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
The fast food chains are catching on faster than my work and I’m about to go back to working entry level shit if they get too far ahead
They probably would attempt a lot more automation if it wasn't for the chip shortage and all the other issues making it harder to keep trucks on the road at all. Everything going wrong at the same time is actually useful for once.
What do you mean by attempts? Are they actually using it on short routes in the industry?
Chip shortage means no autonomous campus food drone delivery piloted by workers in the third world.
Interesting dynamic here that someone posted an article on the other day. Vehicle manufacturers need parts that have been proven to reliably last for decades, which you can’t do with a chip that came out last year. But chip manufacturers are competing for the cutting edge and trying to get their fab precision filed down nanometer by nanometer. Smaller architecture = more chips per run. So chip manufacturers are basically telling the car manufacturers to fuck off because they’re not about to build new facilities for products that are a decade old and therefore don’t include all the gains in efficiency they’ve poured R&D into.
After IBM's Big Blue moment defeating chess dudes in the 1990's billions poured into AI companies.
Most of those AI companies no longer exist and never produced anything.
It's a problem that is at the heart of Marx's prediction of capitalism eating itself. The rate of profit to fall is based on increasing automation and cheapening of human labor. Late capitalism instead has relied on neo-colonial exploitation in the global south to put off the inevitable drawbacks of automation: with enough violence, it's magically cheaper (for manufacturers) and more profitable (for the military-industrial complex). That's how growth is funded. Of course, the real wall that capitalism will hit is an ecological one, not a growth one.
One could argue that the ecological wall is essentially a growth wall
It is, but not the technological growth wall that people were expecting.
Thinking back to this CGP Grey video and how I believed it at the time.
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.
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
am i wrong to say rail shipping would require significantly less labor? i get the feeling it would
Autonomous vehicles are already being used for deliveries, they could be used for last-mile type stuff to reach places the tracks don't go.
Autonomous vehicles are already being used for deliveries
Oh yeah? Where and what?
https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/06/yandex-self-driving-group-partners-with-grubhub-to-bring-robotic-delivery-to-college-campuses/
https://www.ttnews.com/articles/fedex-test-nuro-autonomous-delivery-vehicles
A friend of mine was in Russia over the summer, and he commented that they were using similar tech in their "tech cities" (equivalent of Silicon Valley)
its totally explicable thru history but its still interesting to me how capital has crafted circumstances wherein more workers in the first world are required
Remember back in the 80's when truck drivers were movie heroes? And then not even a decade later the media stopped giving a shit? Maybe they should have continued giving a shit.
in the 80’s when truck drivers were movie heroes
What are some examples?
Big Trouble in Little China...? I feel like one staring Chuck Norris as a trucker also exists.
I've heard that song my whole life but now I know where it's from.
Edit: Oh I see, the song came three years before the movie it inspired
I worked for a trucking brokerage after college and the exploitation of the drivers is insane. Dudes in the office would high five each other making hundreds of dollars of profit and the driver might be lucky to break even. The market is all about trucking supply & demand ie if a driver has to eat costs leaving the east coast then they try to make their money driving into the east coast but the brokerage makes money both ways.
