Market for who? Who is left working? If we can’t answer that question then we’re not prepared for what’s next.

THIS is the question!

Henry Ford II: "Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?" Walter Reuther: "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?"

Ah, the elephant in the room. Nobody seems able to answer this point, or even talk about it. Occam’s razor sure doesn’t imply a good outcome.

For so long, people, especially politicians, have said that companies want to create jobs. But I think most companies want to create profit.

And for so long, I've had people tell me to just get a job. But I tell them that I don't want a job: I want money and I want something to do. Those two things don't have to be together.

I think this is the hard part: philosophically so many of us have learned we need jobs and don't realize a job can be decomposed into money and something to do.

So I think we need to start looking more creatively at 1) how people receive money from others and 2) how people give services to others.

Well the essence of capitalism might be that people who own the capital receive money for owning it, not doing any labor on it necessarily.

So when we talk of people doing labor for money, we are assuming they can only own their body and receive money from that?

owning capital comes with risk...

you may not like the fact the fat capital owner may not be lifting a finger, but they certaintly aren't getting a free lunch.

5,283 workers were killed on the job in the United States in 2023.

The only thing capital owners risk is losing it and becoming a worker.

Fair, I never said there wasn't risk involved with ownership. I even made sure to qualify when I said that people who own don't do labor, because often there is labor involved in ownership.

So I don't think it's a free lunch, it's more risk-for-lunch than labor-for-lunch. Maybe you could argue laborers are still risking their body or something, but I think the point might stand.

The economic model is inconsequential to my point. Latching on to that as a boogeyman is a distraction, the point stands on its own.

> Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”

You paint the economic model as a false dichotomy, and the main point of my posting was that it is not a false dichotomy. It is not either have a job (and be exploited by someone else) or be helpless and rely on government handouts.

For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?

The whole conversation seemed to be about the economic model, so I'm not sure how it is a distraction, a boogeyman, or inconsequential.

> For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?

You have described less than 0.1% of the US population, not to mention the rest of the world.

I get it, you have an idea in your head and you're struggling to see past it. Read Brave New World.

It seems that you may not want to actually have a discussion, rather just reinforce the idea that we're either screwed by employers or screwed by helplessness.

Fair, my one example on layoffs may not land with you.

But do you want us to just sink into the helplessness of us all being screwed or do you want to try to find solutions that might allow us to feel some sense of agency and hope?

Dissmissive, thats a way to handle it for sure. I'd be much more interested in you adressing what I said. Dismmissing is lazy.

You wrote 7 paragraphs originally. What specifically do you want me to address?

Ah, well, nobody needs to buy them if the robots just provision everything for the people who would have otherwise had their businesses make cars.

Driving a car is a chore, not a job (usually), much like washing dishes is. Dishwashers did not produce an economic collapse.

OTOH replacing people with AI would indeed bring about a huge economic downturn. What would be good is augmenting humans so that they can do 10x more. That would enable things that are hard to imagine exactly now, much like computers enabled interesting transformations in the society from 1980s to 2010s.

The current crop of AI is by construction unable to reach the human level of cognition, but it is quite good at doing some symbolic manipulation tasks. We will get used to that, and will integrate that in our workflows. Humans are still going to be needed.

Tractor-trailer trucking alone is the 13th largest profession in the US. It’s not unusual for driving to be a whole profession in and of itself.

Fair, but I spoke about cars, the commute / chore kind of work, not trucks, a commercial job.

And do you feel that the industry in general, and individual companies are currently trying to augment / 10x their workers and have everyone share in the 10x profits that will bring? Or are they jumping on opportunity to try and cut costs by even single digits, by replacing those workers with AI and it's not their problem what those people do from there?

If an employee brings in more profit than before, you want more such employees, not less.

You have to cut costs when the costs do not bring you enough profits.

That assumes the market is infinitely expandable.

If in fact you can meet the same market demand with fewer workers and the market does not expand accordingly, you get deflation and job losses.

Huh?

Hundreds of billions are changing hands globally, every week, at the retail level alone.

And that happens literally every week, week after week.

That constitutes a massive market in any sense I can think of.

That won't happen any more if nobody has jobs. It's also completely irrelevant because how did you just connect the self driving car market to the entirety of retail sales?

So you think a trend that is growing year after year, yes global retail sales grew from 2025 to 2026 week over week, indicates a future collapse?

That needs a way more complex explanation than simple gut feeling.

This is the same issue for water in California as well. Growing water thirsty crops in a desert to use an allocation while average people are asked to conserve.

Free? They serve ads on their clients. The best solution that solved this terrible issue was Inbox, which they purchased and then destroyed. Google also makes monthly cloud storage fees for anyone who has large files or photos. Also, it keeps people in Googles ecosystem. It’s a beneficial monopoly for Google.

You getting one hour of sleep is meditating and no going outside?

Basically you’re talking about implementing The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Many innocent people have been sentenced to death in the US. The idea that jail or punishment solves crime also has no basis in fact.

Trust with trillions of dollars in investments, basically destroyed by Bobby Drop Tables…

https://xkcd.com/327/

If they can look at their leaderships statements as positive or neutral then they are part of the problem.

This isn’t hypothetical, this system just exists in other countries. Digital systems can confirm flight instruction from ATC with zero radio communication.

> Digital systems can confirm flight instruction from ATC with zero radio communication.

Digital comms is available in the US:

* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/DataComm

The issue is that the final approach and landing (and taxiing?) environments are probably too dynamic for that: in this particular situation one of the vehicles was responding to an emergency (fire).

In addition to huge planes, there is baggage transportation, passenger buses (to mid-field terminals), fuel pumpers, emergency vehicles, snow plows, deicers, and general maintenance vehicles (clear debris off runways).

I’m not saying we couldn’t move more into automation. What I’m saying is that doing so will not solve all of our air/ground control problems. We still have human pilots and humans driving vehicles on the ground. Switching from humans directing landings to machines might improve some things but will not solve for all (and probably not most) risks.

Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.

The ATC told them to enter the runway because they were confused or distracted due t overwork.

No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.

People are saying automation could handle a significant portion of the routine things allowing humans to handle the more complex/finicky issues.

Even if automation could handle 10% of the most common situations it would be a huge boon. In reality its probably closer to 50%.

There's unfortunately an alertness problem WRT automated systems.

If the reason you have the human there is to handle the unusual cases, you run the real risk that they just aren't paying attention at critical moments when they need to pay attention.

It's pretty similar to the problem with L3 autonomous driving.

Probably the sweet spot is automation which makes clear the current set of instructions on the airport which also red flags when a dangerous scenario is created. I believe that already exists, but it's software that was last written in 1995 or so.

Regardless, before any sort of new automation could be deployed, we need slack for the ATC to be able to adopt a new system. That's the biggest pressing problem. We could create the perfect software for ATC, but if the current air traffic controllers are all working overtime and doing a job designed for 3 people rather than one, they simply won't have the time to explore and understand that new system. It'll get in the way rather than solve a problem. More money is part of the solution here, but we also need a revamped ATC training program which can help to fill the current hole.

> The ATC told them to enter the runway because they were confused or distracted due t overwork.

Very possibly. It will be interesting what comes from the investigation.

> No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.

I’m asking if it would have solved even the current situation. The truck presumably saw the red light, and was asking to cross. Would traffic control have said no if more had been automated and if so, what automation would fix this? Unless we are supposing the truck would be autonomously driven and refuse to proceed when planes are landing, in which case, maybe, though that’s not really ATC automation anymore.

an automated system that could check if a plane is about to land on a runway and show some kind of alert or red light is hardly a stretch of the imagination

That’s such a great idea that it already exists and is deployed at La Guardia.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl

Thank you for providing your aviation knowledge to this discussion. What a classic example of tech people thinking that because they're smart, every other industry must be dumb and they can just jump in and fix it.

I also do not like this persistent tone of “everyone else is stupid; software would easily fix it” that pops up so often. Not all problems are easy to fix with some code.

To be clear, though, I don’t even have significant aviation knowledge. But this isn’t hard to learn about. That’s part of what irks me so much about this tone. It’s not just “I’m so smart” it’s “I’m so confident that you’re dumb that I don’t need to know anything about the domain you’re working in to know better than you”. Someone could ask ChatGPT why airports don’t have stoplights to stop traffic from crossing the runway and it would reveal the existence of this system.

Yes, in fact I had considered adding your same thought to my initial comment. It's not impossible that a smart tech person might be able to improve the existing systems. The problem is the arrogance of not even checking what existing systems there might be, as if obviously they'd be too backwards to have any.

> "I don’t need to know anything about the domain you’re working in to know better than you"

This frustates me to no end. Is it just an example of the Dunning–Kruger effect?

Something like that. It feels a bit different because it’s less about overestimating one’s knowledge/ability and more about underestimating the complexity of domains outside one’s expertise. But yeah. Very similar.

Me too, but I don’t like referring to Dunning-Kruger ever for multiple reasons. There are perfectly good labels like cockiness, arrogance, ignorance, presumptuousness, and wrongheaded. ;)

There are many issues with DK, and the paper’s widely misunderstood. For one, the primary figure demonstrates a positive correlation between confidence and competence, so according to DK’s own paper, high confidence is not an indicator of incompetence, contrary to popular belief. The paper also measured things in a very funny way (by having participants rank themselves against other people of unknown skill), and it measured only very simple things (like basic grammar, and ability to get a joke), and it only polled Cornell undergrads (no truly incompetent people), and there were a tiny number of participants receiving extra credit (might exclude the As and Fs in the class). Many smart people have come to the conclusion that DK is a statistical artifact of the way they did their experiment, not a real cognitive bias. Some smart people have pointed out that DK is probably popular because it’s really tempting to believe - we like the idea of arrogant people getting justice. The paper also primes the reader, telling them what to believe even though the title isn’t truly supported by the data. It’s an interesting read that I think would not pass today’s publication criteria.

Anyway, sorry, slash rant.

Agreed, but I see this in every industry. And though it's certainly arrogant on some level, I think of it in a more positive light: people are generally optimistic and want to solve problems.

My grandfather had a rule at his business for 55-ish years: we welcome your ideas and suggestions, but not for the first year. You spend that time learning our processes, decisions behind them, pain points, areas that need improvement, etc. You also spend that time doing the work and hearing from your colleagues. Then you can (hopefully) make informed suggestions. That's not possible in every situation, but I like the intent.

> people are generally optimistic and want to solve problems.

This is an amazingly positive spin on the behavior.

I meant something in-vehicle for ground vehicles, like an extremely simple extrapolation of current velocity and the extremely predictable trajectory of a plane, instead of depending on going back and forth over radio asking a very busy fallible human, but sure

even my cheap car has geofencing and automatic braking

I've worked on avionics professionally and I haven't crashed any of my planes yet...

“These lights … turn red in response to traffic, providing direct, immediate alerts without the need for input from controllers”.

It will be interesting to see what the report says. Did the light system not function? Did they override it? Do they ignore it consistently?

> geofencing and automatic braking

I’m not at all sure I want emergency vehicles to be blocked like this. And if they can override then it’s no different. They didn’t roll onto the runway on accident.

> I've worked on avionics professionally and I haven't crashed any of my planes yet...

Is this relevant somehow?

The habit where HN commenters greenfield solutions that are slightly worse versions of the ones experts already have in place is unmatched.

In an ideal world this would be like rail traffic, where the runway would be 'locked' (red signal) due to the landing plane, and the fire engine would have to explicitly request an override to cross the locked runway, and importantly, this process has to be _rare_. If it's something that's done 5000 times a day, it'll be normalized. Everyone involved should be aware of the dangers of traversing a 'locked' runway.

My understanding that this scenario is exactly what happened here.

What is _really_ needed is a replacement of the archaic narrowband analog FM radio. Where you can't listen and talk at the same time. There are probably at least several dozen accidents where the inability to communicate with an aircraft or a road vehicle was a contributing factor.

I would settle for a good digital system with an ability to issue emergency/priority calls to specific receivers. Oh, and full-duplex communication.

I'm practicing for a sports pilot license, and I really have problems with understanding other pilots and the ATC.

Not only that, if 2 people talk at once they can cancel each other out and neither can be heard by anyone else.

Much of aviation is still based on pre WWII tech and practices like this and people underestimate how slow and difficult it is to change. Many piston aircraft still run on leaded gas, for example, the last existing market for it in the US.

Changing the delivery method doesn't do anything to solve the problem of a controller sending an instruction that creates a hazard.

My rich friend drove home drunk from a police ball even though his parents gave him an unlimited taxi card, the police stopped him and recognized his family, and then told him to get home safely.

My other friend forgot his drivers license at home while being non-white and was arrested/charged and forced to explain why he didn’t bring his license to a judge.

That sounds like it's in the US? That's a known third-world country, in this respect at least.

If you don't think this would happen even in an 'idyllic' scandi country or wherever, you're mistaken.

No way, the Norwegian Prime Minister certainly was not doing anything corrupt or trading any criminal favors with Epstein, that's all just a vast conspiracy theory.

The end game is when the US backed dictatorships collapse, this is the end of American power, not the beginning.

That seems pretty unlikely at the moment.