(no subject)

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People Keep Crashing Into Google's Self-Driving Cars

Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck. The imminent need for basic income in recognition of our machine-driven future.

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That article on the self-driving trucks

Or any article on automation, actually, there are two type of comments that drive me up the wall.

The first is "LOL, worried about nothing, I'm sure new jobs will open up!"

Well, that's certainly possible, but as those new jobs don't seem to be appearing it's not laughable that some people are a little concerned about this trend.

The second is "Oh, c'mon, eventually nobody will have to work! Post-scarcity, here we come!"

That one makes me want to throw things and curse loudly. Yes, yes, I'm sure a post-scarcity world will be just dandy. Our descendents will be ecstatic. But we're not living in a post-scarcity economy, and we don't have post-scarcity politics. What we have is politicians sanctimoniously declaring that "he who won't work, won't eat" and decrying "moochers" and insisting that service jobs "don't deserve" a living wage and cutting benefits left and right and carefully not doing the sorts of things that could increase jobs right here, right now. (How about rebuilding our infrastructure? How about cutting class sizes, from pre-k on through college? How about hiring more lawyers for free legal aid? How about limiting the hours doctors can work and decreasing the patients they can see per hour? Any of those things would increase jobs in those fields automatically.) So, yeah, the distant future where every job that can be automated is might be a paradise. Like Star Trek! But the immediate future, where jobs are being automated and there's nothing else to fall back on for the recently unemployed? Yeah, if that future happens, it's gonna suck, and forgive me if I'm a little more concerned about the future I might live through than the one that will show up after I'm dead in my grave.

I have no idea what's going to happen in the future, of course. All I know is that in the present we already have people fighting in wars that were precipitated in no small part by climate change, and that it was mostly low-wage, service jobs that came back since the recession, and that dystopian fiction is still alarmingly popular. I know that freak weather events are becoming everyday, half the country thinks inequality is just and fair, and that government is increasingly in the hands of a small, moneyed elite that is just as short-sighted as the rest of us and just as likely to chase immediate profits instead of long-term benefits. I know that non-renewable resources will eventually run out, and that the weight of inertia won't. I know that everybody thinks robots and self-driving vehicles are the cat's meow, and that every time I read a headline on the ice shelf collapsing or swathes of the biosphere potentially going extinct I cover my ears and go "lalala" along with the rest of the reading public.

No idea how to put together those puzzle pieces into a coherent view of the future, but my guess is that it'll be interesting, to say the least, and I'm sick of people claiming we're either going to maintain the current status quo (but with cooler toys) or that we'll seamlessly transition to a better state of being for everybody. That's just not in the cards.