I have no doubt self-driving vehicles will be safer than ones driven by people.
My concern is not about safety. I'm concerned about humanity as whole, once the majority of people are without jobs and have no means to support themselves. I fear we will remain ignorant, selfish and petty, rather than evolve into a society that will care enough for one another and wise enough to realize we are being manipulated.
The world needs to progress and we need to move on. There were people who were against the use of computers as well as it would lead to unemployment and many other factors but still the world has accepted it as a positive change. Similarly self driven cars might help to reduce the number of accidents and would be safer for people to cross the roads.
If the autonomous car is faulty and kills people, who will you hold responsible? Onboard CPU?
If your faulty tires explode, who is held responsible? The tires themselves, or the company that makes them? If the cpu is found to be at fault, then the company that made it will be held responsible. If it's road conditions that caused the accident, then it's either the fault of the company responsible for road maintenance or it's simply an 'act of god'.
Well we might be losing the truck drivers but that will open a new job up again... Full Service gas stations. Unless they make a robot that pumps the gas into these automated trucks
Filling a tank full of gas is by far easier to automate than driving a truck.
Result: Shift in employable skills. Think of all the engineers and lawyers that will be needed to clean up after these things..
The first question is is the type of people who would be displaced by this technology the same type who could shift to being lawyers and engineers? (My guess is the overlap of would-be truck drivers who could also be engineers or lawyers is very small.) The second question, taking for granted that the answer to number one is that truck drivers and highly educated/trained professionals are very interchangeable, is at what point are there too many engineers and lawyers for them to be productively creating value for the economy?
Exactly.
Once most of the job market is automated and the masters no longer require us to slave after them, the poor and uneducated will be left to suffer and starve. In no time, we will reach their desired population of 1/2 million people (Agenda 21) and the Earth (that they nearly destroyed) will become a paradise once again. Only this time, it will be exclusively for them to enjoy, without all us "useless eaters" around wasting "their" resources and degrading the gene pool.
