2025 seems to be the year that the automation of employment by AI & robotics has gone mainstream. Soon, we will start to see it affect politics and elections. Approximately 5 million US citizens have driving jobs, and that isn't including gig driving jobs for Uber, Lyft, etc A 7% pay cut in the space of one year is serious news. Multiply that out to millions of people, and it will soon be a political movement.
The AI stock bubble is built on the back of AI companies promising mega profits, replacing human workers. Something has to give, and we're heading for the crunch point.
Self-driving vehicles are already depressing driving job earnings: In areas with autonomous taxis, human drivers’ pay has fallen. Down 6.9% in San Francisco and 4.7% in Los Angeles year-on-year.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
20 Comments
And politicians and CEOs are saying adapt or die because they are not going to help us.
We are creating the world for less people to be needed. I do not know what the average person was expecting.
I think its also people losing their jobs and ultimately going into gig work. High labor supply means employers can get away with lowering wages.
Good. Have you been on a Waymo before? It’s great. Cheaper and no driver to talk to. No need to tip either. Just what I am looking for in a taxi ride.
I get a cringe every time when I see drivers posting signs in the car reminding why tips are important for them. Or just talk about their life during the entire ride.
Now let’s do this to deliveries. I am sick of DoorDash and UberEats drivers holding your food hostage to ask for tips. I call them bribes, but they think these are bids for their services.
If you replace humans with robots, humans have less work and money.
This is a shocking development.
We need to understand that real goal is to capture not only taxi but also public transport. Only after you destroy buses there will be enough demand for auto-cars.
Self driving cars are not gonna trigger the ‘crunch point’
Just yesterday I read a long article about how awful Uber is about vetting drivers before onboarding them. They do the barest minimum background checks, while Lyft is much more thorough, there are issues with Uber drivers raping women and I’m fine for robots to take those jobs.
Professional level drivers will still have a significant following, we can do away with the Uber trash heaps and all be better for it
Hey, drivers – with your extra time/capacity created by becoming under/unemployed, you can make more money through other jobs, more work, starting new businesses, taking risks, and pursuing new opportunities.
That’s how economics textbooks think. Is it how real humans will behave? What d’ya say?
San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York… well, you get what you vote for.
You have had at least a decade to read the writing on the wall.
If the only plan you had for your life was to be a taxi…
From real world experience, I trust a Tesla more than a human at this point.
I’ve used FSD for probably over a 100 rides at this point, and it is safer and more consistent than any ride share ride I have taken.
1. It doesn’t speed, for no reason, or for selfish reasons like being late/emotional/absent minded.
2. It ALWAYS uses its turn signal
3. It accounts for all blind spots
4. It actually stops at stop signs.
5. It is very protective of pedestrians and bike riders (giving them space)
At this point, the only safety downside to FSD, is the OTHER people on the road. For example, FSD will merge into someone else’s blind spot. Technically not wrong, but I don’t like that, because you never know.
When you start using FSD, your stress level while driving drops like 50 percent. And you realize how unhealthy driving actually is for people. It is not normal to be in fight or flight response mode for such long stretches of time, so consistently. In my opinion.
Have they taken into account the sheer number increase of human gig drivers? That’s probably lowering prices more than robocars.
Don’t worry. The alternative is a driver sitting there waiting for you to cancel so they can get the fee.
This bad bad, Its going to force everyone into already competitive blue collar jobs and the tech industry will be ran by AI, Capitalist love replacing you if they can. Yikes
The job market is softening overall
That’s pushing people into gig work like signing up to be an uber driver
More supply -> lower prices
If people are really losing their job then it means that AI is delivering on their promises and is thus not a bubble but that it can instead successfully replace workers
The only question now is if it will be successful at replacing workers fast enough to warrant the current valuations, maybe the increase in unemployment is slower than inverstors expected so the bubble could still pop even as the unmployment rate rises
Sooner or later driverless cars will be better drivers than people assuming they aren’t already. At that point it’s not a jobs issue anymore, it’s a health and safety issue. Which is more important the jobs or the lives that will be saved from having less accidents.
Maybe if uber and lyft vetted their drivers better I wouldn’t love waymo so much.
There are very real downsides, but what doesn’t get brought up are the very real upsides away from the wage drain and corpo profit taking that obviously are going to be real bad.
A small fleet of autonomous driving vehicles highly trained on their specific use area around mass transit sites like light rail stations and bus depots to provide last mile service would be a complete game changer for many metro area transit systems that were simply built in very car-centric ways before the mass transit even existed.
Remaining larger bus routes can be updated to be much more efficient, usage patterns change, and the limited service areas open up new possibilities as far as safety measures while making existing ones easier to apply at a high level.
Less people randomly driving around seems good, if only the new methods actually improved efficiency and waste, not just labour costs
So many commenters here are obsessed with their own selfish convenience and are missing the point – the issue here is greater wealth transfer upwards and greater entrenchment of wealth inequality, the effectiveness of the drivers is peripheral to the debate on whether we should use Waymo. IMHO municipal governments ought to have full ownership of the Waymos and use it as a revenue raising scheme, but we will get more job loss and like it as long as people worship convenience over societal stability