re: The gig economy will be dead in 5 years

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Food delivery gigs aren't getting replaced by tech that quickly, if ever

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It’s the robits pleasure.

I'd love to see Robit climb 3 flights of stairs or gain access to a hospital.

Gig just means independent contractor.

There will always be independent contractors.

Now some jobs may become more automated.

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Enter Universal Basic Income

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The folks who have groused about gov't assistance since it was rolled out are going to suddenly decide to give out money to everyone in lieu of working?

It's more likely that the 1% will continue to hoard capital. What happens then?

I don't think 5 years is long enough.

The tech is improving quickly - no doubt. But look at the companies that are driving this: a lot of them are like Waymo, Zoox, etc. They are developing the tech and attempting to integrate them into a brand new driverless vehicle and eventually earn revenue by having those autonomous robo-taxis shuttling passengers around. It's an interesting concept (people never needing to own a car, never needing a parking space, and vehicles esentially being rolling real estate that we rent and summon on demand to shuttle us around).

Most of the companies developing this tech are structured to be service providers, manufacturers, and tech innovators. They want to own the tech, the hardware, and the entire people moving business. They want to make the robo-tax and take over Uber all in one. And that's exactly where I think they may be flawed structurally.

It's one thing to have a vehicle that can handle autonomous driving in todya's car market. But the Tesla Model S or Cadillac Escalade that you can buy today with those incredibly good automated driving features also don't have to figure out the logistics of being completely driverless. Tesla and GM (and most car companies) are earning money on early stages of autonomous driving tech by packaging it into consumer products RIGHT NOW. An Escalade's Super Cruise system doesn't have to figure out how to handle a bus being parked at the passenger drop off point, a flooded roadway, or some other unplanned event that robotaxis have to be programmed to handle. The Escalade and Tesla has a driver behind the wheel can intervene on the spot. And the companies that built those cars are earning money on that tech right now while their systems see real world use over thousands and thousands of cars running around as we read this.

Waymo and Zoox are a different structure. They have to be fully 100% baked before they are ready for showtime. They want to have completely driverless vehicles. The mountain that they have to climb between where the tech is now and generating their first dollar with a fully driverless robotaxi is damn high.

Without giving too much information about my business - I'm very familiar with this industry space. I've ridden in the prototypes. I've seen the production lines.

I don't think any players are 5 years from being ready for revenue generating rides without remote control intervention and monitoring from humans (making these wheeled drones - not driverless autonomous cars).

And if a human remotely intervening where the tech can't is going to be the business model until the tech is fully baked - it's going to be hard to compete with Jamal and his second hand Kia on costs to move a person from point A to point B. And since those companies aren't licensing their tech to a legacy car company or packaging their tech into a vehicle consumers can buy right now......they are living on VC funding or series B funding from major corporate backers (like Apple or Amazon). VC's and the big corporate backers may not indenfinitely be on board for these companies remaining pre-revenue - other opportunities and breakthroughs in other industries could draw funding away from robotaxis and threaten their technological advancement. And they will burn through their funding eventually.

I'm not even going to touch the regulatory hurdle. Some of those robotaxi companies have former Biden DOT officials on their board and I still don't think they'll see regulatory thumbs up for even test rides in every state (or at least a critical mass of them for their tech to be tested in a variety of climates and use cases) for up to a decade. You'll see them in Seattle, Austin, Vegas, the bay area, and a few other cities but those companies need to test their products in every corner of the countries where they intend to operate.

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Better self driving cars and AI taking entry level white collar jobs, we’re going to have a lot of unemployed people.

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I hope you pink collars that work inside with the women can figure out how to swing a pickaxe


Learn to coal

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You don't think robots can build products either?

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At least manufacturing adds value to a product/good. Service is a cost that doesn’t add value (look at how people bitch about warranty and insurance costs vs benefits).

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Universal Basic Income

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It's not a question of if; it's when.

Outside of an apocalyptic, civilization-destroying event, at some point, technology will progress such that most jobs are unnecessary.

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There will be plenty of folks who refuse to let a robot drive them at highway speeds, and I'm sure a company will step in to serve that market.

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Except that no one will insure them.

The early data is pretty clear that automated vehicles are exponentially safer than manually controlled vehicles. There will come a point where insuring a manually controlled vehicle will be incredibly difficult and expensive.