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American truck drivers could lose their jobs to robots

77 points by dankohn1 10y ago

MrFoof 10y ago
>1.8 million American truck drivers ... well-paying working-class jobs Those two items right there are exactly why they are being automated (in addition to additional efficiencies and cost reductions). If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality. What to do about the aftermath that affects actual people and families as pay is reduced or eventually eliminated over the next 10-25 years? Well, that's the new problem. Not one that the companies that employ truck drivers will be looking to solve, but the one everyone else has to cope with in some capacity -- whether directly affected by the reduced jobs, or indirectly affected by those now looking for work in their community.
- Osiris 10y ago
  Our education system needs to adjust to prepare our youth for highly technical jobs. Instead of truck drivers we'll need engineers to build the automation systems and programmers to write the complex software behind it.
  - tormeh 10y ago
    Intelligence isn't equally handed out. Especially the analytical kind required of engineers/programmers. Not everyone can do those jobs. As the market price for the truck-driver demographic declines, new sectors will be able to afford to hire them, but they largely won't become engineers.
  - aylons 10y ago
    Economically, the main advantage of automating is paying less for the same. So, if there were the same need for engineers than for truck drivers, even in aggregate, automation would be a lot less compelling. Putting it more straightforwardly:100 engineers in California can automate several hundred thousands of jobs in the whole country.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    There is no economic reason to automate things in order to replace 1.8 million drivers with 1.8 million engineers. Automation happens when you can replace 1.8 million drivers with 0.18 million engineers.
    - lkbm 10y ago
      Except the extra 1.62 million engineers can be working on other things. There's no shortage of useful things to build. It might be hard to think of things for 1.62 million people to build, but the good news is you and I don't have to think of those things ourselves right now. Those 1.62 million people will be thinking about it too.
  - douche 10y ago
    Unfortunately, highly technical jobs have a floor problem. It's sort of like the "You must be this tall to ride" signs at the amusement park, except its "You must be this smart to do this job effectively." Not everybody that can drive a truck or swing a chainsaw has the mental tools to handle the increased complexity.
- gwright 10y ago
  > If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality. I have a hard time accepting the reduction in the cost of production as "unfortunate reality". This process is a key element of economic development. Why, at this point in history, is it now 'unfortunate'? I think there are some very difficult challenges associated with the macro-trends in our global economic system but I'm pretty sure that viewing productivity increases as "unfortunate" isn't very helpful towards dealing with these challenges.
mwsherman 10y ago
This is a perfectly reasonable intuition – that there will be large net loss of jobs as trucks are automated – but we should not mistake the intuition for evidence. There is a long history of believing that massive job losses are imminent due to technological advance. The problem with mistaking this fear for a fact is that it often leads to an incorrect intervention. (I call this a WMD argument.) We’d be much better served with much greater caution about what is actually, observably, measurably true. In this case, we’d have to discover the yet-unfound correlation between technical advance and employment rate.
andersthue 10y ago
It's scary and understandable at the same time especially when you multiple the number of drivers with their salary, then you get a yearly cost of 72.000.000.000$ That's more than Uber's latest valuation.
tuna-piano 10y ago
The other question you need to ask in order to understand this future scenerio:. Shipping costs will significantly decrease, what will consumers and shareholders spend the extra money on? Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries. It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!" Imagine telling a farmer in 1850s America, when 64% of America farmed, that in 2016 only 2% of people would be farming! Imagine the distopian horror (1)! If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today. Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors, leading to the enormous improvement in production, income and standard of living since then. If 64% of people still farmed, or 2% farmed and 62% were on UBI - who would have had the time or incentive to create computers, software, advances in healthcare, etc? I'm not claiming the transition is easy for someone who's laid off - it can be an extremely tough process, but it's absolutely necessary for the improvement of humanity. (1) http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-since-1850-s.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-...
- k__ 10y ago
  > UBI > sitting around choose one
  - mertd 10y ago
    Can you explain why those are contradictory? Surely some people will opt to not have a job at all, if they didn't need to worry about maintaining a minimum quality of life and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
    - k__ 10y ago
      there are more than enough things to do that help society, which aren't done at the moment, because no one pays for them.
sandworm101 10y ago
It isn't that simple. The robots will never be a drop-in replacement for all the various tasks that a "driver" actually does. Driving, negotiating the vehicle down the road, isn't the entire job. (1) People will still be needed for inspections and maintenance, however that will be done. Much of that is now covered by drivers (the little things) and cannot be automated. (2) Insurance companies may demand that a human, a certified driver, at least ride in the truck as backup/security and to deal with awkward situations. (3) Boarder crossings will still need humans. (4) Hazmat loads will still need humans on board for safety reasons. (5) Winter driving. I have yet to see any autodrive system capable of attaching chains or deicing a clogged brake line. (6) Automation will open up new areas for drivers. By driving shipping costs down, more trucks may hit the road, requiring more people for the jobs listed above. It may be a wash. The concept that every driver can/will be replaced by an autodrive bot is naive.
- drcross 10y ago
  Each are edge cases and nothing which can't be fixed by further work. >The concept that every driver can/will be replaced by an autodrive bot is naive. The premise is that the driver aspect will be removed, the things you mentioned are not strictly what a driver does.
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    > the things you mentioned are not strictly what a driver does. They are according to the drivers I know. Long haul truckers are not like pilots. They are much more involved with their rigs. They are actually responsible for maintenance. They are the ones talking to the cops when/if they hit an inspection station.
    - NotSammyHagar 10y ago
      It's not that every single driver will be gone - just a lot of them will be. There used to be a lot of jobs at stables, horse shoe replacement, etc. Today there are a lot of jobs changing oil, mufflers, tune-ups etc, that will go away with the switch to electric cars, but one big truck can carry a lot more freight than a big wagon train, and it needs less human labor. EVs will still need work, they are designed and made by humans (at least for a while, ha ha) so they can break like anything else. But you will need fewer humans probably. I heard a story on NPR last night where an insurance company was planning for new businesses, because they expect there to be less need for them with less human drivers and a lot fewer accidents. Not next year, but in 10 years. Just like one truck can do a lot more transportation than a wagon train with 10 hourses. You have some jobs taking care of trucks, but fewer than took care of horse trains. Horses didn't travel as far, so you needed a lot more places for them to stop and feed and water. I think it will hollow out the middle of the us even more. I'm not crazy about that, I'm from that middle of the country that already has continued to hollow out even without robot cars.
blfr 10y ago
Vox writers should be more worried than drivers. Driving a car, dealing with other users on the road, making regulators happy are all difficult problems. Meanwhile, I have already seen Reddit bots which summarise submissions. How far off are from one that will rehash 2-3 articles and toss in an infographic (created elsewhere)?
- FooHentai 10y ago
  Kinda already happening, see: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-used-to-write-apocalypse-survival-guides http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-used-to-write-apocalypse-... "the practice of article spinning, in which the same human-written article is quickly reorganized and reworded to create one or more additional “new” articles. (This is often done by software that has a built-in spintax that replaces keywords in the text with synonyms.)"
awjr 10y ago
Once all the robots take over we'll probably need Universal Basic Income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
tfnw 10y ago
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/ Take your pick, or interpolate between them.
vacri 10y ago
I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, truck driving is an "old man's job". The average age of a truck driver here is 47, apparently. Automated trucks probably won't get here in time to dovetail with the natural retirement of these drivers...
beyondcompute 10y ago
Yeah, I've been thinking lately as well, why are we doing that? I mean as a society? (I recall a phrase said by someone, that we are consciously building a future nobody wants to live in.) What exactly are we getting from that? Ultra-rich, namely car companies owners and shareholders, will become even more rich. (Why are they doing it, by the way, don't they have enough super-cars, mansions, yachts already?) What am I getting from it? Basic goods will become 7% cheaper? Who needs that? I am happy with current prices. And then dozens if not hundreds of millions people worldwide will lose their jobs and even more the very means for their existence. What will be the impact on their families, communities? I may be terribly wrong but it seems like yet another round of value extraction by a small cohort of ultra-rich from general society. There are technologies that are genuinely useful, like space exploration, scientific projects, disease fighting, urban development, planetary computer network, and so on. And there are "comfort gimmicks" like refined sugar (and sugary drinks), tobacco, toasters, etc. that produce effects from which people living consciously and healthy would want to get rid of. And that are propelled only by "economic factors". Which are a paperclip maximizer.
- kbenson 10y ago
  In what way is this different than the industrial revolution? Are we, as a world, wallowing in relatively more people starving and in poverty than ever before? Why is this different?
  - beyondcompute 10y ago
    Well, I still believe that world became better than it was: https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_makes_the_case_for_optimism?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_makes_the_case_for... And, of course, it all is just a food for thought, doesn't necessarily mean we need to prohibit sales of self-driving vehicles (except for special technical applications). But still we have to understand that it's our conscious effort, not just the "natural force of Progress". As a society we should intervene and regulate things, and make that decision to steer the economic trends in ways harmonious with society's needs. As a related thought, I think, Jaron Lanier puts it nicely: https://youtu.be/XdEuII9cv-U?t=11m37s https://youtu.be/XdEuII9cv-U?t=11m37s
jondubois 10y ago
The only people who really benefit from innovation are entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders. The majority of the population are actually worse off because of innovation (at least this is the case right now - The value is just not trickling down). The worst part of this will come when even highly educated people start losing their jobs to machines... We will have a situation where entrepreneurs, investors and company shareholders will earn massive incomes while many of the world's smartest people (who fell through the cracks of the system) will struggle to make ends meet - I think many engineers already feel that this starting to happen now. Money used to go mostly to employees, but as employees become less valuable in the workplace, it will go mostly to shareholders (owners of capital). This is why tax on income is making increasingly less sense - We need a tax on capital holdings instead. When you consider the massive role that luck plays in becoming a successful entrepreneur, it does bring into question the fairness of the entire system. The balance is shifting; we are moving from an economic system which not so long ago seemed 'mostly fair' to one which is becoming 'mostly unfair'. Maybe something like Universal Basic Income would be a good first step. What we have now is no longer capitalism, it's increasingly an Oligopoly.
- mavhc 10y ago
  The majority of the population now don't starve when there's bad weather, have indoor plumbing, healthcare, don't die from playing tennis without socks. What do we need money for now, and why? Houses mostly, because a) hand built, and b) scarcity.
  - mmcconnell1618 10y ago
    In case anyone else was wondering about the tennis without socks death: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/coolidge.asp http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/coolidge.asp
- stcredzero 10y ago
  That's only true in the short term. Historically, innovation has always killed jobs in the short term but created them in the long term.
- 10y ago
ufmace 10y ago
I'm skeptical about the timelines of these reports. Certainly we'll never see all 1.8 million drivers lose their jobs overnight. These guys are predicting auto-truck apocalypse in 5-10 years, and we still don't have a single commercial system on the road that's capable of even lightening the load on a driver, much less replacing him. I think truck automation will go in 2 ways at the same time, and we can watch the progress of each: Systems to ease the strain on independent drivers. Ones that can cruise on the highway without supervision indefinitely, but need help with city streets, parking, maintenance, loading and unloading, keeping manifests, dealing with whatever company is loading and unloading the cargo, etc. They may need somewhat fewer of this class of driver, since the trucks will be able to run more continuously and there will be less need for second drivers and probably fewer trucks. Motels and truck stops will hurt some when the truckers can sleep while the truck drives instead of stopping. I think we're at least a decade away from this existing at all, much less being common. Full automation for tightly integrated logistics chains. Maybe the Wal-Marts, Amazons, Fedexes, and other huge companies that own the entire logistics chain will be able to figure out how to use fully automated trucks, that can drive from one company facility to another, complete with parking and maneuvering, driving local streets, and letting other company systems handle the logistics of loading and unloading and keeping track of what items are where. I bet at least one of them will start experimenting with something like this in the next 5-10 years, but probably at least 20 years before it works well enough for them to cut down on the number of drivers they employ. There will be job losses, but it will be slow and gradual. There should hopefully be plenty of time for the economy to adapt, and hopefully either create new jobs for all of these people to do, or move towards something like UBI. I think we'll have to have a massive cultural shift before anything like UBI would be considered or even possibly make sense.
- galdosdi 10y ago
  I dunno. Even if "all" the first generation can do is freeway driving (and let's say, not even urban freeway, just "easy" rural portions of freeway) that seems like it still would make the vast majority of long-haul trucking jobs vanish -- just by definition of "long-haul." If you ship something from New York to Chicago by truck and it takes 14 hours, maybe the first and last hour or so are getting in an out of the source/destination cities. That leaves 12 out of 14 hours where the truck can drive unattended, eliminating the need for about 12/14 of the truckers (or their work hours) that drive that route. It depends on what proportion of truck drivers today mostly do long-haul as opposed to short haul. I have no idea.
andrewstuart 10y ago
Civil war against robots is what will happen: http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2016/03/get-ready-for-our-first-civil-war.html http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2016/03/get-ready-for-our...
sevenless 10y ago
I bet developers will start to lose jobs to AI. Maybe before truck drivers do. The reaction here on HN will be something to behold.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  It's already happened. Those AIs are called compilers. Compilers get more powerful every year. If you took them away, there aren't enough people on the planet to do the same job with assemblers.
  - NotSammyHagar 10y ago
    Brilliant comment! I guess devs are lucky to have enough jobs left to work.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      What happens is pretty straightforward - the more powerful the AI devtools get, the more is demanded of them. I look at programs I wrote 20, 30 years ago, and am bemused by how trivial they look today. I'm calling a compiler an AI tool, because what is it other than you type in what you want the computer to do, and the compiler figures out how to do it?
- NotSammyHagar 10y ago
  There's no doubt that some programmer's jobs will start to disappear. Think about how many web devs/ html jockeys are no longer needed because word press or 100 other web publishing platforms are easy enough for non pgmrs to use. How long will a million programmers write custom software instead of just packaging apps? Today, places like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon have a lot of programmers writing custom apps. And lots of other companies - eventually I think we'll need fewer of them. Maybe as a software engineer, I could be retrained to do genetic engineering or dna analysis. But it's a lot easier for me than the guy making hamburgers at McDonalds. I don't want anyone to lose their job, but this change of reduced labor based work is inevitable. Economic forces are hard to overcome. Just like coal has been wiped out by cheap natural gas - it wasn't a conspiracy.
pmarreck 10y ago
What then? Progress, perhaps. ::eyeroll:: Disclaimer: In 1997 I was cut off by a semi (in the middle of trying to pass him), who did NOT signal, on a 2 lane road (I-5 in California, speed limit was 85 or so), and ended up entering the ditch and rolling over 8 times and shattered my hand (it's fine now, but it took a while). The driver never stopped. I was lucky to walk away from that one. Sorry, truckers, but your job can eat a bag of dicks. Lest we forget, the only reason trucking is so huge is because train cargo wasn't maintained (conspiracists say the oil industry lobbied for trucking).
- merpnderp 10y ago
  Trucking is so big because it is far more efficient than trains. Lol trying to just in time your inventory using trains.
  - gwright 10y ago
    This comment, together with its parent, is a nice example of a false-choice. They both are built upon an assumption that there is some sort of total ordering between cargo transportation systems. Trains are better. No trucks are better. No trains are better. In reality trains and trucks are part of an incredibly complex cargo transportation system in which the most appropriate transportation mode is dependent on the nature of the cargo, the geography of the source and destination, the infrastructure available, the current price of fuel, weather conditions, capacity constraints and on and on and on. There is no total ordering of efficiency of transportation modes.
- PedroBatista 10y ago
  And they are cut off and break tested by 4 wheelers all the time. Lets crush all cars and make every person ride the bus? Btw, cargo trains are very cute for big loads between huge industrial hubs. Which means according to your theory that most people and their job in every state can go fuck themselves. Also I suspect you'll be fine with your Amazon Prime taking 1-2 weeks to reach your door.
galacticpony 10y ago
Simple solution: Ban self-driving trucks. I'm surprised that in the land of (apparently ) limitless legal liabilities, so many people are bullish on self-driving cars, let alone self-driving trucks. You should be highly concerned that the push towards this by big players is going to lead to laws where ultimately nobody will have to take up personal responsibility for accidents anymore.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Grandparents killed by truck driver on speed. Robot drivers can't get her soon enough.
  - convolvatron 10y ago
    its surprising this isn't mentioned more often. truck drivers do meth. its the only way for them to stay focussed and awake driving across country. so, from both sides, we have drivers with long term substance abuse problems controlling really heavy metal whacked out of their skulls. and we have an economy which can only function by effectively ruining people's lives by turning them into machines. if we were a remotely moral society we would be horrified
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      I THINK that truck driver on speed use is down since log book tampering has gotten harder over the years, but I am sure it is not perfect. If you can only work 11 hours a day and need a day off every 3 days of work, less incentive to speed.
- planteen 10y ago
  There need to be more safety systems on trucks driven by people today. I was on I-80 in western Nebraska last weekend. The road was closed for hours after a distracted semi driver slammed into cars slowing down in a construction zone. 6 people were killed. I get alerts for I-70 in Colorado. The number of semis that jack knife in winter is terrifying.
FooHentai 10y ago
What I don't get is, if we're so close to this becoming a reality, why isn't the lower hanging fruit of train/locomotive automation already here? That seems to be an order of magnitude simpler issue to solve, and yet we don't seem to be there yet. Granted, forms of automation have penetrated that industry - deadmans switches, automated signalling and such. But there's still a human at the helm of every freight loco. Smaller scale urban light rail deployments seem to have got close to full automation, presumably due to being able to embed all the necessary elements into the end-to-end installation of the system (signalling, stock, cameras/sensors etc). How can the kind of full automation that would put truck drivers out of work, arrive before the kind that would put train drivers out of work?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Trains may be easier to automate, but 100 train cars already only have 1 driver. There is a lot less cost that can be removed there than for trucking. Even just deskilling trucking offers the opportunity for bigger cost savings.
- 4ad 10y ago
  Because in the grand scheme of things, train drivers cost nothing. A single train driver moves 100x more stuff than a truck driver.
- Tsagadai 10y ago
  It is, it just isn't widely distributed. BHP and Rio Tinto operate automated trains in large areas of Australia.
- ucho 10y ago
  Well, if we talk about trains ... the future is already here. Humans where deemed unworthy to drive high speed trains so ETCS[1] takes over almost everything. The drivers are in cabin for the same reasons we still have pilots in airplanes - just in case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Train_Control_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Train_Control_System
xf00ba7 10y ago
At some point everyone gets phased out. The question we should be asking, is how do we prepare to transition people from one job to the next more quickly. Coal miners are a perfect example. They're largely stuck. They haven't the money to send their kids to school to do something else, nor do they have the $$ to do it themselves (and likely not the time either). We need to rethink (as a planet), how we deal with churn.
femto 10y ago
Is the answer an "Uber for robots"? Rather than an organisation owning all the robots, individuals could own a robot and rent it out though an online marketplace. It would be a continuation of the "owner/driver" model, without the need to actually be a driver. Maybe the problem is that if it's a lucrative opportunity the group running the marketplace will want to keep all the profits for themselves, by owning the robots and locking out small players?
- nxzero 10y ago
  At scale, the value truckers provide is being a driver, not offer there trucks. Yes, there will be companies that provide logistics as a service, but it's hard to imagine a business based on a single robot.
TrevorJ 10y ago
Don't see it happening anytime soon. Self driving cars directly create convenience for the end user, and the public may be willing to accept a few crashes here and there in exchange for that convenience. The first time an unmanned Fedex truck kills a family of 6 in a minivan people will decided they would rather pay a few cents more to have trucks driven by humans.
palakz 10y ago
Robots might destroy jobs, but also create new jobs for us. It's like innovative products - which might make some products obsolete but also makes space for more innovation and other products that would've not existed otherwise. :)
paulryanrogers 10y ago
Entropy and diminishing returns from readily accessible energy sources will kick in at some point. My guess is it'll happen before the robots are more adaptable to changing road conditions than humans.

77 points by dankohn1 10y ago

>1.8 million American truck drivers ... well-paying working-class jobs Those two items right there are exactly why they are being automated (in addition to additional efficiencies and cost reductions). If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality. What to do about the aftermath that affects actual people and families as pay is reduced or eventually eliminated over the next 10-25 years? Well, that's the new problem. Not one that the companies that employ truck drivers will be looking to solve, but the one everyone else has to cope with in some capacity -- whether directly affected by the reduced jobs, or indirectly affected by those now looking for work in their community.

Osiris 10y ago
Our education system needs to adjust to prepare our youth for highly technical jobs. Instead of truck drivers we'll need engineers to build the automation systems and programmers to write the complex software behind it.
- tormeh 10y ago
  Intelligence isn't equally handed out. Especially the analytical kind required of engineers/programmers. Not everyone can do those jobs. As the market price for the truck-driver demographic declines, new sectors will be able to afford to hire them, but they largely won't become engineers.
- aylons 10y ago
  Economically, the main advantage of automating is paying less for the same. So, if there were the same need for engineers than for truck drivers, even in aggregate, automation would be a lot less compelling. Putting it more straightforwardly:100 engineers in California can automate several hundred thousands of jobs in the whole country.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  There is no economic reason to automate things in order to replace 1.8 million drivers with 1.8 million engineers. Automation happens when you can replace 1.8 million drivers with 0.18 million engineers.
  - lkbm 10y ago
    Except the extra 1.62 million engineers can be working on other things. There's no shortage of useful things to build. It might be hard to think of things for 1.62 million people to build, but the good news is you and I don't have to think of those things ourselves right now. Those 1.62 million people will be thinking about it too.
- douche 10y ago
  Unfortunately, highly technical jobs have a floor problem. It's sort of like the "You must be this tall to ride" signs at the amusement park, except its "You must be this smart to do this job effectively." Not everybody that can drive a truck or swing a chainsaw has the mental tools to handle the increased complexity.
gwright 10y ago
> If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality. I have a hard time accepting the reduction in the cost of production as "unfortunate reality". This process is a key element of economic development. Why, at this point in history, is it now 'unfortunate'? I think there are some very difficult challenges associated with the macro-trends in our global economic system but I'm pretty sure that viewing productivity increases as "unfortunate" isn't very helpful towards dealing with these challenges.

mwsherman 10y ago

This is a perfectly reasonable intuition – that there will be large net loss of jobs as trucks are automated – but we should not mistake the intuition for evidence. There is a long history of believing that massive job losses are imminent due to technological advance. The problem with mistaking this fear for a fact is that it often leads to an incorrect intervention. (I call this a WMD argument.) We’d be much better served with much greater caution about what is actually, observably, measurably true. In this case, we’d have to discover the yet-unfound correlation between technical advance and employment rate.

andersthue 10y ago

It's scary and understandable at the same time especially when you multiple the number of drivers with their salary, then you get a yearly cost of 72.000.000.000$ That's more than Uber's latest valuation.

tuna-piano 10y ago

The other question you need to ask in order to understand this future scenerio:. Shipping costs will significantly decrease, what will consumers and shareholders spend the extra money on? Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries. It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!" Imagine telling a farmer in 1850s America, when 64% of America farmed, that in 2016 only 2% of people would be farming! Imagine the distopian horror (1)! If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today. Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors, leading to the enormous improvement in production, income and standard of living since then. If 64% of people still farmed, or 2% farmed and 62% were on UBI - who would have had the time or incentive to create computers, software, advances in healthcare, etc? I'm not claiming the transition is easy for someone who's laid off - it can be an extremely tough process, but it's absolutely necessary for the improvement of humanity. (1) http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-since-1850-s.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-...

k__ 10y ago
> UBI > sitting around choose one
- mertd 10y ago
  Can you explain why those are contradictory? Surely some people will opt to not have a job at all, if they didn't need to worry about maintaining a minimum quality of life and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
  - k__ 10y ago
    there are more than enough things to do that help society, which aren't done at the moment, because no one pays for them.

sandworm101 10y ago

It isn't that simple. The robots will never be a drop-in replacement for all the various tasks that a "driver" actually does. Driving, negotiating the vehicle down the road, isn't the entire job. (1) People will still be needed for inspections and maintenance, however that will be done. Much of that is now covered by drivers (the little things) and cannot be automated. (2) Insurance companies may demand that a human, a certified driver, at least ride in the truck as backup/security and to deal with awkward situations. (3) Boarder crossings will still need humans. (4) Hazmat loads will still need humans on board for safety reasons. (5) Winter driving. I have yet to see any autodrive system capable of attaching chains or deicing a clogged brake line. (6) Automation will open up new areas for drivers. By driving shipping costs down, more trucks may hit the road, requiring more people for the jobs listed above. It may be a wash. The concept that every driver can/will be replaced by an autodrive bot is naive.

drcross 10y ago
Each are edge cases and nothing which can't be fixed by further work. >The concept that every driver can/will be replaced by an autodrive bot is naive. The premise is that the driver aspect will be removed, the things you mentioned are not strictly what a driver does.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  > the things you mentioned are not strictly what a driver does. They are according to the drivers I know. Long haul truckers are not like pilots. They are much more involved with their rigs. They are actually responsible for maintenance. They are the ones talking to the cops when/if they hit an inspection station.
  - NotSammyHagar 10y ago
    It's not that every single driver will be gone - just a lot of them will be. There used to be a lot of jobs at stables, horse shoe replacement, etc. Today there are a lot of jobs changing oil, mufflers, tune-ups etc, that will go away with the switch to electric cars, but one big truck can carry a lot more freight than a big wagon train, and it needs less human labor. EVs will still need work, they are designed and made by humans (at least for a while, ha ha) so they can break like anything else. But you will need fewer humans probably. I heard a story on NPR last night where an insurance company was planning for new businesses, because they expect there to be less need for them with less human drivers and a lot fewer accidents. Not next year, but in 10 years. Just like one truck can do a lot more transportation than a wagon train with 10 hourses. You have some jobs taking care of trucks, but fewer than took care of horse trains. Horses didn't travel as far, so you needed a lot more places for them to stop and feed and water. I think it will hollow out the middle of the us even more. I'm not crazy about that, I'm from that middle of the country that already has continued to hollow out even without robot cars.

blfr 10y ago

Vox writers should be more worried than drivers. Driving a car, dealing with other users on the road, making regulators happy are all difficult problems. Meanwhile, I have already seen Reddit bots which summarise submissions. How far off are from one that will rehash 2-3 articles and toss in an infographic (created elsewhere)?

FooHentai 10y ago
Kinda already happening, see: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-used-to-write-apocalypse-survival-guides http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-used-to-write-apocalypse-... "the practice of article spinning, in which the same human-written article is quickly reorganized and reworded to create one or more additional “new” articles. (This is often done by software that has a built-in spintax that replaces keywords in the text with synonyms.)"

awjr 10y ago

Once all the robots take over we'll probably need Universal Basic Income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

tfnw 10y ago

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/ Take your pick, or interpolate between them.

vacri 10y ago

I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, truck driving is an "old man's job". The average age of a truck driver here is 47, apparently. Automated trucks probably won't get here in time to dovetail with the natural retirement of these drivers...

beyondcompute 10y ago

Yeah, I've been thinking lately as well, why are we doing that? I mean as a society? (I recall a phrase said by someone, that we are consciously building a future nobody wants to live in.) What exactly are we getting from that? Ultra-rich, namely car companies owners and shareholders, will become even more rich. (Why are they doing it, by the way, don't they have enough super-cars, mansions, yachts already?) What am I getting from it? Basic goods will become 7% cheaper? Who needs that? I am happy with current prices. And then dozens if not hundreds of millions people worldwide will lose their jobs and even more the very means for their existence. What will be the impact on their families, communities? I may be terribly wrong but it seems like yet another round of value extraction by a small cohort of ultra-rich from general society. There are technologies that are genuinely useful, like space exploration, scientific projects, disease fighting, urban development, planetary computer network, and so on. And there are "comfort gimmicks" like refined sugar (and sugary drinks), tobacco, toasters, etc. that produce effects from which people living consciously and healthy would want to get rid of. And that are propelled only by "economic factors". Which are a paperclip maximizer.

kbenson 10y ago
In what way is this different than the industrial revolution? Are we, as a world, wallowing in relatively more people starving and in poverty than ever before? Why is this different?
- beyondcompute 10y ago
  Well, I still believe that world became better than it was: https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_makes_the_case_for_optimism?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_makes_the_case_for... And, of course, it all is just a food for thought, doesn't necessarily mean we need to prohibit sales of self-driving vehicles (except for special technical applications). But still we have to understand that it's our conscious effort, not just the "natural force of Progress". As a society we should intervene and regulate things, and make that decision to steer the economic trends in ways harmonious with society's needs. As a related thought, I think, Jaron Lanier puts it nicely: https://youtu.be/XdEuII9cv-U?t=11m37s https://youtu.be/XdEuII9cv-U?t=11m37s

jondubois 10y ago

The only people who really benefit from innovation are entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders. The majority of the population are actually worse off because of innovation (at least this is the case right now - The value is just not trickling down). The worst part of this will come when even highly educated people start losing their jobs to machines... We will have a situation where entrepreneurs, investors and company shareholders will earn massive incomes while many of the world's smartest people (who fell through the cracks of the system) will struggle to make ends meet - I think many engineers already feel that this starting to happen now. Money used to go mostly to employees, but as employees become less valuable in the workplace, it will go mostly to shareholders (owners of capital). This is why tax on income is making increasingly less sense - We need a tax on capital holdings instead. When you consider the massive role that luck plays in becoming a successful entrepreneur, it does bring into question the fairness of the entire system. The balance is shifting; we are moving from an economic system which not so long ago seemed 'mostly fair' to one which is becoming 'mostly unfair'. Maybe something like Universal Basic Income would be a good first step. What we have now is no longer capitalism, it's increasingly an Oligopoly.

mavhc 10y ago
The majority of the population now don't starve when there's bad weather, have indoor plumbing, healthcare, don't die from playing tennis without socks. What do we need money for now, and why? Houses mostly, because a) hand built, and b) scarcity.
- mmcconnell1618 10y ago
  In case anyone else was wondering about the tennis without socks death: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/coolidge.asp http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/coolidge.asp
stcredzero 10y ago
That's only true in the short term. Historically, innovation has always killed jobs in the short term but created them in the long term.
10y ago

ufmace 10y ago

I'm skeptical about the timelines of these reports. Certainly we'll never see all 1.8 million drivers lose their jobs overnight. These guys are predicting auto-truck apocalypse in 5-10 years, and we still don't have a single commercial system on the road that's capable of even lightening the load on a driver, much less replacing him. I think truck automation will go in 2 ways at the same time, and we can watch the progress of each: Systems to ease the strain on independent drivers. Ones that can cruise on the highway without supervision indefinitely, but need help with city streets, parking, maintenance, loading and unloading, keeping manifests, dealing with whatever company is loading and unloading the cargo, etc. They may need somewhat fewer of this class of driver, since the trucks will be able to run more continuously and there will be less need for second drivers and probably fewer trucks. Motels and truck stops will hurt some when the truckers can sleep while the truck drives instead of stopping. I think we're at least a decade away from this existing at all, much less being common. Full automation for tightly integrated logistics chains. Maybe the Wal-Marts, Amazons, Fedexes, and other huge companies that own the entire logistics chain will be able to figure out how to use fully automated trucks, that can drive from one company facility to another, complete with parking and maneuvering, driving local streets, and letting other company systems handle the logistics of loading and unloading and keeping track of what items are where. I bet at least one of them will start experimenting with something like this in the next 5-10 years, but probably at least 20 years before it works well enough for them to cut down on the number of drivers they employ. There will be job losses, but it will be slow and gradual. There should hopefully be plenty of time for the economy to adapt, and hopefully either create new jobs for all of these people to do, or move towards something like UBI. I think we'll have to have a massive cultural shift before anything like UBI would be considered or even possibly make sense.

galdosdi 10y ago
I dunno. Even if "all" the first generation can do is freeway driving (and let's say, not even urban freeway, just "easy" rural portions of freeway) that seems like it still would make the vast majority of long-haul trucking jobs vanish -- just by definition of "long-haul." If you ship something from New York to Chicago by truck and it takes 14 hours, maybe the first and last hour or so are getting in an out of the source/destination cities. That leaves 12 out of 14 hours where the truck can drive unattended, eliminating the need for about 12/14 of the truckers (or their work hours) that drive that route. It depends on what proportion of truck drivers today mostly do long-haul as opposed to short haul. I have no idea.

andrewstuart 10y ago

Civil war against robots is what will happen: http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2016/03/get-ready-for-our-first-civil-war.html http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2016/03/get-ready-for-our...

sevenless 10y ago

I bet developers will start to lose jobs to AI. Maybe before truck drivers do. The reaction here on HN will be something to behold.

WalterBright 10y ago
It's already happened. Those AIs are called compilers. Compilers get more powerful every year. If you took them away, there aren't enough people on the planet to do the same job with assemblers.
- NotSammyHagar 10y ago
  Brilliant comment! I guess devs are lucky to have enough jobs left to work.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    What happens is pretty straightforward - the more powerful the AI devtools get, the more is demanded of them. I look at programs I wrote 20, 30 years ago, and am bemused by how trivial they look today. I'm calling a compiler an AI tool, because what is it other than you type in what you want the computer to do, and the compiler figures out how to do it?
NotSammyHagar 10y ago
There's no doubt that some programmer's jobs will start to disappear. Think about how many web devs/ html jockeys are no longer needed because word press or 100 other web publishing platforms are easy enough for non pgmrs to use. How long will a million programmers write custom software instead of just packaging apps? Today, places like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon have a lot of programmers writing custom apps. And lots of other companies - eventually I think we'll need fewer of them. Maybe as a software engineer, I could be retrained to do genetic engineering or dna analysis. But it's a lot easier for me than the guy making hamburgers at McDonalds. I don't want anyone to lose their job, but this change of reduced labor based work is inevitable. Economic forces are hard to overcome. Just like coal has been wiped out by cheap natural gas - it wasn't a conspiracy.

pmarreck 10y ago

What then? Progress, perhaps. ::eyeroll:: Disclaimer: In 1997 I was cut off by a semi (in the middle of trying to pass him), who did NOT signal, on a 2 lane road (I-5 in California, speed limit was 85 or so), and ended up entering the ditch and rolling over 8 times and shattered my hand (it's fine now, but it took a while). The driver never stopped. I was lucky to walk away from that one. Sorry, truckers, but your job can eat a bag of dicks. Lest we forget, the only reason trucking is so huge is because train cargo wasn't maintained (conspiracists say the oil industry lobbied for trucking).

merpnderp 10y ago
Trucking is so big because it is far more efficient than trains. Lol trying to just in time your inventory using trains.
- gwright 10y ago
  This comment, together with its parent, is a nice example of a false-choice. They both are built upon an assumption that there is some sort of total ordering between cargo transportation systems. Trains are better. No trucks are better. No trains are better. In reality trains and trucks are part of an incredibly complex cargo transportation system in which the most appropriate transportation mode is dependent on the nature of the cargo, the geography of the source and destination, the infrastructure available, the current price of fuel, weather conditions, capacity constraints and on and on and on. There is no total ordering of efficiency of transportation modes.
PedroBatista 10y ago
And they are cut off and break tested by 4 wheelers all the time. Lets crush all cars and make every person ride the bus? Btw, cargo trains are very cute for big loads between huge industrial hubs. Which means according to your theory that most people and their job in every state can go fuck themselves. Also I suspect you'll be fine with your Amazon Prime taking 1-2 weeks to reach your door.

galacticpony 10y ago

Simple solution: Ban self-driving trucks. I'm surprised that in the land of (apparently ) limitless legal liabilities, so many people are bullish on self-driving cars, let alone self-driving trucks. You should be highly concerned that the push towards this by big players is going to lead to laws where ultimately nobody will have to take up personal responsibility for accidents anymore.

brianwawok 10y ago
Grandparents killed by truck driver on speed. Robot drivers can't get her soon enough.
- convolvatron 10y ago
  its surprising this isn't mentioned more often. truck drivers do meth. its the only way for them to stay focussed and awake driving across country. so, from both sides, we have drivers with long term substance abuse problems controlling really heavy metal whacked out of their skulls. and we have an economy which can only function by effectively ruining people's lives by turning them into machines. if we were a remotely moral society we would be horrified
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    I THINK that truck driver on speed use is down since log book tampering has gotten harder over the years, but I am sure it is not perfect. If you can only work 11 hours a day and need a day off every 3 days of work, less incentive to speed.
planteen 10y ago
There need to be more safety systems on trucks driven by people today. I was on I-80 in western Nebraska last weekend. The road was closed for hours after a distracted semi driver slammed into cars slowing down in a construction zone. 6 people were killed. I get alerts for I-70 in Colorado. The number of semis that jack knife in winter is terrifying.

FooHentai 10y ago

What I don't get is, if we're so close to this becoming a reality, why isn't the lower hanging fruit of train/locomotive automation already here? That seems to be an order of magnitude simpler issue to solve, and yet we don't seem to be there yet. Granted, forms of automation have penetrated that industry - deadmans switches, automated signalling and such. But there's still a human at the helm of every freight loco. Smaller scale urban light rail deployments seem to have got close to full automation, presumably due to being able to embed all the necessary elements into the end-to-end installation of the system (signalling, stock, cameras/sensors etc). How can the kind of full automation that would put truck drivers out of work, arrive before the kind that would put train drivers out of work?

maxerickson 10y ago
Trains may be easier to automate, but 100 train cars already only have 1 driver. There is a lot less cost that can be removed there than for trucking. Even just deskilling trucking offers the opportunity for bigger cost savings.
4ad 10y ago
Because in the grand scheme of things, train drivers cost nothing. A single train driver moves 100x more stuff than a truck driver.
Tsagadai 10y ago
It is, it just isn't widely distributed. BHP and Rio Tinto operate automated trains in large areas of Australia.
ucho 10y ago
Well, if we talk about trains ... the future is already here. Humans where deemed unworthy to drive high speed trains so ETCS[1] takes over almost everything. The drivers are in cabin for the same reasons we still have pilots in airplanes - just in case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Train_Control_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Train_Control_System

xf00ba7 10y ago

At some point everyone gets phased out. The question we should be asking, is how do we prepare to transition people from one job to the next more quickly. Coal miners are a perfect example. They're largely stuck. They haven't the money to send their kids to school to do something else, nor do they have the $$ to do it themselves (and likely not the time either). We need to rethink (as a planet), how we deal with churn.

femto 10y ago

Is the answer an "Uber for robots"? Rather than an organisation owning all the robots, individuals could own a robot and rent it out though an online marketplace. It would be a continuation of the "owner/driver" model, without the need to actually be a driver. Maybe the problem is that if it's a lucrative opportunity the group running the marketplace will want to keep all the profits for themselves, by owning the robots and locking out small players?

nxzero 10y ago
At scale, the value truckers provide is being a driver, not offer there trucks. Yes, there will be companies that provide logistics as a service, but it's hard to imagine a business based on a single robot.

TrevorJ 10y ago

Don't see it happening anytime soon. Self driving cars directly create convenience for the end user, and the public may be willing to accept a few crashes here and there in exchange for that convenience. The first time an unmanned Fedex truck kills a family of 6 in a minivan people will decided they would rather pay a few cents more to have trucks driven by humans.

palakz 10y ago

Robots might destroy jobs, but also create new jobs for us. It's like innovative products - which might make some products obsolete but also makes space for more innovation and other products that would've not existed otherwise. :)

paulryanrogers 10y ago

Entropy and diminishing returns from readily accessible energy sources will kick in at some point. My guess is it'll happen before the robots are more adaptable to changing road conditions than humans.