26 ms·

Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway People’

190 points by 6stringmerc 9y ago

rwmj 9y ago
Does any government in the world have a sensible plan for what happens when (probably) 1 in 10 of the workforce become unemployable when self-driving cars/trucks take over their jobs?
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  I'm sure the mighty invisible hand will save us all in its bosom. What we need is faith.. err confidence in the market. All praises be to the one true god money.
- gooseus 9y ago
  I haven't heard of one, the conspiracy-theorist in me is reminded of all the ammunition that various federal agencies have been purchasing over the last decade and the militarization of local law enforcement. I'm not sure if that's an indication of any actual plan (certainly not a sensible one) or simply a hedge against the fact that nobody has one, or nothing at all. In any case, ignoring even just the truckers is a bad idea (let alone ups, fedex, usps, etc), they know the highways and the trucks and if they form a new Luddite group then any self-driving trucking company is going to be in for some surprise expenses when their trucks start disappearing and/or breaking down randomly in the middle of nowhere.
  - snerbles 9y ago
    Those agencies tend to pre-purchase ammo years in advance, and the "militarization" of police is mostly from agencies receiving surplus equipment from the DoD for pennies on the dollar. Lord knows civilian cops don't have the same level of discipline - if I pulled one-tenth of that sort of abuse while I was an enlisted MP, I'd be rotting in a cell in Fort Leavenworth instead of writing this post. All that being said, I wouldn't be surprised if certain elites have noticed that public sentiment is resembling France in the 1790s. This whole surveillance apparatus is here to intercept the next Robespierre, national security be damned.
- scrumper 9y ago
  I haven't heard a single proposal yet. I could imagine a government passing a succession of laws which first required all autonomous trucks to have a supervising human on board (with a relaxation of existing maximum hour rules), operating under a new Trucking Supervisor License (which any current CDL holder is automatically granted); then slowly ratcheting up restrictions on actual CDLs (reduced hours, reduced permissible routes, reduced maximum weight) to make them less attractive; then ultimately ceasing issuance of new CDLs for heavy trucks once the final generation of drivers-cum-supervisors has retired.
  - jtuente 9y ago
    The second part of your proposal doesn't make any sense in the scheme of transitioning humans out of that sector of the workforce. Increasing restrictions on CDL issuance doesn't make it any easier to transition drivers out, it kicks them out. I find it comparable to increasing the minimum wage of fast food workers as the food prep process is increasingly automated. It simply makes it more and more favorable to choose the automated option.
    - scrumper 9y ago
      It stops more coming in; existing holders keep driving (base case) or move to those supervisory roles. Ending the supervisory license and mandate is the end game, done once most of that last generation of CDL holders has hung up their hats. This is really about long distance, semi truck freight only. Local delivery (as someone mentioned above) is likely to need humans for a very long time.
- atonse 9y ago
  Apart from people putting out feelers about a Universal Basic Income, the next best thing I've heard is an informal proposal by Bill Gates about taxing automation [1] so we can better control the speed in which this stuff will upend everything, and buy more time for a more controlled transition. I say that as a developer who is one of the classes that will benefit more from automation (until we are also replaced). [1]: https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/ https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-j...
  - malandrew 9y ago
    That sounds like a recipe for crippling the competitiveness of the US relative to other countries. It's not like China is going to slow down on the inevitable march towards automation. The absolute best scenario is for a country to automate as much as possible as quickly as possible to capture the productivity gains available on the global scale and then figure out how to tax gains (from automation or otherwise) domestically after the fact to support those in its population that have been displaced. If you think instability from unemployment is bad, it's certainly worse if you also have the problem of not having the resources to even try and address it.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      "Competitiveness" means nothing when only a fraction of the population prosper from those gains. On paper, America is significantly richer than it was in the 80's, yet incomes for the majority have been flat, social mobility has decreased, worker leverage has nearly disappeared, and quality of life for those outside of the coastal regions has gone down. There's no reason to push for exponential growth any further until we can correct income and wealth inequality a bit.
      - malandrew 9y ago
        It's better that a fraction of the population prosper that the can act philanthropically or that rest of the country can tax. The alternative is a fraction of the population of another country prosper over which we have no power to tax and whose philanthropy likely won't benefit Americans. The former gives you options, the latter affords you none.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
  Not to mention entire small town economies, particularly in the West, are entirely economically dependent on truckers to stop by, rest, fuel up, visit prostitutes etc. Those people are gonna have a much harder time. Any owners of property will see the values of their assets plummet just as their jobs disappear.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    I see the rare few towns along, say, the Dalton Highway on the way to Deadhorse, Alaska as being the first to go. Ignoring the weather for just a moment, that 400 miles of packed gravel would have to be an appealing target for autonomous vehicle engineers. Mostly straight, mostly flat (albeit with one non-trivial mountain pass), little traffic other than other trucks. And poof, there goes Coldfoot and Yukon River when humans don't stop anymore (except for a smattering of tourists). Or maybe the tank range is enough that trucks don't stop between Fairbanks and Deadhorse the way it is now, and I'm talking out my ass. All I know is that the traffic I saw last time I was up there consisted of a lot of trucks, a minivan, one camper at the Arctic Circle that said they were going to Deadhorse, and the remainder of tourist traffic consisting of a bunch of dumbasses like me on motorcycles.
    - niftich 9y ago
      I'd guess that a road like Dalton where weather-related and road condition-related hazards can suddenly appear, would make an exceedingly poor fit for self-driving non-guideway vehicles. Far better would be vehicles -- self-driving or otherwise -- on some sort of fixed guideway; given that most of the current usage of the road is for traffic solely between the two points-of-interest on either end. Special vehicles could still be used to access the pipeline running alongside at arbitrary points. A railway, potentially with extra equipment to assist with maintaining traction and negotiating grades, would accomplish this nicely, but is avoided due to its large up-front cost. While self-driving vehicles don't come with such large non-distributed up-front cost, they would be unreliable on such a road without permanent in-vehicle supervision, at which point they're not really making any of the intervening towns that provide driver services superfluous.
- cmiles74 9y ago
  In my experience, the US federal government tends to see this as an issue for those who are being unemployed to figure out for themselves. Not to be cynical, but I wouldn't be surprised if their solution boiled down to granting lots of money to private companies to try to tempt them into providing retraining.
- golemotron 9y ago
  Add the implosion of brick and mortar retail and we're in for some hard times. Automating away jobs increases inequality.
- mullen 9y ago
  Clinton did. She had a jobs retraining program that would have addressed people in industries that were in decline or going away. Ironically, the very people who would benefit from this program mostly vote for Trump and he is not going to do anything for them. Automation is coming for these people's jobs and there is nothing that can be done about that. Retraining is the only hope for these people but they have to stop acting entitled and start voting for people who will help them get retrained.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    I think rural America needs more than retraining programs, though you're correct that Donald Trump has made no mention of what he's actually going to do for coal workers. They need new and dynamic industries that treat the employees with respect and agency. Something entire communities can benefit from.
    - krapp 9y ago
      > Donald Trump has made no mention of what he's actually going to do for coal workers. He apparently plans to revive the coal industry by repealing environmental regulations and to put them back to work mining coal[0,1]. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/coal-jobs-trump-appalachia.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/coal-jobs-trump-... [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-27/trump-s-order-won-t-resurrect-jobs-of-miners-key-to-his-campaign https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-27/trump...
      - wavefunction 9y ago
        Forgive me for saying so, but I don't believe that's much of a realistic plan. Which to me is no plan at all.
        krapp 9y ago
        It's not even remotely realistic, it's a populist fantasy. Nevertheless, that is the plan, to somehow force the world to turn the clock back on globalism to a time when American coal, steel and auto workers were relevant, and to beat back the tide of modernity until the world makes sense again.
- jackhack 9y ago
  The same thing that, at the turn of the century when one in ten people were employed in agriculture. (today it's closer to 1/100) they go find other work. Same goes for a farrier or a blacksmith or milkman, or ice delivery, or newpaper boy shouting "extra, extra - read all about it" from the street corner. In some cases, the job is simply gone. In others, the work still exists, but is nowhere as common.
  - wonderwonder 9y ago
    I agree to a point but I think it is a different scenario today as you have unprecedented concentration of wealth in the top 1 % as well as the means of production. I have a hard time seeing how 5% of the nations workforce suddenly transitions to jobs that did not exist before. You also have an increase in the cost of living where most households require two incomes compounding the issue. With agriculture new jobs were created as people moved to cities and new communities were created. those cities already exist. Short of a sudden civilization focused effort to colonize mars, I just don't see it.
    - malandrew 9y ago
      I honestly don't think we pay enough attention to the rising cost of living. Cost of living should go down year over year due to productivity gains, but we see at least three line items becoming more expensive over time: (1) housing, (2) healthcare, and (3) higher education. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co... https://howmuch.net/articles/american-spending-past-75-years https://howmuch.net/articles/american-spending-past-75-years
      - cousin_it 9y ago
        Amusingly, these exact three things were free in the USSR. I benefited from that a lot. Though most other consumer goods were less affordable and lower quality in the USSR than in the US, and the economy was in worse shape overall. I wonder if there's a way to combine the two systems without people screaming blue murder.
- petra 9y ago
  I can see an alternate scenario happening: Let's say, for the sake of argument, self-driving cars and truck, fully deployed, are 10 years away. In that time we might see a move to many more drivers on the road, not less: A lot of growth in food delivery, e-commerce and in particular shuttles offering a fast,affordable, shared transport mode, as an attractive replacement for private cars in many places. Maybe, with all of that, instead of 1/10 we'll have 2/10 of the workforce as drivers. Consider the effect their salaries have on the families, and indirect support extended families has, we could see a really strong political base against self-driving cars. And from that point, all kinds of things could happen, to better manage or prevent that change.
  - chii 9y ago
    > political base against self-driving cars. it doesn't matter how strong the political base is, when there's profit motive, the humans will lose to machines.
- wonderwonder 9y ago
  Its interesting as we are seeing a similar scenario play out in the energy sector with the shift away from coal. So far the government response has essentially been to ignore it or to use it as a scape goat for relaxing environmental protections. As far as having a real plan dedicated to finding people decent paying and more importantly fulfilling jobs, i believe the answer is for the most part no. Finland beginning a limited basic income trial is the closest I have seen. It is a kick the can scenario that has the possibility of massively reducing the quality of life of tens of millions of people.
- cbanek 9y ago
  No, not really. If anything, it's likely those people might have a lot higher risk of suicide. (deaths of despair) "Because at 54 years old, nobody wants me. I can’t retrain for anything else. For older people, you kind of get trapped. For every one that does well, there’s 30 that it destroys." That feeling that nobody wants you is a killer. It may be true, it may not, but that lack of hope just prevents anything good from happening. "I can't retrain for anything" - you're defeated right from the start, and it's obvious people don't even want to take the leap to try. It's hardest on people that had it good, and then lost it. Much worse than those that never had it, in that you feel like you're losing something. (endowment effect) Here's an interesting article the WaPo did about whites and a lack of hope. While there is a race component to it, I think it'd equally apply to other races where people have had a good/stable life, but lost it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/15/the-worst-thing-poor-whites-are-inheriting-could-be-a-lack-of-hope/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/15/the-w... http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/521083335/the-forces-driving-middle-aged-white-peoples-deaths-of-despair http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/52108333...
  - watwut 9y ago
    From the article it seems that whites in the same situation as blacks have the same mortality rates - "If you compare whites with a high school degree or less with blacks with a high school degree or less, their mortality rates have converged." It suggests that the group having higher status previously does not change things all that much.
    - cbanek 9y ago
      I don't think it's about the groups having higher status or not, say whites vs blacks, but in the article they say they believe the cause is: "These deaths of despair have been accompanied by reduced labor force participation, reduced marriage rates, increases in reports of poor health and poor mental health. So we are beginning to thread a story in that it's possible that [the trend is] consistent with the labor market collapsing for people with less than a college degree. In turn, those people are being less able to form stable marriages, and in turn that has effects on the kind of economic and social supports that people need in order to thrive." Like you said, the rates are converging when they have a high school degree or less. These are the kinds of people that get hit the hardest when the labor market is collapsing. It's not that "whites had it before and now they don't", it's "I used to believe I was entitled to a job if I wanted to work hard, and that would pay enough to live, but now that doesn't seem to be true." People just don't know what to do now and are feeling hopeless.
- dboreham 9y ago
  Perhaps they are not drinking the koolaid you need to drink in order to believe that self-driving vehicles are likely to work well enough to be widely deployed in the next 20 years?
  - galdosdi 9y ago
    Well, I wasn't sure either, but have you seen Waymo's current state-reported stats for mean miles driven between human takeover incidents? If not, look them up, they are very impressive. If you still disagree, please elaborate on _why_ you think this
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Trucks travel a lot of highway miles. That is a significantly easier problem than general driving. Even if you don't believe that general driving will be solved in 20 years, you can easily imagine trucks doing their highway driving alone and only having the last couple of miles taken care of by humans.
- 6stringmerc 9y ago
  Currently in the US the workforce population rate is at an all time low in almost 40 years. Basically the same number of people working as in the early 1970s. Yikes. My point is we're already in this situation, automation be damned, and until the tsunami of anti-intellectualism backs off, then smart people aren't going to have a chance to actually figure some of this out.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  How about when 9 in 10 become unemployable? Human nature is not ready for this world. We are dogmatic puritanical beasts obsessed with the idea that a person's value must be inextricably tied to one's economic output. We're more likely to see a worldwide make-work program where 1/2 of the people are paid to dig holes and the other 1/2 paid to fill them in, than we are to see something like universal basic income.
  - iak8god 9y ago
    Not sure that's strictly Human Nature, but it's certainly the prevailing paradigm in this time and place.
- skocznymroczny 9y ago
  When will that happen? Self-driving cars/trucks aren't anywhere near being deployed on real roads. Also, as soon as there's an accident and the self-driving car kills a child, they will be postponed for at least 5 years until safety assurances are strengthened.
wehadfun 9y ago
Brother did this. The bad part about the job, as noted in the article, is the way the pay works. If the truck is not moving the driver is not getting paid. Stuck in traffic? Not paid, Takes a day to load your truck, no paid. Take a day to unload truck, not paid. Truckers sit for hours doing nothing and not getting paid. Sometimes trucks have to wait a day or two just to be assigned a load. Not paid.
- savanaly 9y ago
  I'm trying to think of reasons why it would be this way and what I can come up with is that if you were to pay by the hour instead of by the mile it would be an incentive to the drivers to take longer to complete routes. A classic principal-agent problem in other words. Is there any non-obvious reason besides that that anyone knows of?
  - revicon 9y ago
    One guess is that most truck drivers were freelance (and many still are), owning their truck and getting paid per mile. Perhaps the rest of the industry standardized around that model regardless of the relationship the truck driver has with the parent company.
  - petra 9y ago
    With today's apps, it's possible to solve that problem while still paying fairly. Maybe even without apps. But why ? why not dump the risk of delays at the weak party in this transaction ?
  - kefka 9y ago
    Doesn't seem that hard to mix the two. We know a route from X to Y is $miles . Detours happen, but Google is getting to the point of calculating realtime incidents. But time could be fairly compensated, as could the miles on a vehicle. If you took a way longer route, it's on you. But if you're traffic jammed, it's not your fault, and should fairly be compensated. You know, that's what Unions are for.
    - 9y ago
nnq 9y ago
Q: Know that joke about the self-driving-car engineer who walks into a trucker bar? A: 'course you don't, he never lived to tell it...
- draw_down 9y ago
  It's always the engineers. People just can't bring themselves to hate the business people involved, somehow.
  - Kevin_S 9y ago
    You're joking right? Here and in other software circles MBAs and other business people are constantly looked down upon as being a waste of time and money. I really doubt he was trying to make a point about engineers....
gumby 9y ago
It's important that there be jobs for people without much education. When I was in my twenties I volunteered as a reading instructor. One of the students was a trucker in his late 30s who had never learned to read. He had just memorized certain routes and took the same ones. He wanted to read so he could get better jobs. Not a dumb guy, but he'd slipped off the rails at a very early age, and dropped out of school as soon as he could. He did already know the alphabet and numbers. He was embarrassed to even talk about this with his peers. Abstract ideas of "job retraining" may sound great but I think they are generally unrealistic. Folks who figured they were "done with school" at 18 or even 22 and then find themselves unemployed in their 40s have a hard time changing direction in my somewhat limited experience. (But those students at community college who are aged between late 30 and 50? Really driven. It's embarrassing to compare typical college students to them.)
- paulddraper 9y ago
  Exactly this. And yet we seek for ever higher minimum wages, decreasing the number of low-skill jobs and push for even more automation.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Wages should be higher. Considering inflation, minimum wage workers in the 60's made more than they do today. The issue is labor surplus caused by both globalization and illegal immigration. Edit: To those downvoting me, could you explain why? Because minimum wage has decreased[1], wages have been stagnant[2], and globalization has undeniably affected the midwest negatively[3]. I suppose the impact of illegal immigration is up for debate, but when you have 10 million illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage in a country of 300 million, of course there will be wage suppression. [1]http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-table-4-39-minimum-wage-1960-2011/ http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-table-4... [2] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/09/15/u-s-household-incomes-a-49-year-perspective https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/09/1... [3]http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2012/04/09/the-global-midwest-richard-longworth/ http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2012/04/09/the-global-midwest...
mlinksva 9y ago
For other reasons, a large % of trucking should be de-subsidized and replaced with rail http://cityobservatory.org/the-real-welfare-cadillacs-have-18-wheels/ http://cityobservatory.org/the-real-welfare-cadillacs-have-1... What are working conditions of truckers relative to railroad workers?
- oppositelock 9y ago
  How is trucking subsidized?
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    Highway funding for one. Instead of improving highway infrastructure with tax money, improve rail lines.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Indeed. Trucks cause several orders of magnitude more road wear than cars, because road wear scales like weight per wheel to the fourth power (this might not always be the perfect model http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=261 http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=261 but even so the general idea holds), and trucks weigh a whole lot. If trucks had to pay their fair share of road maintenance, shipping by truck would probably be noticeably more expensive.
    - trothamel 9y ago
      Federal highway funding appears to be mostly funded by gas taxes on highway users. It costs $44B, and $39B is funded by gas tax revenue. While $5B is still a lot of money, it's smaller than the $8B that funds mass transit.
      - ashark 9y ago
        Trucks do disproportionately more damage do the roads than they pay in taxes for fuel, though. You're subsidizing trucking every time you fuel up your passenger vehicle.
TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
Long haul is the only type of trucking I can see being replaced by autonomous vehicles in the next 10 years. Milk runs require, at least for the time being, driving through many surface streets, unloading product off the truck, and potentially upselling the customer using the relationship you build with them over time.
- shostack 9y ago
  I think if battery and drone technology increases sufficiently, we could see automated or semi-automated drone deliveries for the "last mile" for many things like that. Drones that can deliver small packages will likely disrupt quite a bit of the delivery scene. Why hire five delivery drivers for an area when you can have one who drives the drone launch truck, they drive to the middle of the zone, deploy the drones, monitor them (or offshore their piloting to remote pilots), wait for them to finish their run, rinse and repeat.
TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
Long haul is the only type of trucking I can see being replaced by autonomous vehicles in the next 10 years. Milk runs require, at least for the time being, driving through many surface streets, unloading product off the truck, and potentially upselling the customer using the relationship you build with them over time.
lhuser123 9y ago
I guess is my chance to tell my story. I have been doing this job for a few years now. Driving all over the country, living in the truck, see the family one or two days a month, etc, etc. In summary not the best job but it allowed me to help my children. Now, how have I spent all those long and boring lonely hours ? Learning to code, yeah!. Always looking for something to do inside that truck, somehow started reading about computer programming, and, well, now I can't let go. I used to work in accounting(long time ago), so had an idea of what it was, but that was it. Now I know a little bit about Angular2, Ionic, Django, Docker, github, and things like that, and even bought a PC and installed Ubuntu after reading the book How Linux works. But what I really want express is this: It's amazing how much free learning material is offered by the open source community, and will never be able to thanks them enough. And yes, my hope is to someday get a good programming job!
- tehlike 9y ago
  Very good for you. There are always good jobs for driven people like yourself. I wish the best of luck to you, and kudos. And agree about opensource, I learned more from opensource than my formal CS education.
  - lhuser123 9y ago
    Thanks. Comments like that about open source, helps me keep things in perspective whenever I struggle to understand something.
- 6stringmerc 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing and I hope the value is great in your lifetime - as in, providing help your children but also give you a chance to discover something about yourself. I feel bad for a lot of the drivers who don't see their downtime as a way to try something or practice something. For me, it'd be rehearsing stories or talking out thoughts on a recorder to upload while I'm back driving, maybe play a little guitar to see it could speed up how quick people help me out. I think many hard jobs don't allow enough room for a person to engage in some self-improvement regularly, and that's unfortunate.
Voyage_wanderer 9y ago
Well. I guess, I should jump into the discussion. I'm a truck driver with 18 years of experience. Between driving jobs I have had 3 breaks when I was doing programming/software development. I had never liked programming jobs, i always enjoyed driving. Programming is something I can do based on my unfinished education. I'm an immigrant. I follow the industry news. Both industries, I guess. First. You wont believe how diverse the truck driving jobs are and how diverse truck drivers as a group. There is a fair populations of drivers with bachelor/masters degrees and pretty high IQs I had chosen the job because it is always there. No need for looking for one. After initial 2-3 years of entry level jobs (big/ corporate type companies driving dry vans with 90-100% turnover) good drivers migrate to niche Jobs. Owner/operators with secured contracts. Or specialized freight. Oversized/high security/more dangerous/requiring specific skills (chemical tankers, medical equipment, military contracts etc) Company drivers in such fields are getting fair pay, very much equal to low/entry level unambiguous programming jobs in $70000-$100000 range. I get paid both by miles(normally under 10%less than actual miles) and time I spend at customers. But, unlike in programming field, I can dictate my conditions. Which is normally would be work hard 8-10 months/year and play with hobbies rest of the time. But yes, it feels like we are getting squeezed harder and harder. The problem is very much same like everywhere in the country. Big/corporate type companies with low pay are getting bigger and bigger share of the market. Going into owner/operator business(equal to being contractor/consultant) means get plummeted with regulations and costs of health insurance. And, starting in December 2017, every truck must be equipped with eLog. Which is watching your every step and hackable by any kid with imagination. Hackability is written in the law. It requires eLog providing interface to truck's engine computer and having cellular contact with the outside world. Just look up eLog and trucking in google and cry and be nervous every time you see 18 wheeler.
- 6stringmerc 9y ago
  As a person with a Masters Degree & 10 years office experience who has found even White Collar work to cap out in the big city at $60,000, financially speaking, there is actually more potential in specialized driving than doing what I do now. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
bluedino 9y ago
Won't uber drivers feel this way when they have to drive to survive, and it's not just a novelty?
dingo_bat 9y ago
I'm surprised truck driving used to be a "road to the middle class" in USA. It's one of the shittiest jobs and requires almost zero higher brain function. I'm pretty sure you can train a brain damaged person to reasonably drive a truck across the country. This job should never have been able to lift anybody into middle class. Glad to see that truckers are feeling the pinch. If they are even a bit smart, they should leave and do something else. Even repairing trucks along the Highway may be a better job. Somewhat tangential, but I hate this notion people seem to harbour, that any kind of job should be able to provide dignified living. No. If your work is shitty and super replaceable and doesn't need much brain power you will live in poverty.
- analog31 9y ago
  In the past, a wage job like trucking wasn't a road to the middle class. It was the middle class. I grew up in what was supposedly a middle class neighborhood -- little tract houses, families with one wage earner, and one stay-at-home parent. A lot of the adults worked in the car plants, steel mill, machine shops, or other jobs that didn't require college education. Among those with college degrees, many didn't earn substantially more than the wage workers, e.g., school teachers, nurses, etc.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    Exactly, and that's what I'm surprised about.
- Voyage_wanderer 9y ago
  Apparently, you know very little about the job and how much brain function (mind you, I didn't say education) it requires. And how difficult it is.(just search London taxi drivers study in your favorite search engine) And, at its base lavel how underpaid it is. Last time I checked, 9/10 of Arkansas working population was involved in trucking or logistic industry. As a side note. Automizing this job will bring total and enormous poverty to US
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
In the US we're all 'Throwaway People'. Its just a matter of time before all our jobs here are automated (programming, lawyering, even art and design). And yet everybody here seems to think that they will get different treatment than detroit workers, or truckers, or who-ever is losing their job to automation. The rich have responded perfectly consistent to automation opportunities, and yet somehow programmers seem to think it will be different for them. Instead we spend all our time discussing the various merits of each of these jobs, and how its probably a good thing that they've been automated. Its like everyone thinks we're magically going to get Star Trek instead of Blade Runner.
- int_19h 9y ago
  Whether we'll get Star Trek or Blade Runner depends entirely on us. Automation enables both of these possibilities, but it also requires political action to adjust the economic system accordingly. Whether said political action takes the form of ballots and bills, or torches and pitchforks, remains to be seen - it could go either way.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    Modern democracy is an illusion. Until the pitchforks come out it will be one group after another thrown under the bus.
    - solonagathon 9y ago
      Actually it's the pitchforks that are an illusion. State control today makes subjects docile even when they have nothing to lose.
d-sc 9y ago
I drove a semi truck for a summer. Enjoyed it more than the summer I spent writing iOS and Android apps for a startup (Beartooth Radio). I was pretty unusual however in that on both sides of my route (300 miles) I had nice houses to stay in as well as a social and family life. Most truck drivers don't get this luxury and the infrastructure setup for trucks is absolutely awful from a social/health perspective.
tsm 9y ago
> What’s retirement? Sounds boring. I’m single, I have no money saved up, I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck. My fault. I didn’t think about retirement growing up. This is the first time I’ve ever made decent money in my life. > I bought me a brand-new car, a 2017 Chevrolet, two days after I hit this town. I don't know what the answer is, but there must be a better way of educating people about their finances.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- titanomachy 9y ago
  You mean a better way than car commercials? There's no money to be made by teaching people financial responsibility... Lots of money in convincing them to buy cars, though.
  - Neliquat 9y ago
    One could argue with one, people would buy more of the other. Now that most rent, a car will be the biggest single financial decision most people make in their lives. Kinda weird, but preparing people for it would help it happen more. I know people who feel they are too poor to even aspire to a car these days. Its not true, but it is the best of their knowledge. Surely there is wide reaching opprotunity to be had here.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ionised 9y ago
  It needs to start from a young age. Keeping people ignorant of savings, debt, credit etc. seems to benefit a certain section of the financial services though.
throwaway31298 9y ago
Frankly, this is probably what most of humanity will be like in the not-too-distant future.
losteverything 9y ago
Im not sure i would extrapolate the feelings of workers in an entire industry from a two day visit to a truck stop. If you interviewed my coworkers at the hated retailer-of-them-all you could cherry pick totally bad experiences. Or on the other hand you could find example after example how a walmart worker can buy their own house [1] and how every walmart has at least one employee making 6 figures, often 250k or more. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/69m275/walmart_employees_who_have_been_able_to_buy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/69m275/walmart_emp...
erikbye 9y ago
Some of the comments here... SMH. I think that a lot of you should cut back on the self-aggrandizing and realize that whether you are a software engineer or a trucker, very few people in the world do great and meaningful things.
Profragile 9y ago
If you are not happy with what you do, work to find another job. I would love to be a truck driver if it paid enough to get by around where I live. I'm sure a lot of people would.

190 points by 6stringmerc 9y ago

rwmj 9y ago

Does any government in the world have a sensible plan for what happens when (probably) 1 in 10 of the workforce become unemployable when self-driving cars/trucks take over their jobs?

throwaway2048 9y ago
I'm sure the mighty invisible hand will save us all in its bosom. What we need is faith.. err confidence in the market. All praises be to the one true god money.
gooseus 9y ago
I haven't heard of one, the conspiracy-theorist in me is reminded of all the ammunition that various federal agencies have been purchasing over the last decade and the militarization of local law enforcement. I'm not sure if that's an indication of any actual plan (certainly not a sensible one) or simply a hedge against the fact that nobody has one, or nothing at all. In any case, ignoring even just the truckers is a bad idea (let alone ups, fedex, usps, etc), they know the highways and the trucks and if they form a new Luddite group then any self-driving trucking company is going to be in for some surprise expenses when their trucks start disappearing and/or breaking down randomly in the middle of nowhere.
- snerbles 9y ago
  Those agencies tend to pre-purchase ammo years in advance, and the "militarization" of police is mostly from agencies receiving surplus equipment from the DoD for pennies on the dollar. Lord knows civilian cops don't have the same level of discipline - if I pulled one-tenth of that sort of abuse while I was an enlisted MP, I'd be rotting in a cell in Fort Leavenworth instead of writing this post. All that being said, I wouldn't be surprised if certain elites have noticed that public sentiment is resembling France in the 1790s. This whole surveillance apparatus is here to intercept the next Robespierre, national security be damned.
scrumper 9y ago
I haven't heard a single proposal yet. I could imagine a government passing a succession of laws which first required all autonomous trucks to have a supervising human on board (with a relaxation of existing maximum hour rules), operating under a new Trucking Supervisor License (which any current CDL holder is automatically granted); then slowly ratcheting up restrictions on actual CDLs (reduced hours, reduced permissible routes, reduced maximum weight) to make them less attractive; then ultimately ceasing issuance of new CDLs for heavy trucks once the final generation of drivers-cum-supervisors has retired.
- jtuente 9y ago
  The second part of your proposal doesn't make any sense in the scheme of transitioning humans out of that sector of the workforce. Increasing restrictions on CDL issuance doesn't make it any easier to transition drivers out, it kicks them out. I find it comparable to increasing the minimum wage of fast food workers as the food prep process is increasingly automated. It simply makes it more and more favorable to choose the automated option.
  - scrumper 9y ago
    It stops more coming in; existing holders keep driving (base case) or move to those supervisory roles. Ending the supervisory license and mandate is the end game, done once most of that last generation of CDL holders has hung up their hats. This is really about long distance, semi truck freight only. Local delivery (as someone mentioned above) is likely to need humans for a very long time.
atonse 9y ago
Apart from people putting out feelers about a Universal Basic Income, the next best thing I've heard is an informal proposal by Bill Gates about taxing automation [1] so we can better control the speed in which this stuff will upend everything, and buy more time for a more controlled transition. I say that as a developer who is one of the classes that will benefit more from automation (until we are also replaced). [1]: https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/ https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-j...
- malandrew 9y ago
  That sounds like a recipe for crippling the competitiveness of the US relative to other countries. It's not like China is going to slow down on the inevitable march towards automation. The absolute best scenario is for a country to automate as much as possible as quickly as possible to capture the productivity gains available on the global scale and then figure out how to tax gains (from automation or otherwise) domestically after the fact to support those in its population that have been displaced. If you think instability from unemployment is bad, it's certainly worse if you also have the problem of not having the resources to even try and address it.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    "Competitiveness" means nothing when only a fraction of the population prosper from those gains. On paper, America is significantly richer than it was in the 80's, yet incomes for the majority have been flat, social mobility has decreased, worker leverage has nearly disappeared, and quality of life for those outside of the coastal regions has gone down. There's no reason to push for exponential growth any further until we can correct income and wealth inequality a bit.
    - malandrew 9y ago
      It's better that a fraction of the population prosper that the can act philanthropically or that rest of the country can tax. The alternative is a fraction of the population of another country prosper over which we have no power to tax and whose philanthropy likely won't benefit Americans. The former gives you options, the latter affords you none.
rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
Not to mention entire small town economies, particularly in the West, are entirely economically dependent on truckers to stop by, rest, fuel up, visit prostitutes etc. Those people are gonna have a much harder time. Any owners of property will see the values of their assets plummet just as their jobs disappear.
- mikestew 9y ago
  I see the rare few towns along, say, the Dalton Highway on the way to Deadhorse, Alaska as being the first to go. Ignoring the weather for just a moment, that 400 miles of packed gravel would have to be an appealing target for autonomous vehicle engineers. Mostly straight, mostly flat (albeit with one non-trivial mountain pass), little traffic other than other trucks. And poof, there goes Coldfoot and Yukon River when humans don't stop anymore (except for a smattering of tourists). Or maybe the tank range is enough that trucks don't stop between Fairbanks and Deadhorse the way it is now, and I'm talking out my ass. All I know is that the traffic I saw last time I was up there consisted of a lot of trucks, a minivan, one camper at the Arctic Circle that said they were going to Deadhorse, and the remainder of tourist traffic consisting of a bunch of dumbasses like me on motorcycles.
  - niftich 9y ago
    I'd guess that a road like Dalton where weather-related and road condition-related hazards can suddenly appear, would make an exceedingly poor fit for self-driving non-guideway vehicles. Far better would be vehicles -- self-driving or otherwise -- on some sort of fixed guideway; given that most of the current usage of the road is for traffic solely between the two points-of-interest on either end. Special vehicles could still be used to access the pipeline running alongside at arbitrary points. A railway, potentially with extra equipment to assist with maintaining traction and negotiating grades, would accomplish this nicely, but is avoided due to its large up-front cost. While self-driving vehicles don't come with such large non-distributed up-front cost, they would be unreliable on such a road without permanent in-vehicle supervision, at which point they're not really making any of the intervening towns that provide driver services superfluous.
cmiles74 9y ago
In my experience, the US federal government tends to see this as an issue for those who are being unemployed to figure out for themselves. Not to be cynical, but I wouldn't be surprised if their solution boiled down to granting lots of money to private companies to try to tempt them into providing retraining.
golemotron 9y ago
Add the implosion of brick and mortar retail and we're in for some hard times. Automating away jobs increases inequality.
mullen 9y ago
Clinton did. She had a jobs retraining program that would have addressed people in industries that were in decline or going away. Ironically, the very people who would benefit from this program mostly vote for Trump and he is not going to do anything for them. Automation is coming for these people's jobs and there is nothing that can be done about that. Retraining is the only hope for these people but they have to stop acting entitled and start voting for people who will help them get retrained.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  I think rural America needs more than retraining programs, though you're correct that Donald Trump has made no mention of what he's actually going to do for coal workers. They need new and dynamic industries that treat the employees with respect and agency. Something entire communities can benefit from.
  - krapp 9y ago
    > Donald Trump has made no mention of what he's actually going to do for coal workers. He apparently plans to revive the coal industry by repealing environmental regulations and to put them back to work mining coal[0,1]. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/coal-jobs-trump-appalachia.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/coal-jobs-trump-... [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-27/trump-s-order-won-t-resurrect-jobs-of-miners-key-to-his-campaign https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-27/trump...
    - wavefunction 9y ago
      Forgive me for saying so, but I don't believe that's much of a realistic plan. Which to me is no plan at all.
      - krapp 9y ago
        It's not even remotely realistic, it's a populist fantasy. Nevertheless, that is the plan, to somehow force the world to turn the clock back on globalism to a time when American coal, steel and auto workers were relevant, and to beat back the tide of modernity until the world makes sense again.
jackhack 9y ago
The same thing that, at the turn of the century when one in ten people were employed in agriculture. (today it's closer to 1/100) they go find other work. Same goes for a farrier or a blacksmith or milkman, or ice delivery, or newpaper boy shouting "extra, extra - read all about it" from the street corner. In some cases, the job is simply gone. In others, the work still exists, but is nowhere as common.
- wonderwonder 9y ago
  I agree to a point but I think it is a different scenario today as you have unprecedented concentration of wealth in the top 1 % as well as the means of production. I have a hard time seeing how 5% of the nations workforce suddenly transitions to jobs that did not exist before. You also have an increase in the cost of living where most households require two incomes compounding the issue. With agriculture new jobs were created as people moved to cities and new communities were created. those cities already exist. Short of a sudden civilization focused effort to colonize mars, I just don't see it.
  - malandrew 9y ago
    I honestly don't think we pay enough attention to the rising cost of living. Cost of living should go down year over year due to productivity gains, but we see at least three line items becoming more expensive over time: (1) housing, (2) healthcare, and (3) higher education. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co... https://howmuch.net/articles/american-spending-past-75-years https://howmuch.net/articles/american-spending-past-75-years
    - cousin_it 9y ago
      Amusingly, these exact three things were free in the USSR. I benefited from that a lot. Though most other consumer goods were less affordable and lower quality in the USSR than in the US, and the economy was in worse shape overall. I wonder if there's a way to combine the two systems without people screaming blue murder.
petra 9y ago
I can see an alternate scenario happening: Let's say, for the sake of argument, self-driving cars and truck, fully deployed, are 10 years away. In that time we might see a move to many more drivers on the road, not less: A lot of growth in food delivery, e-commerce and in particular shuttles offering a fast,affordable, shared transport mode, as an attractive replacement for private cars in many places. Maybe, with all of that, instead of 1/10 we'll have 2/10 of the workforce as drivers. Consider the effect their salaries have on the families, and indirect support extended families has, we could see a really strong political base against self-driving cars. And from that point, all kinds of things could happen, to better manage or prevent that change.
- chii 9y ago
  > political base against self-driving cars. it doesn't matter how strong the political base is, when there's profit motive, the humans will lose to machines.
wonderwonder 9y ago
Its interesting as we are seeing a similar scenario play out in the energy sector with the shift away from coal. So far the government response has essentially been to ignore it or to use it as a scape goat for relaxing environmental protections. As far as having a real plan dedicated to finding people decent paying and more importantly fulfilling jobs, i believe the answer is for the most part no. Finland beginning a limited basic income trial is the closest I have seen. It is a kick the can scenario that has the possibility of massively reducing the quality of life of tens of millions of people.
cbanek 9y ago
No, not really. If anything, it's likely those people might have a lot higher risk of suicide. (deaths of despair) "Because at 54 years old, nobody wants me. I can’t retrain for anything else. For older people, you kind of get trapped. For every one that does well, there’s 30 that it destroys." That feeling that nobody wants you is a killer. It may be true, it may not, but that lack of hope just prevents anything good from happening. "I can't retrain for anything" - you're defeated right from the start, and it's obvious people don't even want to take the leap to try. It's hardest on people that had it good, and then lost it. Much worse than those that never had it, in that you feel like you're losing something. (endowment effect) Here's an interesting article the WaPo did about whites and a lack of hope. While there is a race component to it, I think it'd equally apply to other races where people have had a good/stable life, but lost it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/15/the-worst-thing-poor-whites-are-inheriting-could-be-a-lack-of-hope/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/15/the-w... http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/521083335/the-forces-driving-middle-aged-white-peoples-deaths-of-despair http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/52108333...
- watwut 9y ago
  From the article it seems that whites in the same situation as blacks have the same mortality rates - "If you compare whites with a high school degree or less with blacks with a high school degree or less, their mortality rates have converged." It suggests that the group having higher status previously does not change things all that much.
  - cbanek 9y ago
    I don't think it's about the groups having higher status or not, say whites vs blacks, but in the article they say they believe the cause is: "These deaths of despair have been accompanied by reduced labor force participation, reduced marriage rates, increases in reports of poor health and poor mental health. So we are beginning to thread a story in that it's possible that [the trend is] consistent with the labor market collapsing for people with less than a college degree. In turn, those people are being less able to form stable marriages, and in turn that has effects on the kind of economic and social supports that people need in order to thrive." Like you said, the rates are converging when they have a high school degree or less. These are the kinds of people that get hit the hardest when the labor market is collapsing. It's not that "whites had it before and now they don't", it's "I used to believe I was entitled to a job if I wanted to work hard, and that would pay enough to live, but now that doesn't seem to be true." People just don't know what to do now and are feeling hopeless.
dboreham 9y ago
Perhaps they are not drinking the koolaid you need to drink in order to believe that self-driving vehicles are likely to work well enough to be widely deployed in the next 20 years?
- galdosdi 9y ago
  Well, I wasn't sure either, but have you seen Waymo's current state-reported stats for mean miles driven between human takeover incidents? If not, look them up, they are very impressive. If you still disagree, please elaborate on _why_ you think this
- adrianN 9y ago
  Trucks travel a lot of highway miles. That is a significantly easier problem than general driving. Even if you don't believe that general driving will be solved in 20 years, you can easily imagine trucks doing their highway driving alone and only having the last couple of miles taken care of by humans.
6stringmerc 9y ago
Currently in the US the workforce population rate is at an all time low in almost 40 years. Basically the same number of people working as in the early 1970s. Yikes. My point is we're already in this situation, automation be damned, and until the tsunami of anti-intellectualism backs off, then smart people aren't going to have a chance to actually figure some of this out.
ryandrake 9y ago
How about when 9 in 10 become unemployable? Human nature is not ready for this world. We are dogmatic puritanical beasts obsessed with the idea that a person's value must be inextricably tied to one's economic output. We're more likely to see a worldwide make-work program where 1/2 of the people are paid to dig holes and the other 1/2 paid to fill them in, than we are to see something like universal basic income.
- iak8god 9y ago
  Not sure that's strictly Human Nature, but it's certainly the prevailing paradigm in this time and place.
skocznymroczny 9y ago
When will that happen? Self-driving cars/trucks aren't anywhere near being deployed on real roads. Also, as soon as there's an accident and the self-driving car kills a child, they will be postponed for at least 5 years until safety assurances are strengthened.

wehadfun 9y ago

Brother did this. The bad part about the job, as noted in the article, is the way the pay works. If the truck is not moving the driver is not getting paid. Stuck in traffic? Not paid, Takes a day to load your truck, no paid. Take a day to unload truck, not paid. Truckers sit for hours doing nothing and not getting paid. Sometimes trucks have to wait a day or two just to be assigned a load. Not paid.

savanaly 9y ago
I'm trying to think of reasons why it would be this way and what I can come up with is that if you were to pay by the hour instead of by the mile it would be an incentive to the drivers to take longer to complete routes. A classic principal-agent problem in other words. Is there any non-obvious reason besides that that anyone knows of?
- revicon 9y ago
  One guess is that most truck drivers were freelance (and many still are), owning their truck and getting paid per mile. Perhaps the rest of the industry standardized around that model regardless of the relationship the truck driver has with the parent company.
- petra 9y ago
  With today's apps, it's possible to solve that problem while still paying fairly. Maybe even without apps. But why ? why not dump the risk of delays at the weak party in this transaction ?
- kefka 9y ago
  Doesn't seem that hard to mix the two. We know a route from X to Y is $miles . Detours happen, but Google is getting to the point of calculating realtime incidents. But time could be fairly compensated, as could the miles on a vehicle. If you took a way longer route, it's on you. But if you're traffic jammed, it's not your fault, and should fairly be compensated. You know, that's what Unions are for.
  - 9y ago

nnq 9y ago

Q: Know that joke about the self-driving-car engineer who walks into a trucker bar? A: 'course you don't, he never lived to tell it...

draw_down 9y ago
It's always the engineers. People just can't bring themselves to hate the business people involved, somehow.
- Kevin_S 9y ago
  You're joking right? Here and in other software circles MBAs and other business people are constantly looked down upon as being a waste of time and money. I really doubt he was trying to make a point about engineers....

gumby 9y ago

It's important that there be jobs for people without much education. When I was in my twenties I volunteered as a reading instructor. One of the students was a trucker in his late 30s who had never learned to read. He had just memorized certain routes and took the same ones. He wanted to read so he could get better jobs. Not a dumb guy, but he'd slipped off the rails at a very early age, and dropped out of school as soon as he could. He did already know the alphabet and numbers. He was embarrassed to even talk about this with his peers. Abstract ideas of "job retraining" may sound great but I think they are generally unrealistic. Folks who figured they were "done with school" at 18 or even 22 and then find themselves unemployed in their 40s have a hard time changing direction in my somewhat limited experience. (But those students at community college who are aged between late 30 and 50? Really driven. It's embarrassing to compare typical college students to them.)

paulddraper 9y ago
Exactly this. And yet we seek for ever higher minimum wages, decreasing the number of low-skill jobs and push for even more automation.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Wages should be higher. Considering inflation, minimum wage workers in the 60's made more than they do today. The issue is labor surplus caused by both globalization and illegal immigration. Edit: To those downvoting me, could you explain why? Because minimum wage has decreased[1], wages have been stagnant[2], and globalization has undeniably affected the midwest negatively[3]. I suppose the impact of illegal immigration is up for debate, but when you have 10 million illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage in a country of 300 million, of course there will be wage suppression. [1]http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-table-4-39-minimum-wage-1960-2011/ http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-table-4... [2] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/09/15/u-s-household-incomes-a-49-year-perspective https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/09/1... [3]http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2012/04/09/the-global-midwest-richard-longworth/ http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2012/04/09/the-global-midwest...

mlinksva 9y ago

For other reasons, a large % of trucking should be de-subsidized and replaced with rail http://cityobservatory.org/the-real-welfare-cadillacs-have-18-wheels/ http://cityobservatory.org/the-real-welfare-cadillacs-have-1... What are working conditions of truckers relative to railroad workers?

oppositelock 9y ago
How is trucking subsidized?
- muninn_ 9y ago
  Highway funding for one. Instead of improving highway infrastructure with tax money, improve rail lines.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Indeed. Trucks cause several orders of magnitude more road wear than cars, because road wear scales like weight per wheel to the fourth power (this might not always be the perfect model http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=261 http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=261 but even so the general idea holds), and trucks weigh a whole lot. If trucks had to pay their fair share of road maintenance, shipping by truck would probably be noticeably more expensive.
  - trothamel 9y ago
    Federal highway funding appears to be mostly funded by gas taxes on highway users. It costs $44B, and $39B is funded by gas tax revenue. While $5B is still a lot of money, it's smaller than the $8B that funds mass transit.
    - ashark 9y ago
      Trucks do disproportionately more damage do the roads than they pay in taxes for fuel, though. You're subsidizing trucking every time you fuel up your passenger vehicle.

TYPE_FASTER 9y ago

Long haul is the only type of trucking I can see being replaced by autonomous vehicles in the next 10 years. Milk runs require, at least for the time being, driving through many surface streets, unloading product off the truck, and potentially upselling the customer using the relationship you build with them over time.

shostack 9y ago
I think if battery and drone technology increases sufficiently, we could see automated or semi-automated drone deliveries for the "last mile" for many things like that. Drones that can deliver small packages will likely disrupt quite a bit of the delivery scene. Why hire five delivery drivers for an area when you can have one who drives the drone launch truck, they drive to the middle of the zone, deploy the drones, monitor them (or offshore their piloting to remote pilots), wait for them to finish their run, rinse and repeat.

TYPE_FASTER 9y ago

lhuser123 9y ago

I guess is my chance to tell my story. I have been doing this job for a few years now. Driving all over the country, living in the truck, see the family one or two days a month, etc, etc. In summary not the best job but it allowed me to help my children. Now, how have I spent all those long and boring lonely hours ? Learning to code, yeah!. Always looking for something to do inside that truck, somehow started reading about computer programming, and, well, now I can't let go. I used to work in accounting(long time ago), so had an idea of what it was, but that was it. Now I know a little bit about Angular2, Ionic, Django, Docker, github, and things like that, and even bought a PC and installed Ubuntu after reading the book How Linux works. But what I really want express is this: It's amazing how much free learning material is offered by the open source community, and will never be able to thanks them enough. And yes, my hope is to someday get a good programming job!

tehlike 9y ago
Very good for you. There are always good jobs for driven people like yourself. I wish the best of luck to you, and kudos. And agree about opensource, I learned more from opensource than my formal CS education.
- lhuser123 9y ago
  Thanks. Comments like that about open source, helps me keep things in perspective whenever I struggle to understand something.
6stringmerc 9y ago
Thanks for sharing and I hope the value is great in your lifetime - as in, providing help your children but also give you a chance to discover something about yourself. I feel bad for a lot of the drivers who don't see their downtime as a way to try something or practice something. For me, it'd be rehearsing stories or talking out thoughts on a recorder to upload while I'm back driving, maybe play a little guitar to see it could speed up how quick people help me out. I think many hard jobs don't allow enough room for a person to engage in some self-improvement regularly, and that's unfortunate.

Voyage_wanderer 9y ago

Well. I guess, I should jump into the discussion. I'm a truck driver with 18 years of experience. Between driving jobs I have had 3 breaks when I was doing programming/software development. I had never liked programming jobs, i always enjoyed driving. Programming is something I can do based on my unfinished education. I'm an immigrant. I follow the industry news. Both industries, I guess. First. You wont believe how diverse the truck driving jobs are and how diverse truck drivers as a group. There is a fair populations of drivers with bachelor/masters degrees and pretty high IQs I had chosen the job because it is always there. No need for looking for one. After initial 2-3 years of entry level jobs (big/ corporate type companies driving dry vans with 90-100% turnover) good drivers migrate to niche Jobs. Owner/operators with secured contracts. Or specialized freight. Oversized/high security/more dangerous/requiring specific skills (chemical tankers, medical equipment, military contracts etc) Company drivers in such fields are getting fair pay, very much equal to low/entry level unambiguous programming jobs in $70000-$100000 range. I get paid both by miles(normally under 10%less than actual miles) and time I spend at customers. But, unlike in programming field, I can dictate my conditions. Which is normally would be work hard 8-10 months/year and play with hobbies rest of the time. But yes, it feels like we are getting squeezed harder and harder. The problem is very much same like everywhere in the country. Big/corporate type companies with low pay are getting bigger and bigger share of the market. Going into owner/operator business(equal to being contractor/consultant) means get plummeted with regulations and costs of health insurance. And, starting in December 2017, every truck must be equipped with eLog. Which is watching your every step and hackable by any kid with imagination. Hackability is written in the law. It requires eLog providing interface to truck's engine computer and having cellular contact with the outside world. Just look up eLog and trucking in google and cry and be nervous every time you see 18 wheeler.

6stringmerc 9y ago
As a person with a Masters Degree & 10 years office experience who has found even White Collar work to cap out in the big city at $60,000, financially speaking, there is actually more potential in specialized driving than doing what I do now. Thank you for sharing your perspective.

bluedino 9y ago

Won't uber drivers feel this way when they have to drive to survive, and it's not just a novelty?

dingo_bat 9y ago

I'm surprised truck driving used to be a "road to the middle class" in USA. It's one of the shittiest jobs and requires almost zero higher brain function. I'm pretty sure you can train a brain damaged person to reasonably drive a truck across the country. This job should never have been able to lift anybody into middle class. Glad to see that truckers are feeling the pinch. If they are even a bit smart, they should leave and do something else. Even repairing trucks along the Highway may be a better job. Somewhat tangential, but I hate this notion people seem to harbour, that any kind of job should be able to provide dignified living. No. If your work is shitty and super replaceable and doesn't need much brain power you will live in poverty.

analog31 9y ago
In the past, a wage job like trucking wasn't a road to the middle class. It was the middle class. I grew up in what was supposedly a middle class neighborhood -- little tract houses, families with one wage earner, and one stay-at-home parent. A lot of the adults worked in the car plants, steel mill, machine shops, or other jobs that didn't require college education. Among those with college degrees, many didn't earn substantially more than the wage workers, e.g., school teachers, nurses, etc.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Exactly, and that's what I'm surprised about.
Voyage_wanderer 9y ago
Apparently, you know very little about the job and how much brain function (mind you, I didn't say education) it requires. And how difficult it is.(just search London taxi drivers study in your favorite search engine) And, at its base lavel how underpaid it is. Last time I checked, 9/10 of Arkansas working population was involved in trucking or logistic industry. As a side note. Automizing this job will bring total and enormous poverty to US
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lowbloodsugar 9y ago

In the US we're all 'Throwaway People'. Its just a matter of time before all our jobs here are automated (programming, lawyering, even art and design). And yet everybody here seems to think that they will get different treatment than detroit workers, or truckers, or who-ever is losing their job to automation. The rich have responded perfectly consistent to automation opportunities, and yet somehow programmers seem to think it will be different for them. Instead we spend all our time discussing the various merits of each of these jobs, and how its probably a good thing that they've been automated. Its like everyone thinks we're magically going to get Star Trek instead of Blade Runner.

int_19h 9y ago
Whether we'll get Star Trek or Blade Runner depends entirely on us. Automation enables both of these possibilities, but it also requires political action to adjust the economic system accordingly. Whether said political action takes the form of ballots and bills, or torches and pitchforks, remains to be seen - it could go either way.
- mistermann 9y ago
  Modern democracy is an illusion. Until the pitchforks come out it will be one group after another thrown under the bus.
  - solonagathon 9y ago
    Actually it's the pitchforks that are an illusion. State control today makes subjects docile even when they have nothing to lose.

d-sc 9y ago

I drove a semi truck for a summer. Enjoyed it more than the summer I spent writing iOS and Android apps for a startup (Beartooth Radio). I was pretty unusual however in that on both sides of my route (300 miles) I had nice houses to stay in as well as a social and family life. Most truck drivers don't get this luxury and the infrastructure setup for trucks is absolutely awful from a social/health perspective.

tsm 9y ago

> What’s retirement? Sounds boring. I’m single, I have no money saved up, I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck. My fault. I didn’t think about retirement growing up. This is the first time I’ve ever made decent money in my life. > I bought me a brand-new car, a 2017 Chevrolet, two days after I hit this town. I don't know what the answer is, but there must be a better way of educating people about their finances.

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titanomachy 9y ago
You mean a better way than car commercials? There's no money to be made by teaching people financial responsibility... Lots of money in convincing them to buy cars, though.
- Neliquat 9y ago
  One could argue with one, people would buy more of the other. Now that most rent, a car will be the biggest single financial decision most people make in their lives. Kinda weird, but preparing people for it would help it happen more. I know people who feel they are too poor to even aspire to a car these days. Its not true, but it is the best of their knowledge. Surely there is wide reaching opprotunity to be had here.
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ionised 9y ago
It needs to start from a young age. Keeping people ignorant of savings, debt, credit etc. seems to benefit a certain section of the financial services though.

throwaway31298 9y ago

Frankly, this is probably what most of humanity will be like in the not-too-distant future.

losteverything 9y ago

Im not sure i would extrapolate the feelings of workers in an entire industry from a two day visit to a truck stop. If you interviewed my coworkers at the hated retailer-of-them-all you could cherry pick totally bad experiences. Or on the other hand you could find example after example how a walmart worker can buy their own house [1] and how every walmart has at least one employee making 6 figures, often 250k or more. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/69m275/walmart_employees_who_have_been_able_to_buy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/69m275/walmart_emp...

erikbye 9y ago

Some of the comments here... SMH. I think that a lot of you should cut back on the self-aggrandizing and realize that whether you are a software engineer or a trucker, very few people in the world do great and meaningful things.

Profragile 9y ago

If you are not happy with what you do, work to find another job. I would love to be a truck driver if it paid enough to get by around where I live. I'm sure a lot of people would.