11 ms·

Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

89 points by blondie9x 10y ago

jobu 10y ago
If you haven't seen the short (15min) documentary "Humans Need Not Apply", then I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU A hundred years ago 'horseless carriages' replaced a lot of horses, and in the next couple decades we're going to see 'driverless trucks' are going to replace a lot of humans.
afarrell 10y ago
The Box[1], a book about the history behind the shipping container which eliminated the jobs of bunches of longshorement, seems very instructive. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/B00I38SQOI/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econ...
astazangasta 10y ago
Recently I am interested in the end of the Bretton Woods system. For the past few years, I've been interested in this graph: http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/family_income_median_income_growth_productivity1.png http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/family_income_med... This is the main story. At a time, perhaps because of fixed exchange rates curbing the flow of speculative capital, perhaps not, productivity (viz., increasing automation) gains meant median wage growth - ordinary people participated in GDP growth. Now this is no longer true, and we get pieces lamenting the death of blue collar jobs through automation. We'll blame robots, but perhaps we should be looking at the fundamentals of our economy - how we've set the free movement of capital above all else, to our detriment.
- harryh 10y ago
  Pay/productivity gap graphs are nonsense http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=30585 http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=30585
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    I disagree with this conclusion, and I tend to disfavor the PCE. The argument is that employers are spending more on benefits, therefore pay has not actually fallen. However, the largest component of the difference between the PCE and CPI is based on employer-provided healthcare; in the US, healthcare spending has been growing at faster than inflation for decades, and medical costs are one of the main avenues of wealth transfer (for example, $300 billion a year, 2% of GDP, goes in patent royalties to owners of pharmaceutical companies). It is a bit crap to suggest that because we are paying people more so they can pay their doctors more, for worse outcomes than anyone in the rest of the developed world, they are somehow turning out better. In any case, the fact that real wages have remained essentially flat requires us to believe that workers are fine with not having made any gains in disposable income in exchange for better benefits, which seems unlikely. Also, the fact that labor peaked in 1973, when the graph begins to diverge, should reinforce, not contradict, this argument.
    - harryh 10y ago
      The conclusion isn't that everything is hunky dory. What he does conclude is that labor's share of income hasn't much changed. What has changed is the distribution of income between laborers. As has been noted in about a million places, gains have increasingly been going to those at the top. Your chart implies some sort of breakdown between productivity and income but does not demonstrate that productivity gains have been equally distributed. In fact, there are a lot of reasons to think that most productivity gains are going towards the top end of the labor pool as well. Due to the lever of technology, we see increasingly small (in terms of # of employees) firms serve increasingly large markets.
      - astazangasta 10y ago
        Median income remaining flat is entirely consistent with productivity being absorbed by the high end.
        harryh 10y ago
mishchea 10y ago
I'm surprised at how _few_ posts/articles like this there have been, so far: self-driving cars are taking off and are a big looming imminent threat to Uber/taxi/truck drivers. Every time I take an Uber now, I wonder if the driver realizes that his job will most likely be automated away in a couple of years.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  There's way more posts/articles than warranted. Human drivers are going nowhere anytime soon. There's a lot of marketing about self-driving cars but nowhere enough actual technology to back it.
- nsgi 10y ago
  More like a couple of decades.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    I disagree. At most one decade, but I would bet it happens much sooner. As some have mentioned... the economic incentives are too high.
intrasight 10y ago
Truck drivers need to work with their union(s) to lobby for a law that says that only union members can own an autonomous driving agent. Problem solved - we have self-driving trucks but trucking companies must "hire" an agent via a union member. To become a union member, you'll still have to a rigorous apprenticeship and training program - and of course pay your union dues.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Sounds like featherbedding. Putting pointless people in the middle just to skim money from the process. Who benefits? Nobody but them. Reminds me of how the railroads had to pay into the pension fund for Firemen, long after steam engines were dead and gone. Just because.
  - mason55 10y ago
    The same way that the unions in NYC have forced the MTA to keep the hugely expensive, 100 year old backup control & signaling systems on the fully-automated lines even though it's 100% not necessary.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    Is no more fetherbedding than any other regulated profession (doctors, layers) who get to themselves decide who is a member in good standing.
    - intrasight 10y ago
      And to carry the analogy further, AI agents are now better than radiologists at analyzing images. But the AI agent works for/under the direction of the radiologist.
    - aianus 10y ago
      Why is that a model to aspire to? It makes me angry when I have to pay a doctor $100 for something stupid and trivial like a prescription for a vaccine.
    - 10y ago
GarrisonPrime 10y ago
>“If you can get rid of the drivers, those people are out of jobs, but the cost of moving all those goods goes down significantly,” Kaplan said. This is a major point of automation. Yes, many jobs will be lost. But the prices of many goods will decrease. The problem is that the current transition threatens to be so rapid as to seriously disrupt society. Perhaps new jobs will eventually be created to make up for those lost to automation (or perhaps not), but they won't be created fast enough to avoid the pain of all the rapid job losses that are coming. Thankfully, society seems to be coming around to the idea that resistance is futile, and we need to address this problem before it becomes too overwhelming. Personally, I feel one of the most realistic options would be to reduce the standard work week to 4 days and/or 30 hours. People need to be kept busy, or society overall tends to start to crumble around the edges. This would mean people will need to shift their perspective on income, as it will likely be reduced. But this shouldn't be too bad, since all the automation will likely lead to reduced prices all around. Reducing your income by 25% may sound bad, but if practically everything becomes ~20-30% cheaper then you should have essentially the same standard of living, but with fewer working hours. Isn't that what we more or less would all like? No matter what we wind up doing however, chances are there will be some period of difficult transition. All we can hope to do is make it as short and relatively painless as possible.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  I agree with most everything you've said, the one point that I would contest is: > Yes, many jobs will be lost. But the prices of many goods will decrease. If you're talking about what I first thought of, which is things like groceries, housewares, the "every day things" that we all buy and consume without really thinking, I'm not sure that A: The prices on these items could go much lower than they already are and remain profitable, or B: That the producers of said goods (majority MASSIVE corporations with impressive names and product rosters, and the most likely early adopters of this technology) would reduce the prices in accordance with the reduction in cost. The trend now among these companies seems to be to squeeze every last cent out of every last consumer, and if you're proposing to your given board of directors to buy all these new trucks (or change contracts to a company that has) why would you then cut the prices? I would hope there would be market pressure to do so from at least one good actor, but I don't know how certain that is at all.
Shivetya 10y ago
the turnover in that career is pretty damn high. having met many truckers, especially newly set on the road from school and such, like 9 out of 10 don't stick with it. Wait for the shit storm when they attempt to fully automate ports
SIGALARM 10y ago
sounds like the self-driving trucks would need to be protected by security teams, otherwise they may be susceptible to out of work pirates.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  This really needs more attention/consideration. Self-driving anything seems like a ripe target, as the perceived "harm" is to a corporation not a human driver/operator. That is, theives will not have to hurt anyone to get the goods.
  - topkai22 10y ago
    This seems like it has already been "solved" by trains- moving targets are hard, cargo is anonymous, stationary targets are in semi-secured railyards, and shrinkage is part of the cost of doing business. Who wants to hijack a truck and find its full of breakfast cereal?
    - monkmartinez 10y ago
      I would guess that a train is much harder to stop than a truck. Further, one can drive next to a truck and have people jump on the truck to do some "snooping." The "driver" is not going to freak out/swerve as the drone truck just keeps going towards its destination at a perfectly efficient speed, perfectly centered in the lane.
      - gsnedders 10y ago
        In plenty of places, you can stop a train simply by cutting the signal wire (because it will fail-safe).
- tlb 10y ago
  You can estimate the impact. Take the fraction of truck drivers that will become pirates Multiply by the number of trucks that an average pirate can hijack, deliver the merchandise to a reseller of stolen goods, get paid, and launder the money before getting caught. Divide by how many shipments a truck driver currently makes per year. And that's an estimate of the fraction of merchandise that will be pirated. I suspect the answer is no more than 1%, in which case it is absorbable along with other kinds of lossage.
pcrh 10y ago
We don't have self-driving trains yet, except in very tightly controlled environments. So I think it's going to take more than a few test runs to show that self-driving trucks will displace drivers anytime soon.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Make no mistake: technologies like this -- which bring massive cost-savings to companies -- tend to arrive sooner than most people think. The incentives are just too big to ignore. Mining companies in Australia are already using self-driving trucks to transport ore. http://www.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-driving-trucks-to-transport-ore-2015-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-driving-... And self-driving cars are just around the corner in the USA. Trucks will follow maybe half a decade after that, at most.
  - harryh 10y ago
    You think cars come before trucks? Trucks seem easier to me. Driving 500 miles on a very standardized highway seems like an easier problem than negotiating city streets and picking up hard to identify passengers from a curb.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      A lot of the time the passenger will be holding a beacon that communicates their position to the car. It also seems to me that such things won't be a big deal. Some Google demo shows their system recognizing a bicyclist making a hand signal. It's the dynamic traffic stuff that will take longer to deal with. I was thinking about one problem the autonomous systems will have to handle on my run yesterday; pedestrians can look at drivers and use eye contact to make sure the driver has noticed them. An autonomous system doesn't have eyes to look at. The first idea I came up with was a highly directional light source that the system could point at the system could point at the heads of pedestrians it had recognized. Not a laser, but a moderately bright light in a recess that limits the direct visibility of the source.
    - 10y ago
shams93 10y ago
The basic premise going back to Jamestown is that if you don't work you don't eat this goes deep into the collective psyche of this country DC is entirely unprepared for these changes they still think unemployment is largely an issue of people having bad morality.
okket 10y ago
I guess it will more likely pan out like flying: You still need humans to steer the colossus through cities and other complicated terrains, to keep them running, for emergency situations, for the insurance company and, maybe, for the unions. But most of the time the truck will drive on autopilot. Slowly humans will fade completely from the picture, but it will not be a hard cut. Also, we are far away from auto-fixing trucks. So at least the repair crews will stay for long while.
- alpineidyll3 10y ago
  It will be a slow-motion economic calamity, similar to how internet sourcing of materials and sales has gutted the lower middle class. The generation in the out-automated job never retrains or productively re-enters the workforce. Instead they turn around and vote for people who want to flip over the economic card table. Democratic capitalism has to get this isht figured out, or the next century is going to be unpleasant.
topkai22 10y ago
The transition won't be good for people who currently drive semi-trucks or who aspire to. However, there are some reasons that this may actually take a bit longer to fully play out than it appears. To start, there is the transition time from existing capital stock of trucks (those things are hundreds of thousands of dollars); there are also many activities that drivers do that aren't just driving- delivery drivers are often responsible for stocking and displaying the goods they bring; there are various paperwork issues that drivers deal with; there is the care and feeding of these large complex machines in often austere circumstances. I imagine you'll see a lot of hybridization of activities before (or if) you see the elimination of the human- such as a human riding "shotgun" and dealing with any issues or activities that arise when the truck is stopped, or where you see more humans employed in servicing and response roles. That being said, hauling shipping containers around the port of long beach is probably on its way out. I feel for those drivers.
barpet 10y ago
I am becoming afraid of what I call excessive capitalism. Do not take me wrong I love capitalism as it is (coming from a post-communist and now socialist country). But what I see especially in the US and China and what I call excessive capitalism is worrying. What I mean by this term is gathering too much wealth and stripping too much money and power out of masses. I am all for automation and killing obsolete jobs but it needs to be done in a much better way than it has been done in the past. Do not take me wrong. I have no problems with millionaires or billionaires. The problem is with distribution and concentration of the money. I am not fine with people like Travis Kalanick who will sooner or later get rid of all of the taxi drivers without thinking much about the consequences. This is not only about taxi drivers or America or the entire world. It's impacting humanity as a whole. I do not think that basic income or taxing Uber or banning Uber is the solution. I do not think re-educating these people is the solution either. The world does not need an army or mediocre programmers or doctors or whatever you think they could co. People want to work. And they are not doing it just because of the money. It's because they want to contribute. Build something for themselves or society. Most of the people that retire suffer from being unable to continue contributing to the society. They are literally bored and feel useless. I think also that people are getting tired of corporations or big companies in general. They are getting tired of globalized interconnected world. They are getting tired of capitalism. Today you go to a shop shopping for some "quality" made shoes and everything you get is mediocre shit built in some sweatshop in China or Bangladesh. Regardless of price or brand. If you really care you have to put too much time into researching this what is and what is not worth your money. They simply are tired of this freedom. People seek stability and want to have just good life. I think the most important problem in our society is how to ensure stability and good life for most of the people.
bogomipz 10y ago
Sure the cost of goods will go down the same way that we all work less hours now due to efficiencies that technology has provided. It would seem that having trucks that can be on the road for 24 hours straight will result in less trucks being needed. I am sure the auto industry will make up for that that decrease in units sold by increasing the price per unit sold. I don't think there will be any dividend passed on to consumers.
grecy 10y ago
I'm continually dumbfounded by how Americans are so concerned with holding onto jobs, rather than moving forward. When the automobile was invented think of all the farriers and hay people that went out of business and had to move on. Think about the milkman or the guy that used to put ice in the back of your ice-chest out in the back yard. When we eventually move off coal, think of all the millions of people involved in the coal industry that will be out of work. Those lay-offs are a good thing, and we should be doing everything we can do expedite the process. Of course for individuals in an industry that will be soon redundant it sucks, but that's the nature of life. Move on, adapt, re-train. Job security was fleeting in the 70s and 80s. It's not real anymore.
- dcposch 10y ago
  This is global, it's not specific to America. Fun story, the word luddite comes from Ned Ludd, an 18th century English weaver. He destroyed some mechanical looms and inspired a bunch of people to copy him. They were angry about automation taking their jobs. This is a timeless problem. > Of course for individuals in an industry that will be soon redundant it sucks, but that's the nature of life. Move on, adapt, re-train. You're gonna need more empathy than that. For someone like a 50-year-old coal miner living in Kentucky, "adapt, retrain" is easier said than done.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ktRolster 10y ago
  I'm continually dumbfounded by how Americans are so concerned with holding onto jobs, rather than moving forward. It shouldn't be a matter of holding on to the jobs, it should be about helping people transition to new jobs. The industrial revolution was amazing and wonderful, but for the people who get caught under the wheels, who didn't know how to adapt, it was nothing but pain. Here is a poem to illustrate what I mean: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44977 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detai...
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  While you are correct, I think the distinguishing difference here is the rate of change. Automobiles became commercially viable and then common years apart and in some areas decades. The industry - and underlying jobs, infrastructure, etc - had time to adapt and change. For self-driving vehicles, I suspect the window of time between "commercially viable" and "common" is a few years, ten if we want to be pessimistic. So will society (jobs, infrastructure, etc) adjust quickly enough to absorb this change without major pain? I don't know but since we know it's going to happen, I think we should push the conversation towards "what's next" and figure out how to help people get there instead of just lamenting the loss or complaining about the lament.
DavidWanjiru 10y ago
I always have a question about this stuff: when the robots take all of our jobs (or the jobs of a critical mass of the human population), who is going to buy all this stuff the robots make if the humans who are supposed to buy the stuff are broke because they lost their job to a robot? Has anybody tried to do some kind of study/educated guess about this impact? At the end of the day, while robots can do our jobs better than we do, they can't consume stuff better than we do, and ultimately our consumption of stuff is what creates the jobs the robots are taking over. With jobs even as "safe" as surgeons potentially under threat, how long before everyone is in trouble?
- xapata 10y ago
  Through most of history, people transition to doing other jobs. That transition is often painful. Thus various government welfare programs.
  - DavidWanjiru 10y ago
    Well, if this video [0] is anything to go by, most of the other jobs will be automated as well. And although I have no foresight to know how it will pan out, it looks like advances in technology (which have produced previously unimagined jobs for humans - hello, Android dev), advances in technology in this new age will only create new jobs for automatons, not for humans. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
    - xapata 10y ago
      Until we hit the singularity, programmers can always get more meta -- thinking about how to do the job rather than doing the job, no matter what the job is. It's infinitely recursive. In the not-so-distant future, nearly all jobs will be programming jobs. That or shaking hands and smiling.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
A truck has quite a lot of kinetic energy, accidents involving trucks tend to be lethal. I wonder how long it will take until self driving technology will be save enough for this application.
hyperliner 10y ago
It's not just the drivers. Drivers stop at stores along the highways. They will suffer impact too. Drivers need to take laundry to the cleaners. That is gone. They need to sleep along the way, so let's hotel rooms needed and less hotel personnel needed. The ripple effect is significant.
h4nkoslo 10y ago
I could see a primary disadvantage of self-driving trucks being that they're much easier to rob.
WalterBright 10y ago
Long haul trucking should be replaced by trains anyway. Heavy trucks are the primary cause of expensive highway damage, and are environmentally destructive with all the fuel, tire dust, etc. The reason trucks are economically viable at all is they shift their costs to the taxpayer, who pays for the highways. (A truck loaded to the legal limit inflicts 9,000 times as much fatigue damage to the road as a car, and trucks are often overloaded.) I propose that the government drastically increase weight fees for highway use, and use the revenue to subsidize freight trains. (The truck container can just be picked up and dropped on a flatbed rail car.) Trucks for the last mile are still necessary.
animex 10y ago
No, millennial lack of interest in trucking careers threatens the industry and self-driving trucks will save it.
xbmcuser 10y ago
Automation is also going to hit white collar jobs. Tax attorneys, paralegals insurance agents and many such jobs will be effected. Self driving cars and trucks are just the tip of he iceberg because of Google more people are aware of it but machine learning and automation now is going to start hitting white collar jobs not just blue collar jobs.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
All the Luddites arguing here that quality of life hasn't really increased in the past 200 years due to technological revolution should spend a year in a third world country away from modern medicine/electricity/internet. Also your viewpoint is incredibly patronising towards billions of people alive today who don't have access to these.

89 points by blondie9x 10y ago

jobu 10y ago

If you haven't seen the short (15min) documentary "Humans Need Not Apply", then I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU A hundred years ago 'horseless carriages' replaced a lot of horses, and in the next couple decades we're going to see 'driverless trucks' are going to replace a lot of humans.

afarrell 10y ago

The Box[1], a book about the history behind the shipping container which eliminated the jobs of bunches of longshorement, seems very instructive. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/B00I38SQOI/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econ...

astazangasta 10y ago

Recently I am interested in the end of the Bretton Woods system. For the past few years, I've been interested in this graph: http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/family_income_median_income_growth_productivity1.png http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/family_income_med... This is the main story. At a time, perhaps because of fixed exchange rates curbing the flow of speculative capital, perhaps not, productivity (viz., increasing automation) gains meant median wage growth - ordinary people participated in GDP growth. Now this is no longer true, and we get pieces lamenting the death of blue collar jobs through automation. We'll blame robots, but perhaps we should be looking at the fundamentals of our economy - how we've set the free movement of capital above all else, to our detriment.

harryh 10y ago
Pay/productivity gap graphs are nonsense http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=30585 http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=30585
- astazangasta 10y ago
  I disagree with this conclusion, and I tend to disfavor the PCE. The argument is that employers are spending more on benefits, therefore pay has not actually fallen. However, the largest component of the difference between the PCE and CPI is based on employer-provided healthcare; in the US, healthcare spending has been growing at faster than inflation for decades, and medical costs are one of the main avenues of wealth transfer (for example, $300 billion a year, 2% of GDP, goes in patent royalties to owners of pharmaceutical companies). It is a bit crap to suggest that because we are paying people more so they can pay their doctors more, for worse outcomes than anyone in the rest of the developed world, they are somehow turning out better. In any case, the fact that real wages have remained essentially flat requires us to believe that workers are fine with not having made any gains in disposable income in exchange for better benefits, which seems unlikely. Also, the fact that labor peaked in 1973, when the graph begins to diverge, should reinforce, not contradict, this argument.
  - harryh 10y ago
    The conclusion isn't that everything is hunky dory. What he does conclude is that labor's share of income hasn't much changed. What has changed is the distribution of income between laborers. As has been noted in about a million places, gains have increasingly been going to those at the top. Your chart implies some sort of breakdown between productivity and income but does not demonstrate that productivity gains have been equally distributed. In fact, there are a lot of reasons to think that most productivity gains are going towards the top end of the labor pool as well. Due to the lever of technology, we see increasingly small (in terms of # of employees) firms serve increasingly large markets.
    - astazangasta 10y ago
      Median income remaining flat is entirely consistent with productivity being absorbed by the high end.
      - harryh 10y ago

mishchea 10y ago

I'm surprised at how _few_ posts/articles like this there have been, so far: self-driving cars are taking off and are a big looming imminent threat to Uber/taxi/truck drivers. Every time I take an Uber now, I wonder if the driver realizes that his job will most likely be automated away in a couple of years.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
There's way more posts/articles than warranted. Human drivers are going nowhere anytime soon. There's a lot of marketing about self-driving cars but nowhere enough actual technology to back it.
nsgi 10y ago
More like a couple of decades.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  I disagree. At most one decade, but I would bet it happens much sooner. As some have mentioned... the economic incentives are too high.

intrasight 10y ago

Truck drivers need to work with their union(s) to lobby for a law that says that only union members can own an autonomous driving agent. Problem solved - we have self-driving trucks but trucking companies must "hire" an agent via a union member. To become a union member, you'll still have to a rigorous apprenticeship and training program - and of course pay your union dues.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Sounds like featherbedding. Putting pointless people in the middle just to skim money from the process. Who benefits? Nobody but them. Reminds me of how the railroads had to pay into the pension fund for Firemen, long after steam engines were dead and gone. Just because.
- mason55 10y ago
  The same way that the unions in NYC have forced the MTA to keep the hugely expensive, 100 year old backup control & signaling systems on the fully-automated lines even though it's 100% not necessary.
- intrasight 10y ago
  Is no more fetherbedding than any other regulated profession (doctors, layers) who get to themselves decide who is a member in good standing.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    And to carry the analogy further, AI agents are now better than radiologists at analyzing images. But the AI agent works for/under the direction of the radiologist.
  - aianus 10y ago
    Why is that a model to aspire to? It makes me angry when I have to pay a doctor $100 for something stupid and trivial like a prescription for a vaccine.
  - 10y ago

GarrisonPrime 10y ago

>“If you can get rid of the drivers, those people are out of jobs, but the cost of moving all those goods goes down significantly,” Kaplan said. This is a major point of automation. Yes, many jobs will be lost. But the prices of many goods will decrease. The problem is that the current transition threatens to be so rapid as to seriously disrupt society. Perhaps new jobs will eventually be created to make up for those lost to automation (or perhaps not), but they won't be created fast enough to avoid the pain of all the rapid job losses that are coming. Thankfully, society seems to be coming around to the idea that resistance is futile, and we need to address this problem before it becomes too overwhelming. Personally, I feel one of the most realistic options would be to reduce the standard work week to 4 days and/or 30 hours. People need to be kept busy, or society overall tends to start to crumble around the edges. This would mean people will need to shift their perspective on income, as it will likely be reduced. But this shouldn't be too bad, since all the automation will likely lead to reduced prices all around. Reducing your income by 25% may sound bad, but if practically everything becomes ~20-30% cheaper then you should have essentially the same standard of living, but with fewer working hours. Isn't that what we more or less would all like? No matter what we wind up doing however, chances are there will be some period of difficult transition. All we can hope to do is make it as short and relatively painless as possible.

FussyZeus 10y ago
I agree with most everything you've said, the one point that I would contest is: > Yes, many jobs will be lost. But the prices of many goods will decrease. If you're talking about what I first thought of, which is things like groceries, housewares, the "every day things" that we all buy and consume without really thinking, I'm not sure that A: The prices on these items could go much lower than they already are and remain profitable, or B: That the producers of said goods (majority MASSIVE corporations with impressive names and product rosters, and the most likely early adopters of this technology) would reduce the prices in accordance with the reduction in cost. The trend now among these companies seems to be to squeeze every last cent out of every last consumer, and if you're proposing to your given board of directors to buy all these new trucks (or change contracts to a company that has) why would you then cut the prices? I would hope there would be market pressure to do so from at least one good actor, but I don't know how certain that is at all.

Shivetya 10y ago

the turnover in that career is pretty damn high. having met many truckers, especially newly set on the road from school and such, like 9 out of 10 don't stick with it. Wait for the shit storm when they attempt to fully automate ports

SIGALARM 10y ago

sounds like the self-driving trucks would need to be protected by security teams, otherwise they may be susceptible to out of work pirates.

monkmartinez 10y ago
This really needs more attention/consideration. Self-driving anything seems like a ripe target, as the perceived "harm" is to a corporation not a human driver/operator. That is, theives will not have to hurt anyone to get the goods.
- topkai22 10y ago
  This seems like it has already been "solved" by trains- moving targets are hard, cargo is anonymous, stationary targets are in semi-secured railyards, and shrinkage is part of the cost of doing business. Who wants to hijack a truck and find its full of breakfast cereal?
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    I would guess that a train is much harder to stop than a truck. Further, one can drive next to a truck and have people jump on the truck to do some "snooping." The "driver" is not going to freak out/swerve as the drone truck just keeps going towards its destination at a perfectly efficient speed, perfectly centered in the lane.
    - gsnedders 10y ago
      In plenty of places, you can stop a train simply by cutting the signal wire (because it will fail-safe).
tlb 10y ago
You can estimate the impact. Take the fraction of truck drivers that will become pirates Multiply by the number of trucks that an average pirate can hijack, deliver the merchandise to a reseller of stolen goods, get paid, and launder the money before getting caught. Divide by how many shipments a truck driver currently makes per year. And that's an estimate of the fraction of merchandise that will be pirated. I suspect the answer is no more than 1%, in which case it is absorbable along with other kinds of lossage.

pcrh 10y ago

We don't have self-driving trains yet, except in very tightly controlled environments. So I think it's going to take more than a few test runs to show that self-driving trucks will displace drivers anytime soon.

enraged_camel 10y ago
Make no mistake: technologies like this -- which bring massive cost-savings to companies -- tend to arrive sooner than most people think. The incentives are just too big to ignore. Mining companies in Australia are already using self-driving trucks to transport ore. http://www.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-driving-trucks-to-transport-ore-2015-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-driving-... And self-driving cars are just around the corner in the USA. Trucks will follow maybe half a decade after that, at most.
- harryh 10y ago
  You think cars come before trucks? Trucks seem easier to me. Driving 500 miles on a very standardized highway seems like an easier problem than negotiating city streets and picking up hard to identify passengers from a curb.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    A lot of the time the passenger will be holding a beacon that communicates their position to the car. It also seems to me that such things won't be a big deal. Some Google demo shows their system recognizing a bicyclist making a hand signal. It's the dynamic traffic stuff that will take longer to deal with. I was thinking about one problem the autonomous systems will have to handle on my run yesterday; pedestrians can look at drivers and use eye contact to make sure the driver has noticed them. An autonomous system doesn't have eyes to look at. The first idea I came up with was a highly directional light source that the system could point at the system could point at the heads of pedestrians it had recognized. Not a laser, but a moderately bright light in a recess that limits the direct visibility of the source.
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shams93 10y ago

The basic premise going back to Jamestown is that if you don't work you don't eat this goes deep into the collective psyche of this country DC is entirely unprepared for these changes they still think unemployment is largely an issue of people having bad morality.

okket 10y ago

I guess it will more likely pan out like flying: You still need humans to steer the colossus through cities and other complicated terrains, to keep them running, for emergency situations, for the insurance company and, maybe, for the unions. But most of the time the truck will drive on autopilot. Slowly humans will fade completely from the picture, but it will not be a hard cut. Also, we are far away from auto-fixing trucks. So at least the repair crews will stay for long while.

alpineidyll3 10y ago
It will be a slow-motion economic calamity, similar to how internet sourcing of materials and sales has gutted the lower middle class. The generation in the out-automated job never retrains or productively re-enters the workforce. Instead they turn around and vote for people who want to flip over the economic card table. Democratic capitalism has to get this isht figured out, or the next century is going to be unpleasant.

topkai22 10y ago

The transition won't be good for people who currently drive semi-trucks or who aspire to. However, there are some reasons that this may actually take a bit longer to fully play out than it appears. To start, there is the transition time from existing capital stock of trucks (those things are hundreds of thousands of dollars); there are also many activities that drivers do that aren't just driving- delivery drivers are often responsible for stocking and displaying the goods they bring; there are various paperwork issues that drivers deal with; there is the care and feeding of these large complex machines in often austere circumstances. I imagine you'll see a lot of hybridization of activities before (or if) you see the elimination of the human- such as a human riding "shotgun" and dealing with any issues or activities that arise when the truck is stopped, or where you see more humans employed in servicing and response roles. That being said, hauling shipping containers around the port of long beach is probably on its way out. I feel for those drivers.

barpet 10y ago

I am becoming afraid of what I call excessive capitalism. Do not take me wrong I love capitalism as it is (coming from a post-communist and now socialist country). But what I see especially in the US and China and what I call excessive capitalism is worrying. What I mean by this term is gathering too much wealth and stripping too much money and power out of masses. I am all for automation and killing obsolete jobs but it needs to be done in a much better way than it has been done in the past. Do not take me wrong. I have no problems with millionaires or billionaires. The problem is with distribution and concentration of the money. I am not fine with people like Travis Kalanick who will sooner or later get rid of all of the taxi drivers without thinking much about the consequences. This is not only about taxi drivers or America or the entire world. It's impacting humanity as a whole. I do not think that basic income or taxing Uber or banning Uber is the solution. I do not think re-educating these people is the solution either. The world does not need an army or mediocre programmers or doctors or whatever you think they could co. People want to work. And they are not doing it just because of the money. It's because they want to contribute. Build something for themselves or society. Most of the people that retire suffer from being unable to continue contributing to the society. They are literally bored and feel useless. I think also that people are getting tired of corporations or big companies in general. They are getting tired of globalized interconnected world. They are getting tired of capitalism. Today you go to a shop shopping for some "quality" made shoes and everything you get is mediocre shit built in some sweatshop in China or Bangladesh. Regardless of price or brand. If you really care you have to put too much time into researching this what is and what is not worth your money. They simply are tired of this freedom. People seek stability and want to have just good life. I think the most important problem in our society is how to ensure stability and good life for most of the people.

bogomipz 10y ago

Sure the cost of goods will go down the same way that we all work less hours now due to efficiencies that technology has provided. It would seem that having trucks that can be on the road for 24 hours straight will result in less trucks being needed. I am sure the auto industry will make up for that that decrease in units sold by increasing the price per unit sold. I don't think there will be any dividend passed on to consumers.

grecy 10y ago

I'm continually dumbfounded by how Americans are so concerned with holding onto jobs, rather than moving forward. When the automobile was invented think of all the farriers and hay people that went out of business and had to move on. Think about the milkman or the guy that used to put ice in the back of your ice-chest out in the back yard. When we eventually move off coal, think of all the millions of people involved in the coal industry that will be out of work. Those lay-offs are a good thing, and we should be doing everything we can do expedite the process. Of course for individuals in an industry that will be soon redundant it sucks, but that's the nature of life. Move on, adapt, re-train. Job security was fleeting in the 70s and 80s. It's not real anymore.

dcposch 10y ago
This is global, it's not specific to America. Fun story, the word luddite comes from Ned Ludd, an 18th century English weaver. He destroyed some mechanical looms and inspired a bunch of people to copy him. They were angry about automation taking their jobs. This is a timeless problem. > Of course for individuals in an industry that will be soon redundant it sucks, but that's the nature of life. Move on, adapt, re-train. You're gonna need more empathy than that. For someone like a 50-year-old coal miner living in Kentucky, "adapt, retrain" is easier said than done.
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ktRolster 10y ago
I'm continually dumbfounded by how Americans are so concerned with holding onto jobs, rather than moving forward. It shouldn't be a matter of holding on to the jobs, it should be about helping people transition to new jobs. The industrial revolution was amazing and wonderful, but for the people who get caught under the wheels, who didn't know how to adapt, it was nothing but pain. Here is a poem to illustrate what I mean: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44977 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detai...
caseysoftware 10y ago
While you are correct, I think the distinguishing difference here is the rate of change. Automobiles became commercially viable and then common years apart and in some areas decades. The industry - and underlying jobs, infrastructure, etc - had time to adapt and change. For self-driving vehicles, I suspect the window of time between "commercially viable" and "common" is a few years, ten if we want to be pessimistic. So will society (jobs, infrastructure, etc) adjust quickly enough to absorb this change without major pain? I don't know but since we know it's going to happen, I think we should push the conversation towards "what's next" and figure out how to help people get there instead of just lamenting the loss or complaining about the lament.

DavidWanjiru 10y ago

I always have a question about this stuff: when the robots take all of our jobs (or the jobs of a critical mass of the human population), who is going to buy all this stuff the robots make if the humans who are supposed to buy the stuff are broke because they lost their job to a robot? Has anybody tried to do some kind of study/educated guess about this impact? At the end of the day, while robots can do our jobs better than we do, they can't consume stuff better than we do, and ultimately our consumption of stuff is what creates the jobs the robots are taking over. With jobs even as "safe" as surgeons potentially under threat, how long before everyone is in trouble?

xapata 10y ago
Through most of history, people transition to doing other jobs. That transition is often painful. Thus various government welfare programs.
- DavidWanjiru 10y ago
  Well, if this video [0] is anything to go by, most of the other jobs will be automated as well. And although I have no foresight to know how it will pan out, it looks like advances in technology (which have produced previously unimagined jobs for humans - hello, Android dev), advances in technology in this new age will only create new jobs for automatons, not for humans. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
  - xapata 10y ago
    Until we hit the singularity, programmers can always get more meta -- thinking about how to do the job rather than doing the job, no matter what the job is. It's infinitely recursive. In the not-so-distant future, nearly all jobs will be programming jobs. That or shaking hands and smiling.
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MichaelMoser123 10y ago

A truck has quite a lot of kinetic energy, accidents involving trucks tend to be lethal. I wonder how long it will take until self driving technology will be save enough for this application.

hyperliner 10y ago

It's not just the drivers. Drivers stop at stores along the highways. They will suffer impact too. Drivers need to take laundry to the cleaners. That is gone. They need to sleep along the way, so let's hotel rooms needed and less hotel personnel needed. The ripple effect is significant.

h4nkoslo 10y ago

I could see a primary disadvantage of self-driving trucks being that they're much easier to rob.

WalterBright 10y ago

Long haul trucking should be replaced by trains anyway. Heavy trucks are the primary cause of expensive highway damage, and are environmentally destructive with all the fuel, tire dust, etc. The reason trucks are economically viable at all is they shift their costs to the taxpayer, who pays for the highways. (A truck loaded to the legal limit inflicts 9,000 times as much fatigue damage to the road as a car, and trucks are often overloaded.) I propose that the government drastically increase weight fees for highway use, and use the revenue to subsidize freight trains. (The truck container can just be picked up and dropped on a flatbed rail car.) Trucks for the last mile are still necessary.

animex 10y ago

No, millennial lack of interest in trucking careers threatens the industry and self-driving trucks will save it.

xbmcuser 10y ago

Automation is also going to hit white collar jobs. Tax attorneys, paralegals insurance agents and many such jobs will be effected. Self driving cars and trucks are just the tip of he iceberg because of Google more people are aware of it but machine learning and automation now is going to start hitting white collar jobs not just blue collar jobs.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

All the Luddites arguing here that quality of life hasn't really increased in the past 200 years due to technological revolution should spend a year in a third world country away from modern medicine/electricity/internet. Also your viewpoint is incredibly patronising towards billions of people alive today who don't have access to these.