'Extensive' Tesla Autopilot probe proceeding 'really fast', U.S. official says https://t.co/KDBtibpAAo pic.twitter.com/4hBn6yrHE0
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 10, 2023
idk how much they have made off FSD, but if FSD at $15k/vehicle turns out to be defective, they are going to be in some very serious shit
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) January 10, 2023
I obtained surveillance footage of the self-driving Tesla that abruptly stopped on the Bay Bridge, resulting in an eight-vehicle crash that injured 9 people including a 2 yr old child just hours after Musk announced the self-driving feature.
Full story: https://t.co/LaEvX9TzxW pic.twitter.com/i75jSh2UpN
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) January 10, 2023
Musk has said Tesla’s problematic autopilot features are “really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”
Highway surveillance footage from Thanksgiving Day shows a Tesla Model S vehicle changing lanes and then abruptly braking in the far-left lane of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, resulting in an eight-vehicle crash. The crash injured nine people, including a 2-year-old child, and blocked traffic on the bridge for over an hour.
The video and new photographs of the crash, which were obtained by The Intercept via a California Public Records Act request, provides the first direct look at what happened on November 24, confirming witness accounts at the time. The driver told police that he had been using Tesla’s new “Full Self-Driving” feature, the report notes, before the Tesla’s “left signal activated” and its “brakes activated,” and it moved into the left lane, “slowing to a stop directly in [the second vehicle’s] path of travel.”…
NHTSA is also investigating a tweet by Musk in which he said that “Full Self-Driving” users would soon be given the option to turn off reminder notifications for drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel. “Users with more than 10,000 miles on FSD Beta should be given the option to turn off the steering nag,” a Twitter user posted on New Year’s Eve, tagging Musk.
“Agreed, update coming in Jan,” Musk replied.
Roll the dice with the Tesla self driving feature. Will your Tesla be a maniac that accelerates towards children and pulls into oncoming traffic or timid grandma that slams on it breaks unexpectedly. Find out today for the low, low price of $15K.
— The Next Day ([email protected]) (@incompetusrex) January 10, 2023
you just have to accept that sometimes it will suddenly stop, and if it does so your job is to put down your phone and start it moving again. the cars hitting you from behind will give you a boost
— flglmn (@flglmn) January 10, 2023
This is a car designed around the anxieties of very rich people who fear the public will turn on them. https://t.co/plT9Uj8aMW
— Paris Marx (@parismarx) January 9, 2023
Probably the best explanation I’ve seen besides “This was clearly designed by brain-damaged children who want to drive a tank” https://t.co/48cFO9kPnS
— Peter Wolf (@peterawolf) January 9, 2023
If it did musk wouldn't have spent 40 billion on Twitter ??
— Joke?? (@MEOWdy_comrades) January 10, 2023
Good lord pic.twitter.com/U3qmWI1Dgj
— הרשמה למסטודון! (@SababaUSA) January 11, 2023
The concurrent existence of:
NHTSA product defect investig'ns;
FTC unfair & deceptive practices investig'n;
Cal. DMV untrue & deceptive marketing investig'n;
DoJ criminal investig's; &
class action litigation
really highlight how much Tesla can get away with out of pure obstinacy pic.twitter.com/uLPhbL3x1W— הרשמה למסטודון! (@SababaUSA) January 11, 2023
bbleh
Yabbut see we’re selling an idea, a lifestyle, and that’s SO much more important than some silly product with whatever braking, crash, whatever stuff, which definitely will be worked out because something something tech. Also have you seen the cool built-in screens? And the styling, I mean … damn!
Elizabelle
Yesterday’s LA Times brought us a nice picture of a Tesla. Submerged in somebody’s backyard pool in Pasadena.
Assumption was the driver hit the accelerator instead of brake. Hmmmm.
Three people, including a 4-year-old boy, are rescued after Tesla crashes into a poo
Here’s a free link, local CBS station report. Tesla looks good in the chlorinated blue water.
Keith P.
I’ve been saying this since the first time this kind of tech was deployed – how the hell did the DOT ever let anyone *beta* test self-driving software in real traffic?
Dangerman
I’d almost be OK with self driving cars if they are well identified like student drivers. Always useful to know which “drivers” are ignorant shits.
Ken
Tesla stock has been climbing back a little lately, probably mostly because they put Tom Zhu in charge of actually making and selling the cars, but I’d bet a chunk of it was because the House elections drove Musk out of the news for a while. I have to think this video release and related news won’t be good for that. It’ll also be a test of how tightly they’ve clamped down on Musk’s Tesla-related twitting.
Also:
Were I a twit, I’d be tempted to post “I’ve got a bet with a friend that your narcissism forces you to treat any acknowledgment of your existence as affirmation, no matter what the content” and tag Musk, just to see if he replies “Agreed, great analysis.”
Gvg
A couple of years ago, even people on this site thought long haul truckers jobs were in danger from AI trucks. I didn’t think technology was really close to that and still don’t. It’s just really complex to handle all the things we think about.
Maybe we can automate a train system better if we actually had a good train system to start with.
Musk is a compulsive liar. But it wasn’t just him, the robo truck was a lot of different people saying. It had a lot to do with AI promoters too. Research and development is worth trying and doing but realism about where we are has to be a part of it too.
TaMara
My car has accident avoidance features and adaptive cruise control. The number of times it has misinterpreted things that I either ignore or have to actively override is scary.
The features are great, but they are far from perfect. More like autocorrect on your phone…you always want to double check, lest you send me a text saying send me dick pictures when you meant to say duck. Which may or may not have happened with our blog master.
bbleh
@Gvg: I still can see mostly-robot “truck trains” going between staging-points via access-controlled highways. They would be major pains in the ass for other drivers, but I can see it being done anyway in the name of high-tech efficient whatever (ie, profit). Unlike railways it wouldn’t require rights of way and so would be more flexible, and keeping it to access-controlled highways (with staging-points right next to ramps) would reduce the technical challenges. But I still don’t know whether it would have enough advantages to be profitable, and of course human drivers would be required from the staging-points to the ultimate destinations.
Could be the whole thing would be determined not on the basis of economics but politics. Might be profitable, but one “truck train” wiping out a suburban minivan carrying a mom and her children could be enough to get the whole thing banned for good.
NotMax
If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, self-driving is a feature designed by a sadist.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ll never buy a self-driving car
A self-flying car…. we’ll see what the sticker price is, can I get maybe get zero percent…?
Betsy
Is it just me or does that logo look like an IUD?
The Oracle of Solace
When I went shopping for an electric car about two years ago, Tesla’s Model 3 tumbled rather quickly in my estimation. I ended up sticking with my current vehicle, but looking ahead, Teslas are basically MAGA hats on wheels, so they’re off the list.
On an unrelated note, I got cast in a local play, so that’s neat. First audition since the pandemic began, and I did all right.
Urza
@Gvg: The disturbing part is how many companies are still funding research as if its solvable with current tech. Anything less than the Cloud controlling every car and its going to have so many edge case failures, and Americans are not even remotely close to letting an anonymous computer control every car, traffic light and have cameras all along the road even if it did work.
Betsy
@Elizabelle: Excellent typo!
bbleh
@Betsy: Lol I would guess the intention was, um, sorta the opposite.
NotMax
@TaMara
There comes a point when the multiplicity of such features tips from driver safety to driver complacency and its corollary, inattentiveness. There certainly are days when traveling the roads observing the traffic when it more than seems it’s already so.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@TaMara: That’s perfect.
FSD = the flawless perfection of autocorrect, but for your car! Let the algorithm take over…
Unfortunately, Teslas put all of at risk from their dangerous and unpredictable behavior. It’s not just their drivers putting their lives on the line…
Unsafe at any speed, indeed!
Betsy
@bbleh: Highways don’t require rights of way? I fail to see any part of the arrangement you have described that isn’t vastly better and far more efficiently done with trains. Way stations – limited access – still requires intermodal between the dedicated train portions ….
FastEdD
“While, yes, Tesla’s system was the particular one that appears to have failed here, and yes, the system is deceptively named in a way that encourages this idiotic behavior, this is not a problem unique to Tesla. It’s not a technical problem. You can’t program your way out of the problem with Level 2; in fact, the better the Level 2 system seems to be, the worse the problem gets. That problem is that human beings are simply no good at monitoring systems that do most of the work of a task and remaining ready to take over that task with minimal to no warning.’”
-Jason Torchinsky, on level 2 autonomous driving in an article today at The Autopian. He wrote a book on this subject called “Robot Take the Wheel.”
bbleh
@Betsy: yeah I dunno if the numbers would work out. Access-controlled highways are EVERYWHERE, and staging-points would be little more than parking lots, a la park-n-ride, and wouldn’t have to be RIGHT next to the ramp. But rail is still far more efficient per ton-mile, so the advantages of greater location flexibility might be outweighed by the increased costs. And it might also depend on the type of cargo, eg, fresh goods almost always move by truck, so there might be segregation by product.
Sounds like a Master’s thesis at least. And there’s still the question of how it would work on the highways. Imagine trying to cut into a line of, say, 20 trucks to try to get to your exit…
Another Scott
@bbleh: That might be a potential use case, but given the exploded tire carcasses one sees along most miles of US interstate highways, I would want there to be lots and lots of testing of events like that before letting it out in the wild.
I remember driving next to a semi trailer once when it had a tire explode. It’s a startling event, to say the least! (He pulled over just fine, but the truck did sway a bit…)
Personally, I think the self-driving technology is too immature for general use, and too expensive to get right (it looks like Waymo’s tech adds ~ $50-80+k to the cost of one of their cars) and probably will be for a while. MotUs that want to get rid of all their employees can’t wait for AI and computers to mean that they can just sit back and collect their monopoly rents without having to deal with humans, but I wonder who they think is going to buy all their robots and stuff to fill up their self-driving trucks. Consumers without jobs don’t do too much consuming…
I’m a big fan of progress and R&D, but rolling stuff out too quickly kills people, and letting some MotU lock up the market stifles long-term progress. Markets require regulation, and especially require effective competition.
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@Another Scott
There’s some things AI is capable of.
Driving isn’t one of them.
;)
oldster
I’m glad that the Federal probe into FSD is getting up to speed, but I worry that it will run into a brick wall.
Or just slow to a crawl for no good reason.
Instead, I’m hoping that it will surge forward, put the pedal to the metal, and run down any mining heirs who might be in the way.
Roger Moore
My personal theory to explain a lot of Tesla’s self-driving quirks is that they’ve been trying to save money by recording real-world driving. The cars are already set up to record all the sensor data and the drivers’ responses, and they’re in constant contact with HQ, so they can get billions of miles of actual driving experience for the price of transmitting the data. The problem is they’ve been training their cars by observing Tesla drivers, so they’ve effectively been training their autopilot to be an obnoxious, self-centered asshole that ignores traffic laws whenever it’s convenient.
Chetan Murthy
@oldster: I suspect that long before the government gets off its fat ass, investors will have deserted that damned hulk. I mean, I’d like for things to be different, but …. it is what it is.
Elizabelle
@Betsy: LOL! Thanks. Messed that up adding the KCAL link.
Funny.
Trust me, the car looks better in the water.
Pete Downunder
CaseyL
@Betsy: Looks more like a very stylized uterus to me, but… yeah, a very female logo. Which, as @bbleh: notes, is the opposite of what they were probably going for.
But when it comes to logos that make me laugh out loud, so far nothing beats Amazon Prime’s “smile,” which to me will forever be a line drawing of the underside of a penis.
Roger Moore
@Keith P.:
You’re going to have to try it in real traffic for the first time at some point. Almost by definition it’s going to be beta quality when you do, since there’s no simulation that can possibly match real world conditions. The real problem is two-fold:
Roger Moore
@Betsy:
Highways require rights of way, but trucks don’t because the highway has handled it for them. That’s the thing about all this stuff. Our road system is enormously expensive, and taxes directed specifically at road users pay for only a tiny percentage of that price. The net result is that everyone is subsidizing drivers and (to a greater extent) truckers. If the truckers had to pay for their own roads the way railroads have to pay upkeep on their tracks, we’d have a lot more rail and a lot less trucking.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Of course part of the folly here is that even though people talk about self-driving cars, right now there is no such thing, only variations of assisted driving technology, some of which is very successful and fairly common. Some of the additions to automobile, RADAR and LIDAR and night vision technologies, can be of great assistance to human drivers.
I have a feeling, not based on any current news stories, that research into self-operating ground and air military equipment, from drones to attack vehicles, will be used to crack the problem of self-driving cars.
As an aside, I read recently that agreement was reached to allow right-of-repair for John Deere agricultural equipment. I look at the relatively rapid adoption of software into consumer and agricultural equipment and am amazed how this has moved from do it yourself and hobbyists technology to a battle to protect intellectual property and to erode the concept of ownership.
I honestly do not understand your luddite rant here. Technology has always disrupted employment and will continue to do so. I imagine that the invention of the wheel and the creation of wagons led to people losing jobs as porters, hiring themselves out to carry packages for paying customers.
I recently read that the phone companies will finally retire 411 operator assistance, which I didn’t even realize still existed. From a CNN story.
I watch old movies about corporate life, which show a secretarial pool of scores of typists and receptionists and clerical staff, all of whom have largely disappeared.
There may be a tipping point where automation and AI eliminate jobs faster than employment can be transformed. But you cannot blame asshole billionaires for this. It is a primary component of human ingenuity.
My 2 cents worth…
Ohio Mom
@CaseyL: Thank you. I’ve always wondered if I was the only one who looked at the Amazon Prime logo and saw a dick. I feel relieved that I am not imagining things.
On another note, I am not a regular Atrios reader anymore but when I was, one of his hobbyhorses was that self-driving cars were never going to happen. He convinced me and so far I see no reason to change my mind.
Jackie
So now we have to apply defensive driving to Tesla cars along with every other defensive driving possibilities.
Great.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
I work(ed) in I/T. My career was spent destroying the jobs of operators, bank tellers, and other low-skill workers all over the economy. And yes, you’re right, that since the days of Ned Ludd, service economy workers have been disintermediated by new technology. And yeah, this is just the way progress works, and we can’t very well kvetch about it …. on fucking computers, FFS, FFS.
On the other hand, there’s a good point, that as computers take over sector-after-sector, capital and the returns-on-capital need to be taxed more aggressively, so those monies can get invested into training workers for the new careers that will arise. Or so that older careers that have not yet been automated (but were heretofore low-paid) can become higher-paid. What’s important, is that the gains of automation don’t get taken by some small subset of society, b/c that’s the road to feudalism and eventual slavery.
gene108
I just marvel at how badly Musk has destroyed his public image he built up over the last 10 years, because of the Twitter purchase.
No one likes to trust someone, only to be made a fool of later. The media that fluffed him will eventually get their knives out, sooner or later.
NotMax
@CaseyL
You mean it’s not?
:)
(Waves to B-J After Dark.)
VOR
@TaMara: Agree. My 2022 has Lane Keeping Assist, which nudges the car into the center of the lane. I generally like the feature but don’t take my hands off the wheel. My son was driving the car on a two lane road and told me it was trying to drive down the middle line, straddling the lanes, as if it couldn’t see the middle stripe. Which is possible, since it was snowing.
It also has Automatic Emergency Braking, which can be a PITA when I’m parking close to a known object like a garbage can or my garage door. The thing will slam on the brakes a few feet before the object, even though I’m moving under 5 MPH with my hands on the steering wheel. Yeah, I know that object is there but I’m intentionally trying to park close to it.
I do like the Blind Spot monitoring, but I don’t trust it. I always look for myself.
Adaptive Cruise Control is a nice thing. It automatically slows down or speeds up in order to keep a gap with the car ahead. One problem is I sometimes do not realize the car ahead has decided to slow down, such as driving 62 MPH in a 70 zone. Since the car is handling the speed, I often don’t notice until everyone behind me starts changing lanes and blocking me in place behind Mr. 62.
Damien
Who was it who said that having a Tesla is like if your printer was a car?
Because I have yet to see a better, more apt description
Kent
We already have that and have had it for 150 years. They are called trains.
Why build whole new access-controlled freight corridors between manufacturing and distribution centers when we have a far better and more efficient system already in existence? Modernize our freight railroads makes a lot more sense.
Kent
The first time a self-driving truck with no driver runs over a 5 year old on a bicycle it will be all over. No driver to blame for driver error? Some big company will have to eat an ENORMOUS settlement.
206inKY
Google has been approaching autonomous vehicles the right way with 14 years of development and safety testing. We still don’t have Waymo vehicles since Google is the adult in the room. Lunatic companies like Uber and Tesla have been intermittently trying to crash the party, but Waymo has been staying the course and I can’t wait to use it someday. Done properly this technology can save 30,000 lives a year in the US alone, but assholes like Musk are destroying consumer trust.
C Stars
I love the idea of self-driving vehicles. I dislike driving, and humans are generally more capricious and untrustworthy than machines. I took a ride in a self-driving Waymo car in Phoenix last year, and it was novel and cool but also just scary. The car changed lanes in a very slow and obnoxious way, riding the line for several meters before jerking over into the next lane proper. And turning in the intersections it went absolutely straight before suddenly at the last minute executing the turn. I was glad when the ride was over. Clearly the tech isn’t quite there yet.
James E Powell
@Chetan Murthy:
While I agree generally, I am curious about the assumptions: a) that new careers will arise in sufficient numbers & with the same or increased income, b) that workers can be trained for those careers, and c) that the money collected through taxes, then invested in training will be enough to make it all happen.
Major Major Major Major
Some day we will be rid of this meddlesome idiot. Hopefully hilariously.
In other news, been laid up all day with food poisoning, blech.
sab
@Betsy: It’s not just you. Can’t believe I didn’t notice that years ago.
Chetan Murthy
@James E Powell: If money is given to people, they will find reasons to spend it, and those reasons will produce new careers. The problem comes when money is not given to the vast mass of people, but instead hoarded by the richest — then they have no reason to want to find new and interest ways to spend that money, b/c they already have every material need.
Now, as to whether those new careers will be sufficiently remunerative …. all I can say is, that’s a matter of adequately progressive taxation. I’m not saying it’s all straightforward. And for sure, in our country there are too many GODDAMN TEMPORARILY EMBARRASSED MILLIONAIRES. But setting aside those sorts of *real obstacles*, if we simply tax away massive profits and redistriibute them to the vast majority of the population, we can rely upon them to spend that money, and that will solve the problem.
C Stars
@Roger Moore: Yep. And aren’t passenger trains also required to pay for rail time? My middle schooler who is obsessed with trains was just explaining this to me.
BigJimSlade
I’m pretty damn sick of Elon Schmuck.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator:
This, exactly. Ingenuity has, so far, generally taken care of both the disruption and transformation required in its wake. I remain skeptical that we’ll see a sudden explosion of generalist neural networks taking everybody’s jobs at once… and whether they can or not is mostly down to how interesting the research is. None of the engineers at Alphabet are twirling their mustaches on their fingers as they cackle in glee about leaving long-haul truck drivers high and dry. Yes, it’s profitable, but this particular paradigm has been an active area of research since, literally, the 1950s.
Is it profitable? Sometimes! So are lots of things. And in fact orgs like OpenAI care *more* than a lot of other people about preventing its misuse.
CaseyL
@Ohio Mom: It was so obvious to me from the start, I thought it was deliberate, possibly an inside joke.
The first time I heard someone refer to the logo as a smile, I actually stared at them; like, “Don’t you see what I see?”
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
I started working, part time as a teen, in the late 70s and saw a transformation of society. I worked at a major newspaper just as they were moving from old lead typesetting to the use of computers and electronic production. The old guys (and they were all men) who did not retire were allowed to become proofreaders and take other jobs at their current salaries. New hires came in at a lower wage.
Later I saw how the humble spreadsheet eliminated entire floors of clerical workers who kept various ledgers related to business operations. Good job, VisiCalc.
Computers and other technology soon eliminated branch offices of many businesses.
Employment picked up again, but I will bet that a significant amount of wage stagnation came from people having to take new jobs at lower salaries. I wonder if there are many good studies of this possibility.
I think that most job training is ineffective. Government and industry guess incorrectly about where new jobs will open up. Even worse, they train people for the next batch of jobs that will soon disappear. And as I noted above, new industries often pay less than old industries, especially if former jobs had union protection. This hurts older workers but may provide long careers for younger workers. I don’t know if there are good solutions here.
ETA. A new phenomenon that is bumming me out. I work with a company that uses a lot of remote workers. This year, increases in the minimum wage in many states has led this company to hire English speaking foreign workers. The transition was very smooth. But talk about international job disruption.
Frankensteinbeck
Fully self-driving cars are not going to happen unless we get a breakthrough of a new kind of artificial intelligence. Machine learning has limits inherent in its concept. Asked to respond to complex inputs, it will always give you an ‘it works until it doesn’t’ result. Making it interact with humans inevitably brings whatever flaw snuck into the pattern out, because we’re so absurdly complex and layered and contextual and evolving. That AI producing a picture in response to your prompt is hilarious when you ask for salmon swimming upriver and it gives you beautifully rendered sushi rolls. When a car makes that kind of context error, people die. You always have to watch machine learning for those context errors, so… you’ll never actually be able to let it drive itself.
C Stars
@Major Major Major Major: ugh, I hope it’s a quick bout.
meander
Here’s an interesting look at autonomous trucks from a trucking trade magazine (Diesel Progress), where the writer notes that “trucks require massive amounts of human interaction to safely reach a destination,” like inspections, fueling, maintenance, etc. The author estimates that “an autonomous truck on a coast-to-coast haul will likely need at least 15 to 20 humans at various points to help it along its journey.”
In the San Francisco Chronicle from December, New California law effectively bans Tesla from advertising its cars as Full Self-Driving: “Tesla will effectively be banned from advertising its vehicles as Full Self-Driving under a new law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom this legislative session. ”
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: we’ve started “nearshoring” (hiring in Mexico what a stupid word lol) for a lot of our new engineers. They’re… okay… but so much of what we do takes place in a US-location-required ‘clean room’ that’s it’s just been impossible to onboard people. Our tools don’t work.
Amir Khalid
@Betsy:
We should all start calling it the Tesla IUD. I bet Elon will be pleased.
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
Sorry to learn that you have been ill. Hope things get better soon. I know the feeling.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
I think there’s also a question about how well our existing approaches to AI/ML will scale. I won’t pretend to be an expert, but all the media stuff I’ve seen about AI/ML suggests that recent developments have been at least as much about throwing more resources at the problems rather than fundamentally smarter approaches to the problem. We’ve been building up ever more enormous corpora of material to train on, bigger neural networks, and more processors to do the massive effort involved in the training. Companies are spending years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing some of these AIs, and they are still scratching the surface of what humans can do. It’s not obvious how much money and time we’d have to throw at the problem to automate some of these tasks, or even if there’s enough training material in existence to let it work.
Mallard Filmore
@C Stars:
Amtrak owns the North East Corridor rail line between Washington DC and Boston. Everywhere else it runs its trains on the tracks of freight haulers.
Google says:
gene108
@Chetan Murthy:
I don’t think everyone can be retrained or wants to be retrained. Automation is only one issue we’ll be dealing with in the near future. I think along with people displaced from jobs due to automation, we’re going to have to deal with global population decline in the next 50 to 100 years. East Asia and Northern Europe may be dealing with this in a generation.
I’d personally like some sort of UBI or other means so everyone’s needs can be met. Our whole economic model of business success being defined as Year-over-year growth in sales will breakdown, as there are fewer people to sell to. My gut feeling is trying to measure wealth by the value of real estate or stock holdings isn’t going to work after a certain point of population decline.
I’d like to rethink the entire economy, so we can have something like what Earth has in the Star Trek universe, where everyone has their needs met and people who want to work can and those that don’t aren’t forced to.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I think a lot of the problems you’re describing are not inevitable outcomes. Employers having all the power and being able to use technological changes to screw over employees is the result of deliberate policy decisions. Just look at how much ground unions have made over the past couple of years of having a NLRB that actually tries to enforce our labor code; they could do even more if we actually made our laws more pro-labor, too.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@TaMara: “Which may or may not have happened with our blog master.”
Do tell…
/popcorn
@TaMara:
Another Scott
@Brachiator: My dad’s first job was working as a pin-setter in a bowling alley when he was 8. Automation, and child labor laws, replaced those jobs.
When I was growing up, kids on bicycles delivered newspapers. Guys in vans replaced those jobs, then Craig’sList and mergers crushed newspapers and took those jobs. Around here, the guys who used to deliver newspapers from vans now have (or had) tree and lawn service companies.
Economies evolve or die.
But people work in those economies, and guys who used to deliver newspapers out of vans aren’t going to community college to learn AI programming. Retraining sounds good, but is really, mainly, just a way for companies to push the costs of workforce development onto others. There has to be a way for people who don’t own their own businesses (who are most of us) to earn a living as the economy evolves. Telling everyone to go to school to be a coder or a nurse’s aid is not a serious solution.
Around here, it seems like kids don’t have much in the way of summer or after-school jobs. Maybe I just don’t see it. Maybe they’re being trained and forced to accept unpaid internships as training for their future as low-paid adjuncts and post-docs after they finish school. :-/
We need to think long and hard about how we want the economy to evolve, because it is going to happen. And the choices we make, the people we elect, and the laws we write, are going to determine how it does so.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@gene108:
Two answers: (1) UBI. (2) more realistically, the jobs that will be left, will be those that require actual human touch. Care-giving. We’re not talking retraining as computer programmers, but as nurses’ assistants, home health aides, teachers’ aides, and child care workers. B/c those are going to be tough to automate. Maybe you’re saying that some rough-and-tough man’s-man coal miner will *refuse* to learn these new skills? Sure, I can buy that. And for him, there’ll be UBI.
For his children, these will be the new jobs. And y’know, if they don’t want those jobs, there’ll be UBI for them, too. But the idea that somehow, the guy who pumps gas at a full-service station, whose dad did that, can expect that his kids will do that, is *incompatible* with a world where we communicate world-wide using the Internet, at basically zero cost.
You can have the Internet, or you can have your old-timey jobs. You can’t have both.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: New Jersey still has a law against self-service gas pumps, doesn’t it? Bell Labs was in New Jersey.
Every economy has laws that guide it. We can be smart about the laws, or we can be stupid about the laws, but in either case they will determine (to some extent anyway) how the economy and employment changes.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ramona
@Betsy: My goodness! Yes, it does! I’ve been scratching my head for years trying to figure out what the Tesla logo reminded me of.
TEL
Wow – I know the Bay Bridge inside out and backwards and that is a lousy place to lose control of your car. It’s going eastbound just out of SF where the bridge stacks and there’s nowhere to go on the left side other than in the concrete. It looks like the driver knew something was wrong – they had the turn indicator on and were trying to get out of one of the center lanes. Plus you’re going from the outside daylight into darkness (it’s not well-lit) so it’s difficult to see.
Ramona
@CaseyL: I see both a smile and a reason to smile.
TEL
Whoops! Just read the accompanying article and it looks like the car did the lane change all by itself assuming the driver wasn’t lying. That’s even worse.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Which is why I have never advocated anything like this.
I don’t think you can write very effective laws to help the economy evolve. Some laws just get in the way.
Off the top of my head, I would suggest job credits, rigorously audited, for companies that hire and retrain people. I have read, for example, that some companies cannot find experienced machinists and other skilled workers. Make it easier for companies to train needed workers.
I also favor national unemployment compensation or state offsets, so that people are not forced to stay in communities where jobs have disappeared. Maybe some form of UBI and enhanced Earned Income Credits.
Otherwise, as I noted before, jobs will disappear and new jobs will be created. You can’t really predict or manage transitions.
ETA. Even unofficial economies adapt. The bus system formerly allowed bus tokens. Poor people would buy or otherwise acquire tokens and sell them at a discount to bus and train riders. Then TAP cards and phone apps made tokens obsolete. Now these people sell phone cases, cheap chargers and other stuff to bus and train riders. Nobody had to wait for the government to come up with a plan.
Mai Naem mobile
The Tesla truck is honestly one of the ugliest vehicles I have ever seen. Its not some unique futuristic design. Its just plain butt ugly.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I emphatically disagree. Please describe the alternate universe where telephone operators still exist. Unions do good work in helping workers get better pay and in making sure that working conditions are good. Unions cannot save jobs.
Newspapers had unions. But to suggest that unions could halt the transition to cold type is absurd. Equally absurd to suggest that unions could ensure that businesses continue to use armies of clerks compiling reports using pencils and adding machines.
In California, unions have done a poor job advising the state legislature. The state went after Uber and Lyft, with good reason. But then, with union support, the state tried to redefine who was an employee. Big money businesses, like architectural and engineering firms, rebelled and carved out exceptions.
But even smaller businesses, like barber and beauty shops also rebelled because the proposed law was onerous and stupid. Newspapers are dying, but the law said that any newspaper that printed more than 32 articles of a contract journalist had to make that person an employee. Newspapers simply stopped hiring these writers. Yay, for who?
A previous round of laws saw businesses simply move out of California. The economy here is robust and can survive a lot of stupidity, but the strain is starting to show.
opiejeanne
@CaseyL:
GAH!!! Now I can’t ever look at that the same way.
Amir Khalid
I would expect a system advertised as Fully Self-Driving to be exactly that. It should be able to drive me to a given destination reliably, efficiently, and safely. It must never misjudge any driving situation so as to endanger me or any other road user. Tesla’s FSD fails these criteria. It is plainly nowhere near fit for purpose. I’m surprised that Tesla haven’t simply been ordered to disable/uninstall it.
ColoradoGuy
Whoa. If that video is representative of the kind of incidents that happen with Tesla’s so-called Full Self Driving, and it’s been happening several times a year, we’re looking at a Dieselgate scale investigation. That’s corporate fraud on a massive scale.
VW could weather the storm because of deep pockets in Germany and a whole state-supported infrastructure around the company (VW going under would have a catastrophic effect on the German economy). Tesla has none of that … not a statewide infrastructure (California doesn’t NEED Tesla the way Germany needs VW), nor a financial structure backed by the largest banks in the country.
If Tesla comes under sustained financial assault from the safety regulators, it would drain the stockholders (who would flee as the share price drops) and Musk personally. This investigation could take down the whole house of cards.
SpaceX could weather the storm because of its prime customer, NASA. Not so for the car company. If customers disappear, used Tesla car prices drop, and the stock price heads to zero, that’s it.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
This may seem irrelevant, but I promise it’s on topic:
Those of you who served in militaries, and pulled sentry duty: how long were your shifts before you were relieved from your posts? Because constant vigilance in a constant, boring situation isn’t sustainable over the long term. (In my case, we were relieved after two hours on post during an overnight shift.)
Like you said, this isn’t a problem that can be programmed around.
Ruckus
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
In the navy, in port the sounding and security and quarterdeck watch was 4 hrs at a time and rotated every 3 days. When I was on temp shore patrol duty it was 8 hrs daytime shift or 8 hrs 6 pm to 2 am on drunk and fight patrol.
Shalimar
@Mai Naem mobile: As someone close to Musk’s age, the Tesla truck reminds me of the lander in the 1986 game Starflight. Given his interest in space flight and Mars, it would surprise me if a 15 year old Musk didn’t play that game.
The Tesla truck is futuristic, but only through the lens of the limited number of polygons 1986 home computer graphics technology could render.
lowtechcyclist
@Keith P.:
You ain’t the only one. Not only that, but DOT or NHTSA or whatever the appropriate agency is, should have been extensively monitoring Tesla’s tests of self-driving software for a couple of years, minimum, before allowing it out on the road in even the most manageable of environments, like Phoenix. And then a couple years of closely monitored tests there before letting it out into other parts of the country.
Since it’s now clear that Tesla’s self-driving software would have flunked any tests that were actually monitored by safety officials, that would have taken care of the problem early. And then the government could have landed on Tesla like a ton of bricks if they continued to advertise self-driving capability.
Item #142857 in the “this is why we need regulation, and why we need people in government to enforce those regulations” file.
lowtechcyclist
@FastEdD:
Atrios has been hammering this point for most of a decade now. If the car’s doing the driving, you can’t expect the human in the driver’s seat to keep their eyes on the road, their hands on the wheel, and their right foot ready to brake at all times. If the car’s doing a good job (until it suddenly isn’t), your attention’s going to wander after a while, and your eyes, hands, and feet with it.
Not to mention, if you’ve got to monitor the car closely every minute of your drive, what’s the point? Might as well just do the driving yourself.
Gvg
@James E Powell: Actually I think a purpose of the taxes in this case is to make sure that a few overly successful leaders of whichever modernization wave we are in at this moment doesn’t hoard all the profit and create a monopoly so that no one else has any money to to do anything else ever again and challenge their position as king of the heap.
Who ever is the current big shot always wants to freeze time and stay there. They forget all about competition when the get to the top because then their is no where to go but down.
That is why these no compete agreements are so stifling. The original example was John Deere not allowing anyone to repair their own purchased vehicle but requiring it to go to the dealer. That was saying people didn’t really own the equipment they paid for and keeping other businesses from offering cheaper or better service for their own profit and cutting JD’s. Monopoly behavior. Trading on their rep for good equipment…but too expensive for many people.
Kristine
@CaseyL:
@Ohio Mom:
Always thought it was just me. I’d ask friends “what does that look like to you?” and get blank looks in reply.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Chetan Murthy: then maybe the care giver jobs need to pay more. It’s back breaking work and physically demanding. Not something you can do into your fifties and sixties for a lot of people. And the people you hell and their families can be demanding and abusive ( I realize the reverse is Also true).
Gvg
@206inKY: and Tesla and Musk should be facing fines and possibly some jail sentences for horribly misleading coverups for profit that causes deaths if those stories are proved in court. Those are really blatant lies.
Google will probably have to do some explaining after, including about how doing it right is slow, boring, careful and spelling out that they aren’t close because they don’t make false claims.
Baud
“You might say the probe is on autopilot,” she added.
Gin & Tonic
Having a machine do like 95% of your job yet being ready to take over control instantly in a life-or-death situation is the exact job description of an airline pilot.
The Thin Black Duke
@lowtechcyclist: Jimmy Tingle once joked that Americans would be more inclined to ride trains if you designed the individual cars of the train to look like the inside of an automobile.
different-church-lady
But hey, humans make mistakes too therefore this is all fine I’ve been told right here in the comments of this blog
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
That’s why there are two of them and they get a lot of training.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Eh, this is more about the misleading marketing than the tech.
Baud
@Gvg:
No wonder Republicans think Google is liberal.
Soprano2
@Brachiator: This is one thing that people who rave about remote work don’t seem to understand. Eventually your employer who lets you work at home is going to figure out that they can pay an English-speaker in India half of what they pay you for the same work. Being able to do your work anywhere has downsides.
The Thin Black Duke
@Soprano2: Not everybody wants to spend three hours or more in rush hour traffic going to work for the next thirty years.
Baud
@Soprano2:
Employers have been outsourcing well before work from home became widespread.
different-church-lady
@Baud: my observation is sort of about apologists for misleading marketing. Or maybe useful idiots for misleading marketing, perhaps.
different-church-lady
All of you stop this right now: sometimes it makes sense for remote work and sometimes it make sense for in-person. It makes no sense to scream about which one we should force everyone to do exclusively.
Betsy
@Roger Moore: Great points. I’m a transportation planner, so I’m fully on board!
lowtechcyclist
@Gin & Tonic:
Which is why they’re paid well to do that job, right? And there’s two of them up there, able to take turns being the primary person paying attention.
Also, I’m assuming that that description applies to the part of the job that takes place at cruising altitude, but that takeoffs and landings directly involve the pilot. I’d say things can go south for a car on the highway a lot faster and more frequently than for a plane at cruising altitude.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Kind of a tragedy of the commons situation.
different-church-lady
@lowtechcyclist:
Soprano2
@The Thin Black Duke: I understand that, but if your employer outsources your job to another country, then what are you going to do? To me it’s an affordable housing problem – it’s ridiculous that people have to live that far away from where they work. I’m lucky, I live 5 minutes from my job, but I also live in the poorer part of town where lots of people are reluctant to live (even though the neighborhood is fine).
Soprano2
@different-church-lady: Yeah, OK, that’s right. I guess my objection is to the “everyone needs to work at home all the time isn’t is just wonderful” idea. LOL And it is true that if you work at home you’re definitely in danger of having your job outsourced. I figure all my co-workers who clean, repair and inspect sewers aren’t going to have their jobs shipped to China.
different-church-lady
@Soprano2: My read on this entire argument is it’s just people using the situation as a Trojan Horse to assert either their introversion or extroversion. Nobody’s considering the actual variety of jobs in question.
Additionally, the entire argument also assumes everyone is a knowledge/info/desk worker, which is just a first-world perspective as all shit.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: A couple years ago I read that the Navy had landed an unmanned version of an F-18 on an aircraft carrier. I don’t think this was intended to further any near-term project but I think manned fighter planes will be obsolete before aircraft carriers are.
I haven’t looked it up but I imagine the Navy is flying drones off of carriers and other ships. The smaller ships maybe using quad copter-type drones.
JMG
Many people like driving. They love the false sense of being in control (reaction, not action is like 99 percent of driving). Surrendering control to a machine isn’t something I think automobile customers are going to go for.
Ken
Very few deer at 35,000 feet.
Someone said above that self-driving would need every vehicle connected to the cloud, but the non-vehicles are the trickiest situations. I wonder for example if any of the “beta-testers” has tried driving down a suburban street, and having someone bounce a ball across the car’s path to see if it brakes.
Eyeroller
@Baud: Airlines are pushing to reduce the number of pilots to one. https://www.thedrive.com/news/airlines-are-pushing-to-legalize-one-pilot-cockpits
Of course, “technology is so good now we don’t need as many humans” is one of the excuses.
That article has a link to another article about a commuter flight whose pilot had a medical emergency and the copilot took over and returned to O’Hare. It is likely the pilot was unconscious (it was probably a heart attack or similar; according to the article, he died that evening).
Bugboy
@Roger Moore: Free marketers have never seen an externalized cost they didn’t like…
different-church-lady
@Ken: “When all balls are smart balls, no problem!” (Some idiot in Silicon Valley right now)
Geminid
@Ken: Squirrels may be doing their own beta testing on self-driving cars.
different-church-lady
@Eyeroller: Boston’s MBTA reduced the number of crew on any train from two to one.
Last year some poor guy got his arm stuck in a door while he was on the platform and got dragged to his death.
It probably wouldn’t have happened if there had been a second operator looking at the platform before the train pulled out, the way they used to before the staff reduction.
One of the things I like about one of my main employers is they NEVER send out a single person on a job, no matter how small. This is for meaningless media work. If there’s the safety of other people involved, then deliberately putting solo employees in critical positions ought to be considered a criminal point of view.
Soprano2
@different-church-lady: Not just “first world”, but it’s a class difference. At my job, there are about 10 people whose job is mostly in the office at a desk. Everyone else comes to the shop, goes to the job site, and comes back at the end of the day. Lots of people have jobs like that.
Soprano2
@different-church-lady: We’ve had people suggest that we could reduce our sewer cleaning crews to one person, because some private sector companies do that. We see that as unsafe and refuse to do it, but with it being hard to hire and keep workers I can see it coming up again.
Hoodie
What was that about the hedgehog knowing one big thing? I loathe Musk, but he does understand one big thing: humans will do incredibly irrational things to maintain their fantasies of individual control.
different-church-lady
@Hoodie: Well, that’s just how sociopaths are.
different-church-lady
FUCK NO! Isn’t sewer cleaning one of the most dangerous jobs around?
Procopius
For heaven’s sake, the states are the ones who allow Tesla to turn loose this software. They’re supposed to control/regulate it, but they don’t. This is particularly true in Arizona and Texas. These things have been happening at least since 2015, and Tesla keeps mislabeling the software fraudulently. I don’t believe Musk is ever going to be held accountable. If he was, he’d be in jail right now and flat broke. You hear these stories, and nothing ever happens to Tesla. There has to be a reason for that.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Soprano2: I never understand why companies(or anyone) think cutting back on the maintenance and sanitation force is a good idea. Do they want their sewers to back up into their offices and their elevators to drop 5 floors to the bottom of the elevator shaft ? Due to lack of preventive maintenance?
Kayla Rudbek
@Dangerman: that’s what the Don’t Tread On Me Virginia license plates are for!
StringOnAStick
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: I think we’re all missing the bigger picture here, though the House R’s are making it very clear. The plan isn’t to allow there to be older or disabled people in need of care or health aids. Oh sure, right now the plan is to starve them out of existence and destroy their access to health care by cutting Social Security and Medicare so that those dependent on these programs to live actually won’t, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to see where this leads. They’re already conditioning their followers to kill D’s with all the eliminationist groomer/evilDemocrat crap, and I see way too many on either side who are doing the same regarding the homeless situation. Bottom line is we won’t be seeing increased pay for healthcare aids unless they work for the wealthy. The current trajectory is incredibly dystopian if we don’t keep the R’s out of power and the MOTU want them in power so their wealth doesn’t get taxed just to keep “useless eaters” alive; there’s a reason why right-wing and fascist governance is on the rise worldwide.
dibert dogbert
Re: Tesla
DON’T TAILGATE A TESLA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tony G
The Tesla executive (that Musk guy) who made the decisions to implement and market this poorly designed, poorly tested software should be In prison already. Of course he’ll continue to get away with it.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: That’s a good theory.
JaneE
Self driving sounds great, and it sounds better as I get older. I also worked in IT, and the one thing that seems consistently true is that you can never account for what a human will do. If the self-driving feature worked perfectly on all the testbeds, I can almost guarantee a live-day-one situation will come up that it cannot handle correctly. That is not pessimism so much as experience.
Software is better than it used to be, but not that much. In my day we would pound our head against the wall when a brand-new application failed for a testable condition that had been known for decades, even back then. And as the programmer was piecing his butt back together the most common words heard were “but no one would”. Except they did.
Every defensive driving class teaches you to expect the unexpected. Just because no sane person or no adult would do something, doesn’t mean that there are not crazies out there, or toddlers who can zip in front of your car without a thought. And even a perfect system in a perfect car can have components fail.
Computer controlled transport works really well in closed systems – metro subways or even rail systems. Even then there are occasional problems. My car can keep itself in the center of the lane very well on many of the highways I use. Not all of them. Not all of the roads I use have lines, and very rarely not even pavement. If every car and every driver and every pedestrian did what they are supposed to do in every situation on roads that are always in a good state of repair, then maybe it could work most of the time. I would like it to handle a wheel coming off at 65, or a flooded street concealing a pot hole deep enough to bend an axle. I have seen both things happen.