They do; RSU vesting is a taxable event. It's counted as ordinary income based on the fair market value at the time it vests and taxes are due immediately. Companies tend to withhold a percentage of the shares and sell them to cover your tax burden.
The terrifying thing is that you don't even need to reach human-level performance to cause structural unemployment. As a hypothetical example, if automation can make top-performers in your field 10x more efficient, that makes 90% of people in that role redundant.
This feels a lot scarier to me since as a ML engineer, I rarely see applications where we can reach human level performance easily but the idea of making existing top performers 2-5x more effective feels much more viable.
The idea of 80% of people in relatively high-skill jobs who are used to a relatively high income level becoming redundant is a pretty scary one.
I guess they can all become Javascript developers and fulfill the big tech companies' dreams of having hordes of cheap engineers on the labor market. That would help save some of the money poured into various initiatives like 'Dolphins who code', etc.
This idea has been around for over 10 years but I still don't see that many signs of it happening. I mean what interesting projects are around that actually make it possible to for example, let a non-technial person point and click develop a python or Java application? It happened with HTML/CSS and Dreamweaver/WordPress etc years ago but it's much easier with web stuff and I don't really see it elsewhere.
I think we're in the early stage of automating web development but sites like Wix have made impressive strides in making UI design accessible. I'm working on something in this field myself and I've done enough research and prototyping that I think it's definitely achievable.
Lots of high-earning people tied up in managing money is pretty inefficient for society, though. Maybe those people can switch to factory jobs and help reduce the cost of common things for the common person.
It's kind of a joke. People getting rich off moving money around is kind of silly, and it would certainly be better if those jobs could be eliminated by machines.
The vision of public blockchains (such as Ethereum) is to make the core of financial transactions automated and non-profit. While there may still be profit to be made on the margin (credit scores), the vision is that currency and equity trades will happen on decentralized markets that are automated and non-profit.
...Even if this vision occurs, it's not obvious how soon it would occur. For example, will we need stable-value cryptocurrencies before any of this can occur? Will anything significant occur in the next two years, or will it be five? OR more?
This is nothing new. I work marketing side running customer acquisition for 12 countries across 3 brands, with budget significant enough to bring in ~3% of a countries population annually in our higher coverage markets. And this year we will add additional countries and brands.
We are a team of 3. There is no way this would have worked 10+ years ago. Maybe in another 10 we will be 1...
>I rarely see applications where we can reach human level performance easily but the idea of making existing top performers 2-5x more effective feels much more viable.
This actually reminds me of Palantir's focus, which is to develop tools to aid analysts.
That's a great point, Rotterdam and Oakland are both not great choices for comparisons. However, there is a general point that US ports such as LA + Long Beach do lag in efficiency compared to Asian ports such as Singapore for example (which is heavily automated but also unionized).
For example in "CONTAINER TERMINAL PRODUCTIVITY:
EXPERIENCES AT THE PORTS OF LOS ANGELES AND LONG BEACH" Le and Murphy give some comparisons of LA and Long Beach to other leading terminals.
Taking Singapore as our main example, as of 2004 it moved 2.7 as much container volume as LA but occupied roughly half the land area. It has 6 times the TEU/acre of LA and 64% higher TEU/crane. General trends also hold for Kwai Tsing (HK) and Klang (Malaysia).
To quote Le and Murphy in the above-mentioned paper:
"Further consideration of these factors reveals that the terminal operators at these
ports are aware of the technologies and practices used at other world ports that would allow them
to achieve a higher level of performance. However, the present operating agreements between
terminal operators and port labor prevent the implementation of such technologies and practices."
Everything is complicated, and we live in a world of high causal density, but that does not mean we should throw up our hands in dismay and self-pity.
It is clear that the union is exploiting its monopoly on the supply of port labor, to decrease efficiency, and increase costs and union membership. For some reason, most people are less likely to attribute high costs to monopoly unions, but more than happy to do so for monopoly corporations.
