Gyroscopic Investing

MachineGhost wrote:In a major milestone for autonomous trucking, some 45,000 cans of Budweiser (NYSE:BUD) beer arrived late last week to a Colorado warehouse after traveling over 120 highway miles in a self-driving semi with no driver at the wheel. Otto, the autonomous truck subsidiary of Uber (Private:UBER), shipped the brew with a driver monitoring from the truck's sleeper berth for the entire two-hour journey.

l82start wrote:

MachineGhost wrote:In a major milestone for autonomous trucking, some 45,000 cans of Budweiser (NYSE:BUD) beer arrived late last week to a Colorado warehouse after traveling over 120 highway miles in a self-driving semi with no driver at the wheel. Otto, the autonomous truck subsidiary of Uber (Private:UBER), shipped the brew with a driver monitoring from the truck's sleeper berth for the entire two-hour journey.

well that just sucks... they are risking a country wide revolution, and maybe the beginning of an Apocalypse letting the beer truck arrive late

As close as 2025 — that is in a mere 10 years — our advancing state of technology will begin disrupting our economy in ways we can’t even yet imagine. Human labor is increasingly unnecessary and even economically unviable compared to machine labor. And yet we still insist on money to pay for what our machines are making for us. As long as this remains true, we must begin providing ourselves the money required to purchase what the machines are producing.

Without a technological dividend, the engine that is our economy will seize, or we will fight against technological progress itself in the same way some once destroyed their machine replacements. Without non-work income, we will actually fight to keep from being replaced by the technology we built to replace us.

Just as our roads a decade from now will be full of machine drivers instead of human drivers, a 21st century economy shall be driven by human consumers, not human workers, and these consumers must be freely given their purchasing power. If we refuse, if we don’t provide ourselves a universal and unconditional basic income soon, the future is going to hit us like a truck — a truck driven solely by ourselves.

To allow this to happen would be truly foolish, for what is the entire purpose of technology but to free us to pursue all we wish to pursue? Fearing the loss of jobs shouldn’t be a fear at all. It should be welcomed. It should be freeing.

No one should be asking what we’re going to do if computers take our jobs.

We should all be asking what we get to do once freed from them.

https://medium.com/basic-income/self-dr ... .lqrh0wtkz

Reub wrote:A young woman rammed the back of a police car while driving topless and Snapchatting with her boyfriend.

Is this the right thread for this story?

Xan wrote:I think his point was that with self-driving cars, you can Snapchat topless in the car all you want with no problem.

Really, Reub's article could have fit perfectly into many threads!

There is a contradiction in economic forecasting today that I’ve come to think of as the “robot paradox.” Some people seem confident that automation will take many workers’ jobs, yet they cannot point to evidence that technology has done anything in the last few years to replace work or add to productivity. Indeed, economic growth has been lackluster for the last few years, productivity growth is mysteriously moribund, and the last two years have been perhaps the best time this century for wage growth. This is not what the end of work looks like.

Since I have written repeatedly that policymakers should take the threat of automation seriously, I’ve developed several theories about the robot paradox. The first begins with humility: Maybe I’m wrong, and today’s statistics are evidence that machines will continue to supplement workers, as they have mostly done for the last few centuries, rather than erode overall employment. The second is that I’m right, just not yet: The economy is on the precipice of several wrenching changes—self-driving cars, machine-learning, and the continued digitization of shopping—that will replace hundreds of thousands of jobs in a future so near it is practically the edge of the present.

But the third theory is the most important, the most empirical, and yet the most overlooked. It is that the time to look for technological displacement of workers is not during recoveries, but rather during recessions. There is nothing to see now, but after the next downturn (or the recession after that), there will be.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/ar ... m_swu=6852