Also, it is possible the union sees no end-game in sight and is just trying to preserve jobs as long as possible. (The robots won't have a union, and if they did, this union would be unlikely to be a part of forming it.)

I think I agree that the UPS union's decision is possibly a poor one, but come on -- it's easy to see why they made it. Making self-interested, short-sighted decisions is literally what humans are best at.

(Plus, it's not like we can pretend to predict the future and better than they can!)

Arm chair "logistics experts" should go sling packages for a few weeks to see what it takes to compete with real operations before declaring existing operations dead if they don't "disrupt themselves". UPS, Fedex, and USPS aren't going anywhere.

My guess is that they overutilize seasonal/temp people and understaff later in the year from the unions pov.

The history of companies with incalcitrant unions isn’t the unions getting crushed at the last minute. It’s everyone losing jobs because the company goes bust.

The bottom line is that there are ways to make this work and be vastly profitable, but I think ultimately, the question is whether our management and union leaders will work to do that.

Some things actually are zero sum games. And we are a lot closer to that now than 50 years ago when there was so much more room for growth.

Unfortunately that's not usually how it works out. See for example, Hostess a couple years back. The union thought management was bluffing about their imminent bankruptcy, turns out they weren't.

Or, all that automation is just vaporware outside of marketing demos and the unions will be fine.

I’m genuinely curious to hear this point of view. I don’t believe unskilled labor (or minorly skilled labor) has a right to a job anymore than a very skilled laborer does.

There’s a reason why cement trucks were created when you could (and can) still mix cement by hand. It’s wildly inefficient at a certain project scale, and I hold the same view for other items.

I’d love to know why you feel it’s socially wrong to push forward automation.

But you know, its all their fault of course, they could've just learned to code!

Should we not have vehicles because it put the horse/buggy drivers out of a job? Have cars made by hand and not by more efficient, safer automation because it puts people out of work?

I completely understand & respect that viewpoint that this does not all happen in a vacuum so the people working manual labor likely did not get or have access to the same opportunities as those "who learned to code".

Who is to say that the automation opens room for better-paying jobs or leads to innovations in health-care that make universal health care more affordable to tax-payers so it can get passed into legislation?

There's negative consequences of slowing automation as well.

The big difference is that automation now replaces jobs at a pace that is faster than we can create them. The whole video is good but the particularly interesting stats are at the ~8:00 minute mark.

Stopping or even slowing automation is though of course completely pointless on multiple levels, if a company isn't going to automate, their competitor will (and drive them out of business), if a country decides to legislate against automation another country will not, in the global economy its a futile effort.

Furthermore there really is no reason for people to "work" at all, if machines can do the same why not let people do what they want to do, instead of pointlessly enslaving humanity forever, that sounds pretty evil.

I really feel that it would do a lot of good in the world to hold back at least some automation of robot type jobs. We as a society need a bigger lead time in the education and social development areas to just expect large swaths of the population to sit around with nothing to do.

Granted, that is the ultimate goal of a would-be post scarcity economy. Unless we're switch to space communism and get matter replicators soon this will only result in social strife.

What about most things that you own today? Surely the metals you come across the very electronic you’re typing away on didn’t come from a blacksmith?

I’m sure I could go ad nauseum but I hope you get my point. I’d believe you if you lived somewhere in the artic circle in a remote corner of that desert. But here you are on HN of all places!

Edit: typo

If UPS doesn't deploy something like that, a competitor will...