The toxic tyrannical culture that killed Volkswagen

Agree with Chappy -- you can with minimal tools swap a clutch in your driveway, pretty simple given basic instructions and some special tools, perhaps. Not so much rebuild a transmission (reliably anyway). Even those in the UT desert where they're constantly being junkyard-trolled and tossed into ersatz recovery vehicles (so lots of exp)... plenty of home wrenches put them together wrong, and find out in the middle of Bum****, Egypt on some dune

Thanks Isaac & ETC for the skinny on autos in semis -- had wondered for a while now why mfrs hadn't used autos in long-haul commercial vehicles until just recently. The notion of controlling two gearboxes to get 80K lbs of semi up a hill... seems a skill you need some seat time to master. They are hauling a shite-tonne of weight tho

 

The thing that really freaked me out is when the automatic 18-speed automatically shifts into neutral and coasts down slight inclines. To be honest it makes sense now that I understand how and why it does that. What was really fun was to take the boss for a spin and watch him freak out.

Driving a non-synchronized transmission does require a bit of skill. I guess that now that trucks are going to automatics and are even coming with things automatic braking my skills aren't as needed as they used to be. Time to look for other types of work I guess.

 

Just wait until trucks start backing themselves into crowded loading docks.......
You and I probably have enough of a runway left to finish out our careers though.
People seem to forget that the Industrial Revolution started with "machine breakers" in the early 1800s.
Now of course they call them data center protesters.
You cannot get academicians to agree on when the industrial revolution really ended, but most agree that it was in the early to mid 1900s. Nobody can agree on the exact DECADE...
Fear not though....Robbie will fix that too....
All of this means that we humans are essentially worried about crowded 10-lane expressways while Henry Ford is still tinkering in his garage.
So we have plenty of time, if not an overabundance of talent to manage this - or be managed BY it.
Think about it.
There are actually people in this forum......a CAR forum that think that mass transportation is a net evil....

It's not just the liberatti and the diploma industrial complex that Robbie and our AI overlords will put out of business.
HOWEVER (comma!)
It will be a while before plumbers, electricians, nurses, will join actors, writers, and college professors into irreverence.

I've been recently acquainted with a philosophical thought experiment called the 'Paperclip Maximizer' or what I now call the "Universal Paperclip Theory."
Instrumental convergence - Wikipedia
Interesting thought experiment but it's a bit of a leap to think that AI can be perfectly....."rational" while having an irrational end goal.....which in the 'experiment' involves destroying everything in the universe to make


....more paperclips.

Me?
I think a bunch of people who've devoted their lives to academia are suddenly feeling a little bit like West Virginia coal miners the day after somebody (or some THING) figures out cold fusion....