The "shift" as you put it will be very temporary though. It will quite quickly become common place for all commercial vehicles to be self directing once some vehicles are. (Think FedEx, UPS leading this charge)
That said, that "shift" is when it's going to be a really, really shitty time to be a truck driver, as the influx of people competing for fewer and fewer jobs is going to drive prices (wages) down into pits of dark despair.
Everyone is crying doom and gloom but I see a mostly seamless transition.
The more cargo management responsibilities a driver has the later they will get automated. These are also the most senior and well paid drivers. Truck drivers who will be replaced first are going to be the steering wheel holders that drag a dry van from loading dock to loading dock. These are also the most junior and poorly paid drivers.
As automation takes over we'll have fewer people taking entry level trucking jobs (because the jobs won't exist or the pay will be too low) and the industry will automate the harder jobs as the supply of experienced enough drivers slowly drives up and pushed the cost of a driver for those jobs high enough to be worth automating.
I'm sure some people will lose their jobs but I doubt we'll see millions of unemployed truckers and the value of a CDL tank.
Maybe ... before that happens, however, there will be a major shift in the most common vocation in nearly every state in the US. 3 million truckers will need major vocational re-training, and that doesn't even begin to count the many other services and industries that are dependent on truckers. See https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-goin...
Self driving trucks probably are going to be considered a national security issue going forward. We can't have cargo sitting around waiting for humans in a health crisis. That will indeed be a huge gut punch to that segment of the labor market. The only slightly silver lining is that trucking has very high turnover so the number put out of their jobs will be less than you might think. What will hurt though will be the loss of opportunity to be a truck driver, even if only for a few years.
I'm not sure if drivers will be completely eradicated, though. The vehicle may still have an operator for non-highway situations, and given there's already a shortage in truck drivers, perhaps the career will slowly ramp down as automation slowly ramps up. I used to think SDC and automation would be fast and furious, but the opposite has occurred so far.
A TED talk with Andrew McAfee made an interesting observation: once long-haul trucks are fully automated (the tech exists, it's just a matter of time), there will be a massive number of truckers suddenly out of work. Yes, other types jobs will no doubt be created, but i'm not sure many of those truck drivers will be in a good position to make the transition.
If truck driving is already a high turnover job, there won't be displacement of a nature that gets political attention. Firms just won't hire new truckers to replace the ones that leave. Trucking will be in transition a long time. The first self driving trucks will be fully attended. Then maybe they are unattended, but only on highways. Self driving in the city is likely years away.
This wouldn't be like shutting a factory or mine where people have worked for years and where they hoped to retire from. By the same token, you see self checkout machines everywhere, parking garages without manned booths, automatic toll roads, self-serve kiosks at restaurants, and self-serve gas with pay at the pump. No one ever paid any attention to displacement from those jobs because they are high turnover anyway.
The trucking industry is huge (say 1.5 million truckers alone, plus rest stops etc), and it will largely have disappeared as a result of this. Uber may want drivers in the cab now, but when it's reliable enough, I imagine it makes sense to just have drop-off points for the last few miles.
In some sense it will be among the biggest economic transformations in recent history. There have been far bigger ones, but I can't think of one that has happened in the short timeframe expected of self-driving trucks. I don't think this point is controversial.
At the same time, I've been very curious to see the overall economic impact, especially with displacing such a huge percentage of the US workforce. Interestingly, there's already a shortage in truckers per wikipedia. I found this fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trucking_industry_in_the_Unite...
I imagine that people going into trucking see the writing on the wall. It will put a lot of truckers out of business, but the turnover is already crazy high, with many truckers already leaving the business entirely.
This could be a very interesting case study on how to manage worker displacement effectively. I don't think anyone here is seriously advocating paying more money and lives for goods just to keep trucking jobs up (although more and more on HN one has to write 'defensively' to curb misinterpretation, i.e. I feel compelled to shout that I think this is a good idea). But it would be interesting to see where truckers are getting new jobs already, and whether those industries could use more. Are truckers leaving the industry going back into some other industrial job, back to school, unemployment?
One important factor to consider is that this won't happen overnight. Once autonomous trucks actually hit the roads, there will be a long period where the drivers will still have to be behind the wheel. And even then, there is a lot of other work a truck driver does other than drive. My father runs a small trucking business, and according to him, the logistics are a way bigger annoyance than the actual driving. You have to time deliveries, you have to unload the cargo without damaging anything, you have to repair the truck (or call a tow / mobile repair) you have to take photos of any potentially damaged products, you have to make sure there are people there to sign off on a successful delivery, you need to find the right people when nobody knows anything about your delivery, etc... The job sounds pretty cut and dry, but in reality, every delivery has some new issue and the driver is usually the one that ends up dealing with it.
I'm not saying that the job won't be automated eventually, but the actual driving is only a part of the job. And even when the automation begins to happen, I think there will be time for them to transition into new roles.
On the trucking side of things, I think it'll actually be a positive for the industry in the short term (a decade or two), before the jobs really start to dry up.
Rail freight will probably be impacted by automated trucks sooner than road freight, weirdly enough.
My guess about the industry's progression:
* Automated trucks take over long haul routes (e.g. highway driving) between major distribution hubs, and previous long haul drivers move to middle and last mile routes.
* Shippers begin to shift freight away from trains and towards trucks (because price of trucks goes down, speed of delivery goes up)
* Automated truck centric freeways (or lanes) begin to show up, allowing for higher density and speeds of truck traffic. Price further falls, volume increases. More jobs created in short and medium haul trucking to handle increased volume of things being shipped.
* Automated trucks begin to be able to handle medium haul (inner city between warehouses), jobs start declining.
* Automated trucks begin to be able to handle short haul (last mile), truckers are a truly dying breed at this point.
Heh, for auto-driving trucks it very likely will mean suddenly 10's of thousands out of work.
And folks out of work are finding it harder and harder to find word. Automation's ultimate goal is putting us all out of work. We're in a transition, and admitting that will help guide policy from here on.
Pretty much every single truck driver I've talked to on the subject is in deep denial. They believe that the weird layout of the loading dock at some warehouse could never be navigated by automated system or that them handing documents to someone at the point of delivery cannot be automated. They don't seem to understand just how much capital businesses are willing to spend to get rid of reoccurring labor costs.
If there are any bright spots in all of this, it's that trucking has a high turnover rate already so few will directly lose their jobs and that trucking in general is rough on the body and the mind. The difficult question to answer is where will all of the people who would have gone into trucking going to go instead?
A truck driver's job is more than, uh, driving the truck. Inspection of the cargo and the conditions of the truck are things unlikely to be automated any time soon even if feasible (there will be regulation resistance at the very least). Yard maneuvers too, or you would have seen fully automated airport ground traffic management by now. The job would pay less, not sure by how much, but my take is that the job will not go away entirely. In fact there might be more drivers hired with each driver serving fewer hours per week.
Disclaimer: I am waiting for my CDL Class-A test ;)
I don't think the change is coming quickly, actually. I think truck drivers have a good 10 years before they're out of a job, both due to technology (self-driving cars won't be fully autonomous for at least 5 years), and due to regulation/adoption (add another 5+ years). This actually leaves them less of an excuse to start retraining now, but it's also a problem because it gives most of them an excuse to dismiss the tech.
Its not the case because its unlikely that the technology will be adopted everywhere, simultaneously, overnight; it will be adopted gradually over time; it'll probably first manifest in the job market as a decline in growth in trucking jobs, then a decline in trucking jobs, rather than going from the existing pattern one day to no humans working as truckers the next.
Exactly - we'll lose the long haul easier to automate truck driving jobs first and that will decimate the employment of the field. That's the easy part.
Trucker wages are not low. It's a middle class job in many cases and a decent semiskilled job in others.
Most of those roles managing bullshit at the head end will go away as the robot fleets consolidate and the current carriers die off. Customers will have to take or leave on whatever terms the carrier demands -- just like the old railroad days.
In a 2018 paper, UC–Berkeley sociologist Steve Viscelli suggested that in the most likely scenario, long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages, will be replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous vehicles through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle less well than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs changing.
I'm not sure if the author is claiming that the job displacement will be 1:1. Does anyone honestly think it would be 1:1? I don't think so. And if more jobs are disappearing than are being created, there is a net job loss; also the author agrees that the new jobs would be lower pay. Whether jobs will be created in entirely and unpredictably new industries is besides the point. Yang's point is that everyday people are inadequately prepared to make that transition to new jobs. He frequently cites data that the US federal government sucks at job retraining.
IF various tech companies are successful in their endeavors (and yes, that's a big if), it will be true that a lot of people will need to transition to something new. And given recent demos by various tech companies for voice AI tech (yeah, Google's really was impressive when it came out, and it will probably get better until it's commercialized one day), self-driving tech (I'm a skeptic for the short-term, but it will probably happen in the long-term), and etc, I think the subject is ignored at the working population's peril. Never mind self-checkout, which is already a reality and steadily gaining ground.
That said, that "shift" is when it's going to be a really, really shitty time to be a truck driver, as the influx of people competing for fewer and fewer jobs is going to drive prices (wages) down into pits of dark despair.
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