoonists ( and they are extremely plentiful ) then you'd of course think it a caricature. Any libertarian that basically denies all public goods is simply not to be taken seriously. I think Rothbard is generally the source for most of that.

We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes. Some are government, some are not. The peak brightness for the sort-of New Deal approach was LBJ. You may or may not agree, but Charles Murray is at least thinking about this, takes social welfare seriously and has an idea or two.

My argument to other libertarians is that SSI and SNAP are simply in the noise of the general economy, have massive velocity and seem to work fairly well. They're "low load" - they will not prevent you building that new plant because of them ( indeed, it might be just the opposite ).

I'm skeptical of claims of mass technological unemployment. That's partly because machines made stoop labor uneconomic, and stoop labor sucks really hard.

We don't know what our problem is right now.

Now - where are they right? There is a lot of load. When people complain.... Trumpishly ... about regulation , they're not kidding. They're not wrong. Some of it is a rock in the shoe; some of it is better founded. That's not an argument against regulation. It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people. And it fits the anti-elite narrative that's popular these days.

After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value - they think that liberty has emergent properties that create additional value.

What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians. But the shouting continues...

I get my libertarianism from listening to people online who identify themselves as libertarians. They often use very flowery language, which many believe to be persuasive because of its floweriness rather than its content. It's from online self-identifying libertarians that I hear these stupid redefinitions of the word 'violence', for example - no cartoons required.

> We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes.

No, we absolutely have not. Historically, you got help if your benefactors find you personally appealing in some way, but otherwise you're short on luck. An industry might have had a 'widows and orphans' fund, but even these were supplements to other income. And if you had a mental illness like schizophrenia, you were really short on luck.

Even today, private charity really only works for one-off disasters (eg: katrina) or easily-marketable charities (eg: kids with cancer). Private charity does not work if it's not marketable (eg: pancreatic cancer) or if the person needs ongoing help throughout their life (eg: schizophrenia).

> It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people.

Yes, better regulation is good, but libertarianism is against proactive regulation - everything is okay unless someone can prove harm done by a specific party, who then has to be taken to court (because everyone has those kind of resources, right?). Libertarianism couldn't give you the Clean Air Act, for example.

Hell, plenty of libertarians even believe that private courts paid for by the applicants would be fair, and rely on the honor system to weed out the bad ones... of course, I've never heard what happens if the parties refuse to agree on a court. Curly realities like that just don't happen in the libertarian worldview - everyone is a fair, fully-informed actor with equal resources.

> After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value

No, that's an overbroad definition of the political movement, and pulls in a lot of people who do not fit the libertarian mold (myself, for example).

> What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians.

Believe it or not, but liberals are big on civil rights and personal freedoms. Equal wages, equal opportunities, and helping those who have been historically downtrodden to make the playing field a bit more level. They just don't believe in the cartoonish "courts will solve what the free market doesn't" ideology of libertarianism.

Have you never found it odd that the vast bulk of libertarians are white males with skills that are in demand? Libertarianism is just a nice-sounding way for these people to preserve their network effects; to preserve the historical leg-up they have over others.

"Private courts paid for by the applicants" - go read "Machineries of Freedom" by David D. Friedman. Catch the finer points. He writes well; it's just a foreign concept. His grounding is non-Anglo Saxon law, from the perspective of literally SCA stuff.

I think of the book as sort of a ... Talmudic dialogue on alternatives to what we're used to. Is it something that should or can be implemented? Can't say. Probably not if I had to guess - crosses too much path-dependence.

The framework I use for "what is libertarianism" tends these days to be the three axis model from Arnold Kling. To wit: conservatives are concerned about barbarism, "liberals" are concerned about oppression; libertarians about coercion.

"... white males with skills..." - well, that's very path dependent. It's also the target audience for say, Heinlein novels. Y'know, nerds :) The internet of the '90s was a big vector for libertarian ideas. "Normal" people won't bother with it. So you have had 20+ years of libertarian bikeshedding online.

Finally, the Clean Air Act... it's easy to forget the junkyards full of cars where all the air control stuff just stopped working, to forget the rather steep learning curve, to forget it all really didn't work out until adaptive control in engine control modules became commonplace. To treat it as ... "holy writ" ( uggggh, horrible metaphor ) is leaving a lot of information on the floor.

My favorite is one of the first of such modern predictions:

"I have an asthma that the doctors have warned me should give me great consideration regarding my future health. My only consolation is that the total of medical knowledge has doubled during the last 7 years, and should our venerable surgeons continue to gain as they have up till now, those in the future will suffer less than I. Indeed, if my parents could only have so arranged their affairs such that I was born 25 years later than I actually was, then I believe I would live in an era where medical knowledge should have a cure for my ailment."

That was Laurence Stern, writing in 1759 (in Tristam Shandy). He was dying of tuberculosis, which he referred to as an "asthma". In fact, if he had been born 25 years later, he still could have easily died of tuberculosis. The first antibiotic (not counting some minor sulfa drugs) was Penicillin, discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928.

That was 169 years later than Stern was writing. Quite a bit more than the 25 years that he thought would be necessary.

Some trends will always hold true; cost of hardware goes down, capabilities of software goes up. I don't think anyone is saying it'll happen in 7.8 years, but as the HN group is aware, we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale. There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this?

That's not at all true, or at the very least, it requires a raft of other assumptions which may not hold, to all stay true, in order for the consequence to stay true. Like for example the cost of rare earth metals, good trading relationships between nations, and so on.

> we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale

I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars.

> There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this?

There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time...

Sure, those lines aren't monotonically decreasing/increasing but the trend isn't likely to reverse direction any time soon.

>I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars.

There'll definitely be a costly hardware buy-in for a lot cases, but some applications of AI might only need a camera - say, a replacement for a cashier at a grocery store.

>There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time...

I think it's worth discussing because waiting for the bad outcome to happen before trying to handle it could be too little too late. Even if the percentage risk of an economic shock is low, the magnitude of the potential damage is high.

The average pre-tax income of the bottom 50% has stagnated since 1980 at about $16,000 per adult [1]

These people are more likely to live paycheck-to-paycheck and more likely to work jobs which might be targeted by automation. I think it's a recipe for disaster.

[1] http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/PSZ2016.pdf

Exactly, look at mobile phones, that took years to scale up. /s

As much as many might believe that moral outrage drives policy, the reality is that in the US, industry drives policy.

The transportation industry is powerful, and the transportation labor force is incredibly weak. I think we'll see the national government push for accelerating autonomous vehicles long before we see them push for banning them.

I think autonomous vehicles mean there won't be a transportation industry, per se. There would have to be some barrier to entry that's not readily apparent now. After all, "Uber for self-driving semis" under an Amazon style aggregator ...

Why are you then confident that safety numbers will carry the day? When someone is killed by a driverless car, that's going to be an emotional issue, and the appetite for cold hard data may be limited.

If safety numbers were really what people were after, it's hard to see how the US would have the gun culture that it does.

Engineers put far too much faith in data, and it's why they're often so bad at politics. Look at the incoming president; what people want is frequently more important than what is.

The upshot of what I read was - these folks are, in effect, test pilots whether they know it or not, and even a good driver could have died.

Are 20 years a "near-term timeline"? Because all it takes is for self-driving cars to be approved for market, and today they are under heavy testing, and we even have some (Tesla etc) where while not "self-driving" they are very close.

It's not like some feature cpu/storage/battery/etc technology, where some lab breakthrough or another frequently gets reported in tech outlets, but it never arrives.

This is a mature field, with multiple multi-billion investments and heavy activity.

You know, it's funny when people talk about job disruption from tech, one of their key platforms is that things are changing so much faster now than they used to be. That's one of the things that's supposed to be really different about 2017.

If you accept that as valid, then 20 years is a preposterously long timeline, and nobody could take seriously a prediction that far out. As an example -- in 20 years time, Hyperloop could easily become the dominant form of transportation, leaving people to shrug off as irrelevant the self-driving car stuff. Not saying that's going to happen, just saying that 20 years is so long, that level of change could happen in the same timeframe.

Me personally - in terms of the economy, available goods & services and such, I think you can take a really good guess 1 year out. 2 years out it's a bit fuzzy but still OK. 5 years out you've only got the broad outlines. 10 years out, you're just straight-up guessing.

20 years out? Unrecognizably different.

I accept it ("things are changing so much faster now than they used to be") as valid AND I don't find 20 years a "preposterously long timeline".

"Much faster than they used to be" is not instantaneous, it just means that in the ancient world it took millennia, in the industrial world centuries, in the electronics world decades, and in the internet world years.

But self-driving cars are more in the electronic's world than the internet world. It's not like they are some new website or web business that takes over in a couple of years or so.

They need engineering work, safety tests, government compliance, infrastructure, etc, which take decades.

>in 20 years time, Hyperloop could easily become the dominant form of transportation

No, it wouldn't.

>20 years out? Unrecognizably different.

Hardly. 20 years is a perfectly good horizon to make realistic predictions. 1996 to 2016 for example: more mobile, more internet (which tons of people rightly predicted) would be totally correct. Policy decisions work in even larger timelines than that. Only superficial crap wouldn't a 1996 be able to recognize about 2016.

And why? Because driverless trucking solves tremendous problems. It's less expensive. It's safer. I'd feel much, much safer on a highway filled with robot trucks than I do on a highway filled with fallible humans with limited reflexes. So yes, yes. It will happen, despite resistance, because it will be so much better than what we have now.

And I'm not fearful about the future. But others are, and for good reason. In general, I think it'll be great. If I was a 35 year old trucker looking at seeing my industry evaporate when I'm 50, I wouldn't be so positive.

The need to replace truck fleets would be one reason why it won't happen overnight. It would take time to replace millions of expensive vehicles.

Say it takes 10 years to replace most of the fleet. That still means someone driving a truck at age 25 will be facing an extremely different job situation at age 35.

We could use the tech to enhance the worker instead of replacing the worker, though. Right now, drivers are limited in the number of hours they can do in a day, for safety reasons. If drivers become mobile managers, there is still a need for them. Still less of them, obviously, but it does mean we don't suddenly get rid of 80% of their job openings in 10 or 20 years.

Passenger cars have a short enough lifespan that I doubt those sort of retrofits will be especially common.

I think it comes down to what you mean by "soon". I would be surprised if in 10 years a huge number of trucking jobs hadn't already been replaced, and in 20 years they will almost gone outside of a few niches.

These sorts of things get waved off with tech enthusiasm as things that will just somehow get figured out; this leads to a straw man where the real costs of human drivers today are compared against the hypothetical, unknown, but believed to be effectively zero costs of the glittering future.

Not a very fair comparison I'd say, comparing fantasy to reality. We'll see how it shakes out in the years to come.

Much less than what they're paying now for insurance covering their human drivers.

> How much will the annual software updates cost?

Less than their human drivers cost, if anything at all.

The key trend we're concerned about here is technology increasing productivity. That's a long-term trend (you can go back to the wheel, writing etc. if you want to stay in the domain of humans) that has accelerated over time, and hasn't shown any sign of letting up.

Output increases because people are freed up; when what they used to do is more efficiently done with technology, they can apply themselves to something else.

What's the end of that trend?

For my part, I can think of only three ends.

A) We stop creating new technology. The trend of development simply ends. We learn nothing more that can be used to increase efficiency. We know everything there is to know that can be applied to production. Seems unlikely and is contrary to the history of life on the planet.

B) We invent technology that replaces people with low ability - not low skills, but low ability, so that they can never be productive - completely. This is part of what we're concerned with in this article.

C) We start modifying people to increase their abilities to keep pace with what our technology is able to do. Seems dystopian.

Another way to put it is that technology can do an increasing proportion of what a person can do on their own. It's a trend line that has increased throughout history. There are only three extrapolations: the trend line stops short of 100% (case A), the trend line goes past 100% (case B), or our own capability starts growing at least as fast as technology (case C).

The only way I can imagine it would take this long is if governments just prohibit it. Even then, they'll get a big chunk of the market in 5 years.

1 - By real, read commercially available, that can run into any reasonable road without anybody inside.