3 ms·

> That story is a little flawed as well. They first compare 2.8 million truck drivers (a specific job) to large categories like "food services". I'm not sure i

> That story is a little flawed as well. They first compare 2.8 million truck drivers (a specific job) to large categories like "food services". I'm not sure it was really a flaw. That was the entire point of the article. The complaint was about how the NPR (and the BLS by extension) lumped anything that had a tiny resemblance to a truck driver into one category, but broke up other industries into smaller groups, such as the 80 different categories teachers can be found in. When they applied those broad strokes to other industries, truck driver didn't look so big anymore. Truck driver represents about 1-2% of the workforce. About the same size as the farmer population. Strangely, nobody is worried about self-driving tractors – which are further along than their road-travelling brethren – taking away farmer jobs, despite a similar impact in numbers. > Whenever self-driving trucks do get here If is the bigger question. As many of us around here are engineers, we know it's easy to get a 90% solution and it's easy to demo a 90% solution to get people excited about what you are working on. But the last 10% required to actually put these things on the market can take forever. Lots of outstanding problems that we still have absolutely no idea how to solve. Past performance is not an indication of future results.

tyingq 10y ago
>If is the bigger question. Personally, I think it's closer than self-driving cars. I suspect they can take over the interstate routes fairly quickly just by using some roadside land as "ports" to transfer control to human drivers. That would get the vast majority of the miles automated without tackling the harder, non-interstate, parts.
- randomdata 10y ago
  But even then, long haul truckers only make up about half of the truck driving sector, so not only will the other half still be necessary as always, there will be additional need for short-haul drivers to handle the loads coming in off interstate routes that they were previously handled by the long-haul driver end-to-end. Additionally, the industry has been quite vocal about wanting to have more trucks on long-haul trips, but cannot afford the talent. If those costs come down, there will be even more trucks on the road, needing even more short-haul truckers. So, while the may be some decline in the job numbers for that industry, it doesn't seem that impactful.

tyingq 10y ago

>If is the bigger question. Personally, I think it's closer than self-driving cars. I suspect they can take over the interstate routes fairly quickly just by using some roadside land as "ports" to transfer control to human drivers. That would get the vast majority of the miles automated without tackling the harder, non-interstate, parts.

randomdata 10y ago
But even then, long haul truckers only make up about half of the truck driving sector, so not only will the other half still be necessary as always, there will be additional need for short-haul drivers to handle the loads coming in off interstate routes that they were previously handled by the long-haul driver end-to-end. Additionally, the industry has been quite vocal about wanting to have more trucks on long-haul trips, but cannot afford the talent. If those costs come down, there will be even more trucks on the road, needing even more short-haul truckers. So, while the may be some decline in the job numbers for that industry, it doesn't seem that impactful.