adam277:
Another thing is vaping.The makers bombard kids with marketing showing how cool vaping is because it is so unregulated.
Like cigarette manufacturers used to do? Or alcopop manufacturers. Or gambling company’s do currently. Nothing new here
I’m sure there are one or two moaning about progress and automation sat at home on the latest smartphone, tablet, laptop, that is manufactured in a chinese factory, armed full of the latest apps and used to order goods via amazon, posting on an internet forum about progress and automation being something they won’t accept
Automation is happening whether we like it or not. There are a lot of plus points although some perceive it as going backwards.
Personally I love automated tills in supermarkets. A big queue of dozy buggers that probably don’t know how to use them and certainly don’t trust them. I’m out ten minutes before most of them. Also they don’t short change you like some staff do. 
dieseldog999:
as soon as they inveted jcb diggers then for every 1 built,then there goes 60 paddys onto the dole for not digging holes i the ground…apparantly its progress.
Care to explain how the UK has the highest number of people in employment in our nation’s history and 3.8% unemployment, the lowest for 45 yearsand which is considered globally to be regarded as full employment despite record immigration and automation? And before you say “government fiddling the unemployment figures” they use an international metric for measuring and it isn’t done on claimant count.
It is the same situation in Ireland too.
Scraggy88:
I wonder what governments will do when enough jobs have become automated and a majority of the planets population are unemployed or there are just not enough jobs to go around? Gonna be an interesting lifetime, even more so for my son!
Automation will create a whole slew of new jobs we’re not even aware of. They said the same about the horse and cart when it was replaced by the motor vehicle but the motor vehicle created a network of mechanics garages, filling stations and jobs in the supply chain for both of those which more than made up for the fact a motorised vehicle could do more work than a horse and all of those jobs being ones people didn’t know would be created with the growth of the car/truck.
Juddian:
Childhood has changed, and it isn’t just because children now have to be entertained in some activity for every waking moment, its because parents are scared stiff to let children out of their sight (but won’t dare say the real reason),
Drugs. People aren’t robbing and stabbing each other because they’re upstanding citizens in work. Ain’t paedophiles because it is looking like there were a hell of a lot more in the 60s, 70s and 80s than today.
Cue the inevitable “cos black and brown people innit”.
Conor:
dieseldog999:
as soon as they inveted jcb diggers then for every 1 built,then there goes 60 paddys onto the dole for not digging holes i the ground…apparantly its progress.Care to explain how the UK has the highest number of people in employment in our nation’s history and 3.8% unemployment, the lowest for 45 yearsand which is considered globally to be regarded as full employment despite record immigration and automation? And before you say “government fiddling the unemployment figures” they use an international metric for measuring and it isn’t done on claimant count.
It is the same situation in Ireland too.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
so if you were a employer,would you use 1 man and a jcb,or 40 blokes with picks and shovels…■■?
best sticking to be a road commander and your night trunk.
If you think that self service tills are a thing to worry about, check out nano replicators and grey goo.
AI will ultimately destroy the human race, and the process has started and can’t be stopped.
Conor:
Scraggy88:
I wonder what governments will do when enough jobs have become automated and a majority of the planets population are unemployed or there are just not enough jobs to go around? Gonna be an interesting lifetime, even more so for my son!Automation will create a whole slew of new jobs we’re not even aware of. They said the same about the horse and cart when it was replaced by the motor vehicle but the motor vehicle created a network of mechanics garages, filling stations and jobs in the supply chain for both of those which more than made up for the fact a motorised vehicle could do more work than a horse and all of those jobs being ones people didn’t know would be created with the growth of the car/truck.
We have seen it already in all the new Amazon depots that keep popping up everywhere. Less labouring warehouse jobs but new higher paid jobs in IT, engineering and robotics running & maintaining the vast amounts of kit they have in them.
The problem is there aren’t as many of the high paid jobs & you would have had low paid ones. Amazon seem to try and make up for this with the vast swathes of pointless ‘yard marshall’ and security womble type jobs, but there won’t be many other companies like Amazon who will be prepared to pay so many people to do jobs that don’t need to exist.
Automation & the advancements in AI can only ever result in less jobs to go round. Governments rightly talk about better education etc. but the fact is not everybody can have a high paid job. I suspect we will end up with a universal income system in due course, how a balance gets struck between that & rewarding people to try and work remains to be seen.
idrive:
If you think that self service tills are a thing to worry about, check out nano replicators and grey goo.
AI will ultimately destroy the human race, and the process has started and can’t be stopped.
Oh yeesss you are so right. Humans have only themselves to blame though.
adam277:
My take on it is I am now 100% sure full automation will come within the next 20 years. Trunking being no doubt the first to take the hit. I do think there will still have to be a driver in the truck for a while yet though.
In my observation, they can barely even successfully automate haulage processes within a single site yet, or have a wagon reverse accurately onto a bay, let alone have a wagon make consistent progress along British roads and negotiate with human traffic.
There is not even a single example where they have demonstrated it in principle (for example, where they have set up a site with every adjustment to the site necessary to enable it).
Even the simplest possible case of a car just making progress within the white lines on a well-engineered, brightly lit open road in the US, led to a pedestrian being run over. It’s bread and butter stuff not to hit anything. For as long as they need a driver to provide oversight or intervention even 0.1% of the time along a journey, they have to have him sat in the seat 100% of the time.
I think an interesting thing i’ve noticed in the past 5 years (ish) is that we have gone from no self service checkouts in my local tesco store to about 10 and last year they upgraded it to about 30.
That’s hardly an example of automation. It is just a till in which the scanning labour is performed by the customer rather than the staff.
Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is my area used to be big for data entry jobs, it sucked but they was always hiring and everyone hated it. They never seem to hire anymore.
Heck just checking online in my area I only see like one data entry job on indeed.
A lot of data entry and manipulation has simply been folded into other jobs. It’s like the “typing pool” - typing didn’t disappear, and certainly hasn’t been reduced, the task has simply been palmed off to those who conceive the content of the documents, so that we are merely back to the pre-typewriter era when people either wrote their own letters by hand and sent them as-is, or gave a broad instruction to a clerk who actually formulated the letter.
rob22888:
Conor:
…We have seen it already in all the new Amazon depots that keep popping up everywhere. Less labouring warehouse jobs but new higher paid jobs in IT, engineering and robotics running & maintaining the vast amounts of kit they have in them.
The problem is there aren’t as many of the high paid jobs & you would have had low paid ones. Amazon seem to try and make up for this with the vast swathes of pointless ‘yard marshall’ and security womble type jobs, but there won’t be many other companies like Amazon who will be prepared to pay so many people to do jobs that don’t need to exist.
I doubt Amazon are paying people unnecessarily. They probably still need at least some human presence on the ground to provide overall supervision, identify problems, and communicate with other workers.
Automation & the advancements in AI can only ever result in less jobs to go round. Governments rightly talk about better education etc. but the fact is not everybody can have a high paid job. I suspect we will end up with a universal income system in due course, how a balance gets struck between that & rewarding people to try and work remains to be seen.
An obvious solution is to share jobs with reduced working hours. The vast majority of drivers working 40 hours a week could easily be machine tenders or mechanics for 20 hours a week (at the same wage as for 40 hours, because the improvement in efficiency allows more to be done for a given amount of human work and thus higher hourly rates to be paid).
And more time will surely be spent educating and sharing knowledge and understanding. If you’re only working 20 hours a week, all the more time to take your kids on a tour of the machines, or all the more time to spend on Trucknet enlarging your mind.
There are plenty of fellas who know nothing of professional jobs, but that’s because they were never taught in schools. Most schools focus on teaching kids to do as they are told in routine jobs.
Machines fail, at some point it will do.
For all I know, all of the rail service in the world could be run by a 5 years old kid with a screen, playing with a remote control in rural china, with existing technology.
Why it still employs so many drivers and controllers and so on?
The same with planes, today it can take off, fly, and land on auto pilot. Why are there still pilots? and why the heck there are co-pilots then? and 3rd officer?
Have a 44 ton lump of metal having one catastrophic failure, going down hill, just before a school, at 15:00 and you would see the point of drivers for safety, even with automation.
Logistics will get more efficient, electrification will come in, a driver will be turn into a data analyst with driving abilities, but we as a species, like the comforting thought of knowing that in case of a big failure, there will be someone trained to at least try to save the day.
Rjan:
In my observation, they can barely even successfully automate haulage processes within a single site yet, or have a wagon reverse accurately onto a bay,
I`ll argue with you there. On closed sites trucks are working successfully.
Shanghai container port, since 2017 has had shunter trucks and in Australia over a billion mile-tons moved since 2012. australianmining.com.au/new … milestone/
youtube.com/watch?v=N_Ag-0IqDAg
Rjan:
Even the simplest possible case of a car just making progress within the white lines on a well-engineered, brightly lit open road in the US, led to a pedestrian being run over. It’s bread and butter stuff not to hit anything. For as long as they need a driver to provide oversight or intervention even 0.1% of the time along a journey, they have to have him sat in the seat 100% of the time.
Having a “driver” sitting bored out of his/her skull waiting for an emergency to happen, so they get summat to do won`t be a successful strategy, we can agree.
One pedestrian run over? After how many miles of safe running? Human drivers are far from perfect, and although there will be resistance, automation could prove safer than human drivers although they may not be accepted as such. Machines dont need to be perfect in order to be safer than us.
At 33 I don’t think I have anything to worry about regarding self-driving lorries or buses. In my opinion they will be one of the last things to go automated on the roads. This type of vehicle gets in far too many tight spots and predicaments that require human thought to solve. 20 years ago they said we’d all be using flying cars or jetpacks by now, and that’s not happened yet. Once they start physically modifying roads to cater specifically for automated vehicles, then we have to worry.
Conor:
Scraggy88:
I wonder what governments will do when enough jobs have become automated and a majority of the planets population are unemployed or there are just not enough jobs to go around? Gonna be an interesting lifetime, even more so for my son!Automation will create a whole slew of new jobs we’re not even aware of. They said the same about the horse and cart when it was replaced by the motor vehicle but the motor vehicle created a network of mechanics garages, filling stations and jobs in the supply chain for both of those which more than made up for the fact a motorised vehicle could do more work than a horse and all of those jobs being ones people didn’t know would be created with the growth of the car/truck.
The whole point of the video was to say that Automation will NOT create a whole slew of new jobs we’re not even aware of like the horseless carriage or the steam engine did.
Passive resistance like avoiding automated till or switching off the stop/start on your car is like peeing into the wind. I like self-scanning my shopping (I do the household shopping every week) because it’s easier - I only have to handle the items twice instead of four times.
The example he gives of baristas is a good one. I guess that most of us don’t spend £4 or £5 on a coffee with a heart on the froth, but all those Costas and Starbucks are convincing enough people to do just that to enable them to take over the high streets just about everywhere. The downside is that no one likes queuing, so a coffee shop that dispenses the same coffee without you having to tell some spotty youth your name and waiting for it will do well. Then another one will open and another and suddenly there are no vacancies for baristas anymore.
A driver who does complex multi-drop deliveries in the city will be safe for a good few years yet; the driver who shunts trailers around a yard, or the one who shunts boxes between depots might consider retraining - but not as a barista.
SJB:
At 33 I don’t think I have anything to worry about regarding self-driving lorries or buses. In my opinion they will be one of the last things to go automated on the roads. This type of vehicle gets in far too many tight spots and predicaments that require human thought to solve. 20 years ago they said we’d all be using flying cars or jetpacks by now, and that’s not happened yet. Once they start physically modifying roads to cater specifically for automated vehicles, then we have to worry.
Like this maybe. vimeo.com/128903547
Rjan:
An obvious solution is to share jobs with reduced working hours. The vast majority of drivers working 40 hours a week could easily be machine tenders or mechanics for 20 hours a week (at the same wage as for 40 hours, because the improvement in efficiency allows more to be done for a given amount of human work and thus higher hourly rates to be paid).And more time will surely be spent educating and sharing knowledge and understanding. If you’re only working 20 hours a week, all the more time to take your kids on a tour of the machines, or all the more time to spend on Trucknet enlarging your mind.
Now there, I think you`re getting it right.
At the moment we have too many working excessively long hours just to make ends meet, but some others have leisure time, and cash to waste on frivolous consumer “stuff”.
The system needs a reset. Or more likely a different system of reward for work.
Santa:
Like this maybe. vimeo.com/128903547
Possibly yes. Something more closely representing a ‘tramway’ rather than a road would be a lot easier for AI to deal with. How many years will it take though to do any wide scale alterations to our roads bearing in mind the average time it takes us to plan and undertake roadworks!
The Cambridgeshire Busway is a classic example of how something that is thought ‘cool’ by politicians and non-engineers ends up being a waste of time and money.
It was built on a redundant railway. It was years late, millions over budget, and had to be closed almost as soon as it had opened because the half-wits who designed it didn’t realise that rainwater would collect between the kerbs.
The problems have continued ever since…