TL;DR. Self drive will create jobs, not eliminate them. I read a lot about self drive putting truck drivers out of work - and I think I disagree. My bias - I

TL;DR. Self drive will create jobs, not eliminate them. I read a lot about self drive putting truck drivers out of work - and I think I disagree. My bias - I own a factory and we ship and receive goods constantly, from overnight envelopes to pallets. I would say that we get every normal form of delivery at least once a week. UPS, Fedex, USPS, dozens of trucking companies, dozen of supplier owned fleets. Shipments outbound last month were over 50,000 pounds. We are small, but that is still a lot of shipping. Enough that I know what I am talking about. I am a self drive enthusiast. I look forward to its everyday use, and I have spent 100s of hours trying to think through the implications (and how my auto parts company will fit into it). With this perspective, I can't see how the driver will be replaced until we have intelligent humanoid robots. The delivery and pickup environment is different in every building. Drivers are also collecting money, and delivering invoices, and doing all sorts of other tasks that the truck simply won't be able to do. Driving the truck is only half the job. Whenever I send a delivery to be done by one of my staff (we have no dedicated deliver person; it's whoever is available) then the instructions to actually get the thing there would be a nightmare to explain to a computer. Example-- (Recent deliver to auto dealership: Go in the side door, not the front. Find Sarah; if you give the box to Jane she will not take it to the back. Find Sarah, she will get the box to Gary. They are expecting you. Remember! Side door, the one marked "Do Not Enter". The front door is for retail customers, we are a supplier and they need this right now.) I do hope that the advent of self drive will lower costs, and thus my shipping expenses. Shipping by the pallet is not that cheap; sending 500 pounds (225 kilo) only halfway across the USA costs me just under 50 cents per pound, or about $250 USD. Freight companies can charge gigantic differences by small changes in address. I am all for their disruption. I once had to pay an extra $100 because the address was on the wrong side of an 8 lane bridge, literal highway robbery. If shipping costs drop, then I will bundle free shipping to my commercial accounts (98% of business), not just to retail accounts. Supplier owned fleets will deliver with smaller minimum orders to be competitive. This will all cause the need for drivers/attendants to INCREASE not decrease. Its possible that the job of "truck driver" may turn into "automated truck interface person" but that would not be a net job loss; it would be a transfer into a different category. If my shipping costs drop, then my number of shipments will go up dramatically while at the same time the size of shipments will likely get smaller. Why order by the pallet, when by the case is the same price. As with the e-commerce revolution, this is going to happen over a period of decades not years. Even now, 20 years of Amazon later, e-commerce has not broken the 10% of retail yet. All the handwringing over lost jobs is going to happen way slower than anyone thinks.