globinfo
freexchange
“The UK
government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on
public roads from January next year.”
“It
also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the
tech, which would start at the same time. In addition, ministers
ordered a review of the UK's road regulations to provide appropriate
guidelines. The Department for Transport had originally pledged to
let self-driving cars be trialled on public roads by the end of
2013.”
“The US
States of California, Nevada and Florida have all approved tests of
the vehicles. In California alone, Google's driverless car has done
more than 300,000 miles on the open road. In 2013, Nissan carried out
Japan's first public road test of an autonomous vehicle on a highway.
And in Europe, the Swedish city of Gothenburg has given Volvo
permission to test 100 driverless cars - although that trial is not
scheduled to occur until 2017.”
Just two
months ago we published our concerns for drivers' jobs, on the
announcement of Google's self-driving car, and how this is connected
to the Greek experiment:
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It
seems that professional drivers are in danger to become unemployed
this time. Even services sector could become hyper-automatized. It
is characteristic that Troika in Greece is forcing the government
to "open" all professions. Although for example, private
taxi owners and drivers form a quite saturated sector, which means
that there are too many in every Greek town, the government
promotes the "opening" of this sector which means that,
a few multinational companies will soon prevail "dragging"
prices even lower and making current small-medium taxi owners and
drivers impossible to withstand the competition. Imagine the day
when these companies would be able to own fleets without any
drivers! More profit for them, more unemployed drivers!
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Meanwhile,
Brynjolfsson and McAfee, the authors of "The
Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of
Brilliant Technologies", are talking
about self-driving cars, medical diagnosis by computer, automatic
news article generators but also admit that "By
definition, the second machine age favours capital (robots) over
labour (humans). [...] it will bring the elimination of routine jobs,
a devaluation of unqualified labour and growing inequality ..."
and
“Consumers
are better off and enormous wealth is created, but a relatively small
group of people often earns most of the income from the new products
or services.”
Therefore,
we should also wonder: Are we playing the game of these "second
machine age" neo-capitalists?
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Such an example would be, the
information that unemployment is here to stay due to
hyper-automatization. As this information goes viral, and many of
us discuss this issue in blogs and websites, people will
eventually get used to the idea that the unemployment rate would
be inevitably high from now on and that they probably would have
to live mostly with government subventions just to survive and
consume, according to the best scenario.
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thlis is definitely the next step they want so the system can keep going another few decades at that sweet 12 percent return for investors, but it's not going to live up to the techno hype.
ReplyDeleteEven in pharmacy, a job field hyper saturated with new schools opening up for twenty years now, how much can they really do to fire people:
1. Central fill--eliminates many pharmacists, but requires large supply and delivery systems. People will always want their drugs immediately, at least for somme of the non-routine ones.
2. Mail order: some people like it, others don't. new evidence is emerging that the drug benefit companies that control it are subsidizing the lower prices with taking profits out of pharmacies. a new federal law banning mandatory mailing has stopped its growth
3. computer verifiers: this is new and potentially the worst issue. if computers are allowed to verify correct meds after the first human verification, this could eliminate a good 20 percent of jobs or more. Only time will tell.
4. Robots: this will primarily destroy pharm tech jobs, which are dead end, created to reduce pharmacists in 1990. Effect on the pharmacist is minimal, except for solutions and chemotherapy, nuclear--not sure how that will affect it however.
5. Even in the complete elimination of retail pharmacies, and retrenchment of hospital pharmacies to skeletal staff, there will need to be tens of thousands working at central fill, mail facilities, counseling through webcams, monitoring patients, running drug reviews, etc.
It will reduce an already hypersaturated, declining profession by at most half. the system will go on, just eliminating the gainful emplyoment aspect, reducing it to casual work.
Also, the green light for google cars is a testament to the corruptin of the political process. there are so many things that the google car can't do, like recognize teh difference between garbage cans or humans, work in inclement weather, operate on roads not exceptionally detailed through mapping, way beyond current google maps, etc. How will the taxi know to pull over for humans if there is a bicycle in the way or not back up traffic, etc. these cars are decades away if ever becoming reality.