Thinking back to this CGP Grey video and how I believed it at the time.
And now:
US trucker shortage means everything is more expensive
The trucking industry has been short drivers for years, but the pandemic made it worse. The shortage means the price of groceries and moving costs are going up. CNN's Vanessa Yurkevich reports.
Source: CNNBusiness
It was conceivable because we have the technology, the money, and the economic incentive to do it.
But it was never going to happen because such an effort requires private enterprise to absorb the cost of building and maintaining a more advanced international infrastructure. Why do good thing when bad thing cheaper?
Now that we're facing a Cheap Labor shortage, business admins might make a more serious attempt at modernizing transpiration infrastructure. Of course, they might find doing scams within the existing infrastructure more lucrative, in which case they won't.
I think they've been overhyping the technology to get VC funding which has given us a warped sense of its inevitability, much like lab-grown meat.
The VCs have caught on by now, but back during the peak of the hype, self-driving cars were a great VC grift. A talented enough engineer would only need a year or two to build self-driving car software that works 95% of the time on clear days on highways or wide suburban roads. To any layman that sounds like you're almost there, maybe halfway if you're pessimistic, so clearly you're going to overshoot all the other attempts that have been floundering for years, so they should invest in you. But in reality, each percent of that extra 5%, each other kind of road, and each other kind of weather condition is, very optimistically, a five-year project for a large fully funded team of experts.
But why does the autonomous car grift live on while the robot squeezed juice grift dies before liftoff?
Autonomous vehicles also appeal to the capitalist fantasy of sacking a bunch of workers and replacing them with machines. The number of people who fantasize about robot squeezed orange juice is just two guys who've spent way too much time on image boorus.
News and radio stations all across the country eagerly pounded this sense of inevitability into the masses though. Bourgeois scab media is only too happy to reiterate the bosses threats.
I mean, one could argue that animal domestication and factory farming have had us on the path towards "lab-grown meat" for centuries. What are pig pens and chicken coops if not increasingly limited and controlled environments for producing foodstuffs? We're just coming at it from the other end. Rather than trying to turn vegetable waste into a lump of edible meat in a petri dish, we're trying to turn a sentient ambulatory life form into a regenerating torso that you can hack chunks off of indefinitely.
Yeah, there's definitely a "pay me to make the infinite money fountain dream a reality" angle to this. But there is also tangible progress towards the capitalist's ideal being made.
I was thinking about this story that was recently posted here.
TIL.
It's a bummer.
Employing 2 million remote-drivers would be cheaper than money thrown into ai driving, by far. Plus they could study inputs organically.
In theory, you could build up infrastructure to support automated transport. So, like, idk. Put down little guide rails for vehicles. And then maybe electrify those guide rails, so they also power the vehicles. And then chain all your vehicles together, so one big engine can pull a bunch of individual cars. Maybe even create some sort of durable road material that allows you to clip into the road on steel tires so you don't need to worry about blowouts.
Yeah, remote-drivers would be cheaper in the moment. So that's definitely what we're going to do. But actually upgrading the infrastructure would lower the per-unit cost of transport nationally on the scale of decades rather than just quarters.
That sounds too futuristic to me :blob-no-thoughts: better retrofit predator drone controls with some prisoners controlling them