re: #102 Targetpractice

Delivery companies already face lawsuits, fines, or reprimands every time one of their human drivers causes a wreck that leads to fatalities, so the question in the end is going to be whether or not the cost of cases involving driverless vehicles is lower, higher, or the same as ones involving humans. If they’re the same or lower, then humans are out and the machines will take their place with necessary software patches and upgrades implemented fleetwide any time one of them is involved in a wreck.

As for militant opponents of such technology, their biggest adversaries will be public opinion. We’ve seen time and time again across human history that any time machines were implemented to replace or supplement human labor, there inevitably were those who opposed such moves to the point of sabotage or even violence. Yet technology marches on and those opponents either lost the argument in the face of more goods at lower prices or they were themselves sabotaged by efforts to win over the public through promises of new/better jobs or higher wages for the workers that weren’t replaced.

I’m only an old lawyer who knows just enough about computers to bang out a legal report on Word, but for what little it’s worth I don’t think AI is going to advance rapidly enough to cause mass unemployment. Unless humanity’s declining birth rates reverse soon, we are facing a future of acute labor shortages as population growth flattens then starts declining and the population ages. So AI may just provide us with the robot slaves a mostly elderly and shrinking group of people need to take care of them. But as I said in my previous long post, this is an unprecedented era in human history, and only time will tell.