Self-Driving Cars Will Be in 30 U.S. Cities By the End of Next Year

I wouldn't say this is scary, it just means that people have to retrain. That's the way technology has always been. Replace farm hands with harvesters, replace skilled weavers with cotton mills. Replace human calculators with machines.

The problem is that retrain time and cost is increasing with each level of labor you automate.

When we moved from farms to assembly lines, the retrain time was however long it took your employer to show you the one repetitive task you had to do all day, and you were almost immediately producing goods. So, the retrain time was not important.

Now, the level of complexity automation can handle has increased, and if you want to move back to making the sort of money you were as a truck driver, the retrain time is years at a trade school or college, and the cost can be exorbitant to you, way before you're even producing goods. In the mean time, the little jobs many people use to pay rent while retraining are being automated as well - e.g. automated warehouses and fast-food joints that are being tested or are in production right now.

There's also the fact that earlier automation, e.g. farms, was about automating muscle - repetitive tasks that required no thought, just someone pushing the weight. Now, we're automating things that actually require comprehension - thought-processes - and as that improves, we're going to start pushing people out of jobs that require comprehension. At a certain point, if this continues, computers will be able to think better than people without getting tired. We'll have specialized automated brains in many jobs that are better than the people that were there before, and many people will be economically worthless - since economics is all about how you share resources created by various people, and people won't be creating goods. Classical economics just won't make sense at this point.

This is actually an awesome thing; the idea that people won't have to work to survive anymore, because there will be things that can supply them with no oversight on their part. The problem is how to detach our sense of identity from our jobs in a culture (at least in the US) where your job is a huge part of your self-worth.

/r/Futurology Thread Link - observer.com