Tesla is reportedly planning a reveal of its self-driving robotaxi on the Warner Bros. lot amid widespread anger in the industry over the brand’s controversial CEO, Elon Musk, resulting in a rejection of its cars.
What’s the plan when all the low skill low pay jobs are automated? With each new advancement, it doesn’t feel cool and futuristic but sad and distopian. Like we all see it…
Eventually they end up homeless and then they can be arrested?
I mean, it’s not a problem until it’s my problem, and then it’s an urgent one. Am I doing this right?
If only there was a way to Know the crisis is here…
And it’s fully constitutional to enslave convicts. So tons of free labor for every company who wants it, and then I guess export everything they help to make since nobody here can buy anything?
I often wonder this. Who do these companies think will be paying for their goods and services when nobody can afford them? And a little further down that stretch, when they pay so little that working full time still doesn’t cover rent and groceries, who will bother with showing up to work at all? If you’re gonna be homeless and starving anyway, might as well just own your own time and find your own food and shelter on your own terms.
I don’t think they understand that if they exploit much harder, they’ll be causing a societal collapse that will render their power meaningless. They’re stripmining both America’s labor pools and consumer pools in one fell swoop, and they won’t be invited to neighboring mines afterward. And then the most capable people will understand what is happening and leave, so only poor, uneducated, and underskilled people will remain. Basically Mississippi, but for the whole country.
They are already planning for it, like a race to extract all before that point
That preview thumbnail of the bunker looks like it was shot by Stanley Kubrick.
This would be a good opportunity to highlight free education and/or technical certification for all. Whether it be college (white collar), trade school (blue collar), or something else, an educated work force will be well-equipped to handle such dramatic shifts in advancement.
free education
Best I can do is siphon more tax dollars away for private education.
Can we parlay this into some school vouchers?
Yes, but they’re expired because the private school they were for closed due to due to being forced to accept more low-income students.
Probably what happens in Charles Dickens novel, except everyone has smartphones now.
But tech bros don’t think literature or history are important disciplines, so they don’t even know what happens in a Charles Dickens novel.
A techbros familiarity with Charles Dickens is about on the level of Philomena Cunk’s familiarity with him.
At least Philomena Cunk is a character.
Techbros are, frighteningly, real.
That’s an insult to Philomena Cunk.
If you’re not aware, look up the automation paradox: https://ideas.ted.com/will-automation-take-away-all-our-jobs/
Every* automation advancement has lead to an increase in employment, not decrease. Most often jobs in the immediate sector are lost, but the rise in supporting sector jobs are bolstered.
Classic examples are the cotton mill and combine harvester. The number of agricultural workers declined, but the number of jobs processing agricultural product increased. Or with ATMs, the number of tellers needed per bank location decreased, but the total employment in the banking sector increased (banks opened more branches, namely in places where it was previously cost prohibitive).
As more things are automated, what’s being automated becomes cheaper and more prolific, often increasing (or creating) new opportunities. There are so many historic examples of this, it’s hard to justify “this time is different” predictions… Even for things like AI automating white collar jobs.
*Edit: almost every. It depends a bit on how you count the secondary jobs, and where those are located (automation combined with offshoring results in a net decline in some countries, but increase overall).
I think the underlying dynamic there is that automation in one industry led to cheaper goods, which led to consumer savings, which led to greater demand, which led to increased employment in other industries that eventually absorbed the displaced workers.
The differences with the current situation are that, firstly, decades of corporate consolidation have reduced competition and enabled automators to channel most of the savings to corporate profits instead of lower prices; and secondly, the fact that automation is affecting the whole economy at once instead of a specific industry means that an economy-wide increase in demand doesn’t cause a corresponding increase in the demand for labor.
So if the difference is corporate consolidation… Sounds like that’s the real underlying issue then, not automation.
Economics has well established that monopolistic behavior by firms harms consumers & the overall economy (that’s why we have anti-trust laws in the first place).
Don’t conflate the one problem with another, as I agree the erosion of anti-trust laws is a bad thing and needs to be reversed. But that doesn’t mean firms further automating things is now also bad.
I’d also say “automation affecting the whole economy at once” isn’t unique. The industrial revolution was not isolated to one industry, its effects were economy-wide. Also true for the transportation revolution (trains & steam boats moved everything), telecommunications, and the internet…
No one’s been arguing against automation per se—the comment you originally replied to was asking what the plan was after automation. Because the marginal effect of automation in the current economy, if corporations are left to their own devices, stands to harm as many as it benefits.
And yes, the industrial revolution isn’t a bad parallel for what we’re potentially facing now. It brought about some of the most miserable conditions working people have ever endured short of slavery, and it took the labor movement several bloody generations to end the worst of it.
Recent studies suggest the science on this is less clear than that TED talk suggests. So I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on either the idea that automation will or won’t take away net jobs.
What happens when we move all the way from manual labor automation and start doing service and information work? Not everyone’s an AI developer
I dunno, this feels like the whole ‘infinite growth’ problem of capitalism. Sure that’s been true so far, but it can’t continually result in more jobs forever. At some point they’ll just automate too much and it’ll be a tipping point.
I like the horse analogy for this. Cars came and replaced horses they never found new jobs. This time they want to replace the people with AI. Whee are they supposed to go? Don’t need that many mechanics or technicians to repair the cars.
EXCELLENT POINT, FELLOW HUMAN. LET US CEASE OUR REPRODUCTIVE EFFORTS TO STICK IT TO CAPITALISM.
Death for poor people thru war, disease, or famine.
Classic story.
Replenishment through forced birth rather than supporting families.
Am I the only one who has noticed that direct-to-consumer sales are floundering and business-to-business sales are up?
They’re just planning on bailing on the consumer market entirely. Expect things like your shopping to be more ad-supported than ever, because they know regular-ass-people don’t have disposable cash.
Businesses on the other hand, have loads of money to spend, so we’re seeing the economy twist itself into knots to just support businesses buying and selling to other businesses, with taking care of the humans doing the work as an afterthought to be handled by someone else (see: Walmart educating their employees on how to apply for Food Stamps). Why worry about making sales to consumers when businesses have boatloads of money to spend on “services.” So many businesses farm out their “labor” to third party companies these days, everything from payroll to janitorial.
They already have a plan, they are in the middle of executing it. Our futures will be ad supported, much like One Million Merits of Black Mirror fame. Expect all four walls of your ‘apartment’ to be covered in ads you can’t avoid just so you can afford an apartment. Expect ads and bullshit everywhere to “support” your life while closing doors to consumer access to almost anything. They don’t like poor people having access to information, and right now the only thing they have to fight access to information is disinformation and misinformation. They’ll drop those pretenses once the consumers are locked out.
“What will happen if their employees are too poor to buy anything?” Nothing, they don’t give a damn that their employees are too poor to eat. They stopped marketing to consumers, they’re marketing to other businesses which have money. They’re genuinely not concerned with what happens to their employees.
“You’ll own nothing and be happy” is a threat, just not in the way stupid right-wing capitalists think it is.
Example: NVIDIA is making way more money selling fleets of GPU’s aimed at AI processing to businesses than they are selling video cards to the consumer gaming market. Gamers are like “when will GPU prices ever come down?” They won’t, gamers are not the key market anymore.
They can’t get their cars to self-drive on their own closed-loop tunnel in Vegas, but they’re revealing a car with no steering wheel…
Tesla is a marketing company at this point
Always has been… since Elon took over
Are they also abandoning Twitter in equal measure? If so, great. If not, amateurs.
Wood be cool if some of their pr people got together and setup their own mastodon instance, that they only allow their own people to setup accounts and then they can join the fediverse.
Honest question. At what point will Tesla execs look at Musk and decide that keeping him at the helm is not in the company’s best interests?
The board recommended that shareholders vote to give him his 50 something billion compensation package and move the incorporation to Texas. Shareholders seemed divided on the package award due to his erratic behavior, that there isn’t a dedicated captain of the Tesla ship (among other things such as shareholder governance) - but he got the package.
Hopefully they’re taking a harder look after sales took a massive hit, the Cyberturd launch was a flop and vehicles are filling lots unsold. I’m not holding my breath though.
I’m looking forward to the Tesla “Loss” memes.
They just decided he should be paid $56 billion dollars for his contribution… So, not anytime soon
Wild guess, early 2025?
Trump is heading towards a loss. Trump is likely to do some really stupid (and dangerous) things between losing and inauguration. Musk is likely to help facilitate.
He’s either going to do something really stupid and just get cut off or quickly backtrack and get weirdly quiet, followed by a “graceful” exit.
I mean, he’s been doing stupid shit the past decade and REALLY stupid shit the last few years… and yet the shareholders STILL voted to approve his 50 billion dollar bonus from the execs.
This suggests that many stockholders are fanboys.
I’m not Hollywood, but I was saving for a Tesla. Then Elon turned into a giant douche. Now that money will eventually be spent on a different EV brand.
Turned into? 10 years ago it was obvious if you had open ears.
The “pedo guy” was the mask off moment. Unless you were in the industry and dealt with him first hand, it was hearsay and rumor and at the time, many of us wanted to see a revitalized space program and electric cars. We kinda just went along with his Hank Scorpio impression, thinking it was an act.
Hank Scorpio would be much preferred.
Scorpio actually has compassion. He just also recognized that a few workers burning alive was steps towards innovation!
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Really all you had to do was ever hear anything from him. He was clear about who he was.
I don’t track down and listen to CEOs. I don’t know most of them. The pedo sub thing was generally the first negative I heard about him also, just from general impressions that came off if you didn’t search for him specifically. I also heard about the Type E and Type 3 thing, and how he wanted to have the cars spell out SEX. I thought it was a bit immature, but didn’t read much further into it back then how much of a manchild he was.
If you’re not dialed into specific types of content, you just didn’t hear it. It’s not simply opening your ears as you said. It would involve having enough interest in looking up a CEO of a company, and many of us don’t do that. I don’t know who runs Kroger, though I have some negative opinions due to the price fixing. I don’t know who is the CEO of Aldi, of Nissan, of AMD, of cuisine Art, etc. I use products from or purchase from the previous companies either daily or weekly, but knowing the CEO generally doesn’t affect me.
What he’s done since then does now affect much more, but back then it wasn’t that important for most to know.
This touches on something I’ve been considering for a while. Any time I spend money on a large company’s product, it’s practically inevitable that I’m putting money into the hands of shitty people, whether they be the CEO, other executives, shareholders, etc. And if I want to have a vaguely normal life, and have some time to enjoy it rather than researching corporate drones all day, that’s something I have to accept and live with.
But sometimes a person or situation is so ridiculous that it just becomes unavoidable. In years past I may have been able to overlook the obnoxious musk connection if I liked a certain Tesla and wanted to buy one. I’d tell myself it’s some cool engineering from a young American auto maker or whatever. But in recent years when the brand is synonymous with one person, and that one person isn’t just your run of the mill rich conservative but is actively and publicly using their position to do or promote evil shit, I’m not sure I would wear a t-shirt with that brand much less drive a car with it.
Fortunately I’m not an early adopter of a lot of tech (EVs included) even though I follow the news on it. So now I have lots of options, and I’ll have even more in a few years when I want to actually buy something!
Agreed. I once tried to look up nearby supermarkets that didn’t donate to antilgbt stuff (or just not GOP) and it wasn’t feasible to avoid it with what was in range back then, especially if I wanted any quality. It felt like I had no choice, so accept and live with it is also what I did. I still tried to avoid egregious examples, of course. Tesla now counts, not just because of his personality, but also because of some of the cost cutting practices and regulation skirting he has done.
Believe it or not some people may not have been investing significant amounts of time into learning about Elon Musk’s personality in 2014
Did Musk have a better damage control person employed previously?
Hence saying you just needed open ears to know. He was broadcasting who he was back then. It was no secret.
Now that money will eventually be spent on a different EV brand.
If you’re in the USA and lease instead of buy, there’s a few decent EVs you can get for <$300/month with $0 down, like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Kia EV6. Check the deals on https://pnd.leasehackr.com/.
I’d recommend leasing EVs instead of buying them. Depreciation is pretty bad, mostly due to the fact that the technology is changing/improving quite quickly, and the fact that people don’t really want to deal with the battery after the warranty expires.
I bought the EV6 wh n it came out, the downside I have is I wish the charging port was on the front like my friends hybrid and it doesn’t have wireless android auto. But plugging my phone in is not hard, and backing into charging spots is not difficult. Just QoL things.
I have wireless android auto and sometimes I wished it didn’t have it, for shorter trips I prefer to have no map, just the car radio, and for longer trips you have to plug the phone to charge anyway because navigation uses a massive amount of battery
Musk can suck a dick. What a piece of fucking trash.
I’m in the market for an electric car. I won’t even consider a Tesla. Mostly because of Musk, and partly because of the shit build quality.
Same for sure. Going back and forth constantly as to what to look into next. Was really hoping alpha motors was going to turn into something but they are going nowhere fast and aren’t turning into a reality. Looking potentially at aptera if they can actually bring their cars to market. If not, will possibly have to go more mainstream with a ionic 5/6
Or go Chinese.
Shouldn’t that be the other way around? “Mostly because of the shitty build quality and partly because of Musk”?
No, because even if they were well made I wouldn’t give one cent to that fascist piece of shit.
People are allowed their own perspectives.
I was asking because I had assumed that people would put their safety before identity politics. I haven’t liked Teslas since I came to notice how bad their build quality was. You’d think that would come first and not the insane ramblings of a mad man but what do I know…
I remember seeing reports that Tesla models outside of the cybertruck have tanked. Goes to show which assholes are still clinging to this turd of a brand. Btw I saw that the panels above the door are glued to the body. Lol
Enjoy your shit cars folks.
It’s honestly quite sad to see what the brand has become. I have a model 3 that I got back when elon was just weirdo that smoked weed on rogan’s show and made sophomoric sex jokes. My car is a solid vehicle that feels fun to drive. There were a lot of really talented engineers that built a great product. I’d never buy another though.
What is the problem with glued panels?
Well for one glue breaks down at borderline random amounts, could last one year could last a hundred also imagone if one came off going 70 on the 15.
Adhesives are used in many aerospace applications to bond panels and structural elements. Some Lotus racing and street cars chassis are bonded aluminum! Lotus are racing chassis specialists, making chassis for other racing teams.
The space shuttle’s bottom tile heat shield, which withstood insane temperatures and stresses, were glued.
Adhesive science is pretty cool. You may want to read up a bit.
Take a look here. I’ve used their adhesives and 3M, also an impressive range, in a signmaking business I used to own. Not a single sign has failed in decades, weathering rain, snow, wind, very hot summers. We are talking pretty big surfaces, under pretty big loads and stresses.
Is that the glue that Tesla is using thought? Are they applying it correctly?
I find your post very cool but I still have skepticism about the application of adhesives here, specifically because they seem to be used on this truck in many places where they don’t need to be. Why use an adhesive over a fastener? In my mind, you generally wouldn’t.
Also I think signage is a decent comparison to an automotive application but it isn’t a perfect one. You’re basically comparing a mostly static load scenario to a completely dynamic one. It’d be more akin to the aerospace example but even those adhesives are in a very different use case. These cybertruck adhesives have to last 7+ years of thermal cycling and dynamic loading. If these adhesives hold up over time, I’ll be very impressed.
There are many reasons to use adhesives rather than fasteners. A very basic one is that fasteners weaken the surface where the drill is made, and all the forces are borne by the fastening point. With adhesives, forces are borne by the entire piece. How’s that for a neat trick?
Another advantage is that you don’t see a rivet or screw head on your nice shiny surface.
I never said signage was a 1:1 comparison with automotive, just that I’ve installed a lot of signs, some very large, whose structure was made of bonded aluminum, that many are over a decade old, that some withstand major stresses, and that none have failed.
As to the longevity? Do you often hear about planes losing panels? Because there are a heck of a lot of bonded panels in airplanes, both commercial and military.
Also, probably somewhere in your cars there are some bonded surfaces.
Lastly, Lotus has been making their sport scar chassis mostly bonded aluminum for the past, what, 30 years, maybe more? There is not a single case of delamination in those years. Good enough for me.
Well color me convinced, that’s all pretty good info that I had no clue about. Forgive my skepticism, I’ve just never run into adhesive applications like that. Seems like they’ve come a long way, but due to economic pressures I’m guessing that myself and others have only ever had experiences with adhesives that are sub par. Even here I’m still curious about the properties of what Tesla is using. Especially since I’ve seen those panels be removed without heating or damage and just by pulling them off. Then again, ultimate strength of these adhesives doesn’t need to be insanely high, they just need to be durable probably. Thanks for the insight!
Edit: I went to go look this up and they are indeed using a 3M product along with a BETAMATE DuPont product, all of which seem up to snuff and are industry standard. I think now I know the adhesives are the least of the concerns with the truck, which is interesting.
Im vague aware though my interests lay with metallurgy and old pieces of tech, these two kinda feed into eachother. Anyways my point shouldve reflected moreso on the fact that Tesla has shit build quality that makes the Ford Pinto look like an M1 Abrams in comparison, do you really think they are using decwnt quality adhesive for their vehicles?
I think the engineering is probably mostly sound. I don’t trust the execution. Many adhesives need specific curing times, temperatures, UV lights, whatever. If you don’t respect those…
That’s my concern. Application/execution, not design. Let’s remember that Musk believes in advancing by BOOOM
The cybertruck has a fucking aluminum frame, its tow hitch is attached to fucken aluminum. The engineering on the cybertruck is a crapshoot from that alone.
I have a lot of safety questions about a driverless taxi. Unless the car gets inspected between every ride (doubtful), what’s to stop someone from staying in the car past their stop? Will I get jumped by the previous passenger? What if someone left something dangerous in it? People innocently forget things all the time, which sucks on its own, but malicious actors could easily exploit an unmanned public(ish) vehicle.
Hell, who cleans it? If someone vomited on their trip home from a bar, will I be greeted by their mess when the taxi comes to me? From what I know of people, rules for passengers can and will be swiftly ignored without a driver in charge to make sure the rules are followed. Cameras wouldn’t stop everything, and honestly, who would want to be monitored by a camera throughout a taxi ride?
It’s obvious that Elon’s never ridden in a taxi in his life.
Sure but those are solvable. Personally I’m nowhere near as optimistic about the self-driving. I hope we eventually get it and current tech is truly amazing but it’s just not acceptable.
So far self-driving has mainly proven
- driving is all edge cases. Handling normal conditions is only the starting point
- it’s all about liability. Even if it’s provably safer than human driving, what human will accept their loved ones being killed by a self-driving car and what manufacturer will shoulder that liability?
Those things have cameras inside, they just won’t move if another passenger is still inside. There’s definitely questions about how reliable driverless cars are from a safety POV, and a future where you don’t own any transport and are at the mercy of some private corporation, but the stuff you mention is easy to figure out.
They already exist in San Francisco: https://waymo.com/waymo-one-san-francisco/
Not sure they’ve been around long enough for the problems you suggested to come up.
Okay, dweeb lord.
Everyone cool just pays Elon for the vomit taxi.
There are cameras in the cab. In the event of someone vomiting in the cab, it’ll be taken out of rotation and cleaned.
But how does the company know that someone vomited? There aren’t smell sensors, and even if there are enough cameras to get a view of the floor, the tech for detecting spills and other issues is not really there yet. Unless you think a person is going to remotely inspect each vehicle between each ride. But that seems highly unlikely. If a company is not wanting to spend money on a driver, then they aren’t going to spend money on someone to watch the cameras at all times. The point is they don’t want to hire people at all. Just have computers that don’t have to take bathroom breaks or food breaks or have any downtime and can work in unpleasant conditions. Customer service is a big part of what drivers do, even if that doesn’t mean talking to the customers directly, just knowing how to make then comfortable, not just the driving. If it’s just the driving, then public transportation makes more sense to automate than individual cars.
I’m guessing it’s done in part by customer feedback? If I order a cab and it’s not a condition I would approve of to ride in, I should have the ability to flag that cab at which point it’s pulled out of the rotation until it’s in a suitable condition for service.
Yeah, not the best service though, if the customer now has to wait for another cab. It will end up like how often I get opened, likely returned items from Amazon a lot these days because they just put returns back in the pile even if they were returned for defects or were returned after opening/use.
They don’t care to fix the problem and rely on enough people accepting the defective items eventually, because it’s too much trouble for them to return. But it’s a pain in the butt for someone who wants a new, non-defective item and has to return things all the time. I so often don’t get what I paid for the first time so with anything I order for a project, I always have to figure in double the time for it to arrive so I can get a replacement.
So, I’d rather have a human driver monitoring it so that I get a clean cab the first time rather than having to budget the time for getting to my destination so a second cab can arrive in case the first is too unsanitary to handle.
I think you have to weigh the probabilities.
Are vomit cabs really so frequent that we need a human present at all times just to avoid a single failed pickup?
Providing X free rides after an incident is likely more economical than a full time human vomit detector.
So basically they’re telling Elon to go fuck himself?
Human beings are strange animals. Tesla build quality has been suspect from the beginning. Why was that not the priority before now?
I’d assume it’s because Tesla were one of the first to mass market EVs, and Musk’s pandering made them seem like a good, progressive bet. Once people were locked into their purchase they don’t like to admit that they might have made a poor choice. Or they were aware of the build quality, but figured that the brand was a safe bet, that they’d improve over time.
It’s amazing what humans will get tribal over.
I’ve been really surprised by how many cybertrucks I’ve been seeing here in Seattle. For a notoriously progressive city, we apparently have an awful lot of Musk fanboys.
Nice. There are other options, but pulling a drive train out of one and putting it in a better car will become cheaper.
OP link got hugged to death
Link works fine? THR is a pretty large industry publication, doubt their servers would go down from lemmy traffic.
Sounds like a good time to be a secondhand buyer.
eww … used Teslas …
Wouldn’t be caught dead in a Tesla tbh
I’m told there’s a hot market for used EVs right now. The batteries are good for a long time and you can get, for example, a used 2020 Nissan Leaf for under $15,000.
Don’t ever buy a leaf at any price. Just ancient tech.
My wife’s best friend has one and likes it. 🤷♂️
I had one they run but the air cooled batteries and a fast charge connection that is non standard just leaves you frustrated if you try to use it as a full time car.
Ya I’d grab one if it was like fifty percent off in a heart beat assuming it was one of the awd versions, heck I’d even but a cybertruck if it was like 30 grand at that price I’m using the parts after it self-destructs to convert a different vehicle
