https://www.understandingai.org/p/we-could-be-months-away-from-driverless?
I visited two startups working to bring driverless technology to long-haul trucking.
I'm surprised this hasn't been done sooner. Long-haul trucking on highways seems like low-hanging fruit compared to city taxis.
Great. One of the last ways to make a real living is being automated now. Because of fucking course it is.
I feel like we are heading to a post-work future where eventually AI and robotics will do most of the work and that will be a good thing. In the meantime, I'm sure there will be a lot of pain and revolution to get to that point.
Even in rich Western countries tens of millions of people rely on driving, delivery and taxi jobs. When people realize they are disappearing forever we'll be one step closer to that future.
That would be nice. It's the interceding years of epidemic homelessness, plague, starvation, and the violence all that will breed that I dread.
Our oligarchs are perfectly happy to push people into the gutter and let them die right now. When they can wipe whole industries out with AI and automation, they will do it with gusto. They have no humanity or empathy. Just avarice.
I don't mean to diminish people's fears and anxieties because they are extremely real, but I think it's worth considering other outlooks. For example, look at how quickly the world changed in March 2020 in response to COVID-19. Isn't there something hopeful about that? Doesn't it suggest that the world can adapt to sudden change far more quickly than we expected?
Sometimes I wonder if some people are too apocalyptic in their ideas especially if they come from a product in an apocalyptic Christian background. if you look at thousands of years of European history isn't the lesson to take away that revolution and change happen all the time, but eventually, progress is what people settle into and things work out in the end.
I realize that is the most hopeful interpretation of events, and perhaps too hopeful, but I'm optimistically natured and that's what I try to stick to.