Here's what I said about automated vehicles and basic income at the House of Commons of Canada

in #basicincome6 years ago

Below is the audio and text of the short speech I delivered to the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities at the Canadian House of Commons on March 28, 2018 as an expert called to answer questions as part of a big study they are doing on Automated and Connected Vehicles in Canada.


In 2014, I went on a road trip with my fiance, and on that road trip from Louisiana to Florida, we had a conversation about the potential effects of driverless trucks. Months later, I self-published an article born from that conversation that went viral globally, and in these past four years, despite my own warnings about it, even I have been shocked by the speed of development of this technology. I have no PhD. I am not a programmer or a truck driver. I am simply a citizen who spends a lot of time researching topics of interest to me and writing about them, and the area that tends to interest me most is the effect of technological advancement on human civilization. With that in mind, I wish to spend my time attempting to convey the monumental impacts automated vehicle technology will have on society as we know it, and the utmost need to understand what’s coming down the road, so to speak.

To begin, I want to share a quote that I feel summarizes why this technology will happen. It’s from the CFO of Suncor in regards to a fully automated fleet of driverless trucks operating in their mining operations. “It’s not fantasy. That will take 800 people off our site. At an average of $200,000 per person, you can see the savings we’re going to get from an operations perspective.”

That’s the cold calculus of self-driving technology. Humans are expensive. Their labor is expensive. Their benefits can be expensive. They’re costly to train. They get injured. They get tired. They make mistakes. They drink and use medications. They get distracted. They look at their phones. They go on strikes. They get involved in lawsuits. They get angry and depressed. They have physical and biological limits. They quit. Machines do none of these things. Machines are the perfect worker as long as the cost is right, and the output is good.

When it comes to driverless trucks, the cost of fuel also enters this equation. Trucks that drive themselves offer incredible efficiencies in fuel costs. Driverless trucks can travel longer distances in shorter times thanks to not needing to sleep. They can travel in convoys to increase aerodynamic efficiencies. Fewer accidents can save a lot in human and capital costs. There are many reasons driving the adoption of this technology, and billions of dollars both invested and at stake for those who get there first.

I’m here speaking only a week after the first death of a pedestrian by a self-driving car, but that accident itself says a lot about the status of this technology. It’s already as good as a human, such that people already expect superhuman abilities from it. Why didn’t its radar and laser-based systems see the woman before tragically colliding with her in the dark. Why didn’t the car immediately detect her and immediately slam the brakes? And yet we’re talking about a matter of seconds where below average human drivers would have caused the same death, just as they do over 3,000 deaths a day, causing 1.3 million deaths every year all over the world.

The first human being has died, but this technology will save lives. This technology will save money. This technology will save time. And this technology will impact our economies in ways governments needed to start preparing for years ago.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just about eliminating driving jobs. The automation of vehicular transport will ripple through the economy. Think of cars and trucks as blood cells in a circulatory system, carrying oxygen throughout the body in the form of income and spending. There are businesses that depend on drivers spending their money. There are businesses that depend on car ownership. There are businesses that depend on vehicles getting into accidents, parking, and requiring insurance. These businesses are themselves then depended upon by other businesses, and so on like falling dominoes.

The challenge that lies ahead for lawmakers is in helping guide this process in a way that doesn’t discourage its advancement, but enables it to flourish and leaves as many people better off as possible. This means not just assisting people in learning new skills for new jobs, but also creating a safety net that acknowledges the transformation of work in this 21st century of great uncertainty. Requiring former drivers to jump through an arduous system of forms and bureaucrats to receive income as they retrain and search for their next opportunity for employment is not the best way to go about a world of work where people are increasingly between increasingly insecure jobs of shorter duration and greater monthly income variance.

This is why I also believe any conversation about automation and the future of work requires a conversation about a basic income guarantee. You’re ahead of the curve in that you’re already testing it, but I do wish to urge you of its importance. Self-driving tech will absolutely create winners and losers, and all those who lose cannot be ignored or expected to just easily find a new job with equal pay, hours, benefits, skill requirements, security, meaning, and distance from home.

It is imperative that you as lawmakers work to make sure that technology like driverless vehicles and the AI that makes it possible, effectively works for everyone, not just its owners. Without that focus, danger lies ahead. It’s up to you to negotiate our way around these dangers, as best as you can, so we can all arrive at a place our ancestors perhaps never even imagined possible.


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I agree with your speech @scottsantens.

Automation is coming faster than people know and, as you stated, the ripple effect cannot be determined. There are many technologies which are going to automate out jobs, not only in the industry they are employed, but tangent ones too.

Governments are woefully ill prepared to set a course to navigate through this. Most do not even want to acknowledge what is taking place. Forget the debate of how to solve it, US politicians dont even admit it is happening. Instead the mantra is to "bring the jobs back". Are you effing kidding me? This is not 1985.

I recall watching the autonomous vehicle movement in 2013 or 2014 and the opinion was that we would see a prototype by 2025....in just a few years, that sped up about 8 years....autonomous cars are on the road already.

By the way, the day the autonomous car killed someone, how many people died as a result of human drivers.

Thank you, Scott, for being that voice in discussions around automated vehicles, Artificial Intelligence and the future of jobs. It seems so obvious that an implementation of Universal Basic Income needed to happen YESTERDAY.

There are businesses that depend on drivers spending their money.

Damn, I just realized we're going to see truck stops disappear. I'll miss them. I'll even miss taxi drivers.

On the plus side, let's hope that self-driving cars will enable new ways of meeting up for people who aren't very mobile at the moment. If they can afford to pay...

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It is imperative that you as lawmakers work to make sure that technology like driverless vehicles and the AI that makes it possible, effectively works for everyone, not just its owners

so...theft then?

Nope. For example. Who owns your data? Do you? Steemit recognizes that you do, so you receive an income for it. Apply that to driverless vehicles. Who's generating the data that makes it possible for an AI to learn how to drive? Every driver and every pedestrian that vehicle encounters is who. It's ambient data created by all of us every day.

Next, let's look at who paid for the R&D behind self-driving cars? The government did, with tax dollars. Tax money made this tech possible. In the VC world, the people who put up the money to make something possible tend to get a large ROI. Where is the ROI for tax payers? They were investors in this. Where's their dividend?

What are all these machines made of? They're made of minerals and metals. Who made those? No one did. All someone did was take them out of the ground and transform them. But who owns them? In Alaska the answer to that is Alaskans, which is why they have a universal dividend.

All taxation is not the same. Look at land value taxation for example. That's not a tax on hard work. It's a tax on unearned rent.

UBI doesn't even require taxation. Another way of going about this is an ROI from patent protection. Again, it's taxpayers that are making patent monopolies possible. Why not charge people a fee for continued patent monopolization, and provide that fee to citizens.

Here's the deal. Automation is here and it's real. If you believe taxing those who own the machines that will replace a vast majority of human labor is wrong, then you're going to have a bad time. The economy is going to have a bad time. Our entire distribution system is built on the notion of working for money. So what happens when people just can't earn enough money any more because they can't out-compete machine labor?

Do you seriously think you're on the side of morality here to let half the country starve to death, and violence break out all over as a result of incredible destabilization while a billionaire becomes the first trillionaire?

That's not moral. That's stupid.

That's not moral. That's stupid.
and so it descends to name calling so soon.

There's a difference between calling a belief stupid and calling someone stupid for thinking it. You're smart enough to know that, right?

and there you go again.
condescension is as thing.

You got a 5.09% upvote from @postpromoter courtesy of @scottsantens!

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