A lot of the fear that comes from tech unemployment is based on predictions of the future, which are notoriously horrible.
You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline. I'm fairly sure there are exactly zero US states where bot trucking is presently common. Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor in whether or not this even could happen.
Bold predictions are, with hindsight, usually wrong.
A lot of these fearful arguments boil down to a simple syllogism; "if present trends continue, then (bad outcome here)". The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, and you'll see uniformly that the future predictors expected certain trends to continue which didn't, and missed the existence of other big trends that ended up as primary drivers.
People just don't know what's going to happen in the future. I suppose guessing is better than doing nothing, but we shouldn't think that the future guessing we do is actually good or accurate, past experience teaches it's actually really far off.
You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline. I'm fairly sure there are exactly zero US states where bot trucking is presently common. Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor in whether or not this even could happen.
Bold predictions are, with hindsight, usually wrong.
A lot of these fearful arguments boil down to a simple syllogism; "if present trends continue, then (bad outcome here)". The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, and you'll see uniformly that the future predictors expected certain trends to continue which didn't, and missed the existence of other big trends that ended up as primary drivers.
People just don't know what's going to happen in the future. I suppose guessing is better than doing nothing, but we shouldn't think that the future guessing we do is actually good or accurate, past experience teaches it's actually really far off.