Also enforcing a 4 day work-week? How does this lower unemployment, except on the paper? And keep in mind this solution would come with it own bag of problems, like administrativ overhead for more employees etc.
I only have so much space here, and I only have so much time to actually think these things through. So I'm just going to ignore this fully general counter argument.
> And saying that the problems won't even arise until we start to sell these cars is just nonsense.
Let me put it this way: if no self-driving car is ever sold, these won't be a problem. These problems are conditional on a working self-driving car actually existing in the first place. The only problem right now is getting the car to drive.
Now of course, foreseeable future problems do influence current decisions. But let's not get into Timeless Decision Theory.
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> Also enforcing a 4 day work-week? How does this lower unemployment, except on the paper?
Why wouldn't it?
Speaking for about 400 actual companies of various size in France, the slight increase in hourly productivity does not match the rather sharp drop in hours per week per employee. To keep their total production from going down, they had to (and did) hire more people (about 15%, I guess, it depends). It meant more employment. In the real world. Now.
Also, the salaries were maintained. No pay cut. And the costs did not increase either. This is because they have a deal which allows them to pay less taxes (specifically, those who go to our national unemployment insurance). So, so increased costs and no pay cut. In the real world. Now.
The only thing that's only on paper right now is the macro-economic calculation: what if everyone did the same? So far, it checks out: it doesn't cost nor bring any money. You just have more people working a bit less.
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There is this saying that employment is not a cake, that more work spurs more employment or something. But at any given point in time, it is a cake. Basically, work equals demand divided by productivity. In a consumption society, to have more work, either you increase demand, or you lower productivity. There's limits to the first, and the second one is Ludism. So there's a point where you have to divide work among the workers somehow. You can let the market deal with it, and that gives you unemployment, or you can enforce shorter work weeks.
Unemployment is bad, because it drives down demand, which ultimately drives down work, which under the current system increases unemployment… One of the causes of World War II by the way.
Shorter work weeks on the other hand, provided there's no pay cut, drives demand up, through the sudden decrease in unemployment. Also, less unemployment means better salary negotiations, which means more money to the workers, and less to the "stakeholders". (Mind you, it can go too far and stifle investment. Currently however, workers get 10% less of what they did 30 years ago. And that money don't tend to go to investment. It mostly goes to the Global Casino.)
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Source: http://www.roosevelt2012.fr/ (In French, sorry. I hope automatic translations are good enough.)
The labor surplus is caused by decreased scarcity. Prosperity has decoupled from labor. This is not a problem! Even if it was, creating an artificial shortage of labor would not be a sensible.
Not exactly. The number one factor is hourly productivity, which more than doubled since the 70s. At the same time, demand also doubled, just not as fast (there are a few missing %). That difference is where labour surplus mainly came from.
> This is not a problem!
If your an employer, sure: this is an employer's market. But ultimately, this drives salaries down, and consumption, then employment. There's a reason why Ford advocated the 5 days work-week when everyone else went for 6, and why he paid $5 a day when the norm was $2.5. He wanted his employees to buy his cars.
> artificial shortage of labor
We're already under such "artificial shortage". Minus the shortage, of course, but we have vacations, 5 day work weeks… If you let the market choose, you would soon have many people working 50-60 hours per week for less than the minimum wage. (I mean, we would have more of them.)
I just want to push the cursor further on the "artificial" side.
Bad press. Being killed by a machine is soo much worse than being killed by a fellow human. This won't be a problem. Yes, it will make the news, but if self driving cars turn out to be more reliable than human drivers, the numbers will show, and the insurance companies will follow. (Funny how talks about not controlling your car will die out in the face of monetary savings.)
Liability. Self driving cars are not the only thing that kills people when it goes wrong. Think airliner software. I think we'll get over it. Also, current cars already face similar challenges. I recall a sticky pedal problem that caused some Japanese cars to speed up until death ensues. As far as I know, unlike some unlucky drivers, the company is still alive.
Law. Not a big problem, as long as self driving cars are legal somewhere. Once they have demonstrated their worth, other states and countries will follow very quickly.
Privacy. It kinda sucks, but it won't matter one bit. If people really cared about not giving away their trip data to some for-profit corporation, they wouldn't be using Facebook in the first place. Or Gmail.
Price. It will inevitably go way down. Self driving is a software problem. A human driver could manage with only a couple web cams. So will programs, as they get better. Not to mention economies of scale.
Unemployment. Here be Unions. But they won't stop the advent of self driving cars. Driver-less companies will simply drive the Driver-full companies out of business. Unlike rail-road companies, they don't own the tracks. Now this will raise unemployment unless we do something about it. (Enforcing a 4 day work-week would be a good start.)
Overall, I expect all those problems to set us back about a decade, 15 years tops. But they won't even arise until we actually start selling those cars.