Instead, they will pass legislation to funnel money directly to the companies that lose revenue because of an impoverished customer base. We've seen this quite recently, in fact.

During the housing crash, the government could have bailed out homeowners, buying their mortgages at pennies on the dollar. The homeowners would have benefited, communities would have benefited, families would have benefited, and lenders would have benefited.

Instead, money went directly to lenders who still held the mortgages for which the shattered homeowners were still obligated. In essence, the lenders got paid twice, and the borrowers got fucked.

That will happen when this wave of automation occurs, too. People will lose jobs & income, and they'll receive--at best--a monthly pittance to ward off starvation. Corporations, meanwhile, will be directly subsidized by the government and, by extension, by the ever-decreasing tax base.

I floated the idea that the feds do exactly as you suggested, but then sell them at the price paid for them to local and smaller community banks with the banks refinancing the loans at the price they paid. The banks would have still made money on the interest rates (not to exceed a federally mandated limit) and homeowners would benefit from lower mortgage rates. This would have also spread risk to much smaller banks where ten to twenty failing wouldn't hurt the longterm economy.

Instead of a basic income, money you can spend freely to satisfy your own needs, they'll subsidize giant corporations and make you eat their crap, live in their shitty housing, and silently accept their abuse.

It would resemble the old Soviet system.

You'll get a seventy dollar coupon for Comcast, and all you'll get for that is propaganda you don't watch.

You'll get food stamps that exclude items like birthday cakes for your kids, or champagne for your wedding anniversary..

You'll get a housing allowance that excludes everything but sterile, corporate owned concrete apartment blocks managed by fascist company men and their private police forces.

Etc.

If you can't choose how to spend your own money it's not really your money.

Especially those big trailer trucks... says 5 years that will happen. I hope not. I think driverless vehicles are a huge safety concern.

Car crashes kill 30,000 people a year. Computers may never be perfect, they may kill 3000 a year, but its not too difficult to make them significantly better than humans.

I would rather have a person in control or at least there to override when it errors. I guess we will see when it happens.

Especially in the interstate trucking industry.

Most likely (IMO), is that there will be human in charge of several trucks that will travel in a train (called platooning) for log haul interstate travel. However a local driver will need to take over for the local delivery.

30000 people are killed every year.

Computers dont have to be perfect, just significantly better. 0 deaths might never happen, but a 75% decrease is possible and would be very welcome.

Don't give it a Twitter account so it has nothing to check while driving.

Something tells me driverless will mean sitting parked most of the winter.

have a driver in the truck.

through various loopholes?

Technology, in certain respects, seems to be a snake eating its own tail- and consumers who buy into that endless cycle will fall short. Reducing consumption and waste used to be a lifestyle during WW II. Some groups of hippy types downscaled and it seems with "tiny houses" there are people doing it today.

I think I'll keep control of my car before I let a computer do it. It would be tough to hack me.

the less there will be for humans to do. That can either be a terrible thing or a grand thing. Without 99% democratic control of the process, it will be terrible. With it has a chance to be grand.

Either way we had better spend our effort on ensuring 99% democratic control of the process rather than fighting to outlaw technology.