We Have Nothing to Fear from Driverless Trucks but Fear Itself
As someone working in the autonomous vehicle space, I read a lot of commentary about autonomous vehicle development. One thing I’m seeing more and more frequently is a predominance of baseless fearmongering about driverless trucks.
Here’s two examples of driverless truck fearmongering:
The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs
While the efficiency gains are real — too real to pass up — the technology will have tremendous adverse effects as well. There are currently more than 1.6 million Americans working as truck drivers, making it the most common job in 29 states.
The loss of jobs representing 1 percent of the U.S. workforce will be a devastating blow to the economy. And the adverse consequences won’t end there. Gas stations, highway diners, rest stops, motels and other businesses catering to drivers will struggle to survive without them.
Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck
This is where we’re at and this is what we face as we look towards a quickly approaching horizon of over 3 million unemployed truckers and millions more unemployed service industry workers in small towns all over the country dependent on truckers as consumers of their services.
The removal of truckers from freeways will have an effect on today’s towns similar to the effects the freeways themselves had on towns decades ago that had sprung up around bypassed stretches of early highways. When the construction of the interstate highway system replaced Route 66, things changed as drivers drove right on past these once thriving towns. The result was ghost towns like Glenrio, Texas.
These guys aren’t the only ones, just Google the topic.
Yes, millions will be put out of work — but millions more jobs will be created. We have done this over and over and over in human history and the reality is that each time we put millions out of work with automation, jobs get easier, pay goes up, wealth increases, and lifestyle standards increase.
During the last major cycle of automation, when we shifted from secretarial pools and thick layers of middle-managers, into desktop computers and digital data management systems, labor force participation didn’t go down, it reached a local maxima!
Would ya look at that!? From the 80s when the computer revolution started until the mid-00s when the digital economy came up to full speed, we actually increased our labor force participation. If changing the roles and status of the interstitial tissue of most businesses of all kinds didn’t negatively affect labor force participation, why the heck would changing the roles and status of trucking do so?
“Well”, you might say, “trucking affects more people.” You know what affects even more people than that, I might ask? Food. Everyone I know eats it, at least, though I suppose your experience might differ from mine. 200 years ago, 90/100 people were farmers. Now 2/100 persons are farmers. Did life somehow get worse?
No. Life did not get worse. Work got easier, standards of living went up. The economy grew tremendously. Why would we want to get in the way of that?
We automated secretaries and middle managers with desktop computers and MS Office. We’ve automated a thousand industries (do you know many cobblers, ferriers, smiths, chandlers, or coopers?), and every time, despite the temporary pain of adjusting to new skill expectations the world gets better.
The only response that society needs is to sit back and let the future happen. Human labor will always be in demand, it’s just that the type of labor shifts over time. Markets take time to adjust to new expectations, and there is temporary pain, but life goes on and things get better.
Specific to the trucker issue, here’s some reality.
- There’s a 30k worker shortage in the industry today — the unfilled positions will be the first “workers” displaced
- Per-mile incomes have gone from $0.30 to $0.70 because of this shortage
- Turnover in the market is >100%, which means the average worker stays in the industry less than a year
- The average age of drivers is 55, and going up yearly
This market is denuding itself of workers naturally, without actively putting anyone out of work (other than retirement or dissatisfaction). Driving a truck long distance is just a terrible job that few people truly want. You’re sitting motionless for hours, which is extremely unhealthy. You’re away from your family for extended periods of time, which is another kind of unhealthy, not just for the driver but for their family. It’s mentally, physically, and emotionally taxing to drive a truck, and the transition to automation will happen at about the same time that the work force dissolves away on its own.
Consider what driverless trucks need — engineers, researchers, developers, designers, and the like. More people are needed in the entire supply chain than were needed previously. This is what happens when humanity creates efficiencies, it allows us to invest more labor into ever-more-valuable endeavors. These jobs, by the way, pay more than trucking jobs do as well.
From The Guardian article linked earlier in this piece:
Their conclusion is unremittingly cheerful: rather than destroying jobs, technology has been a “great job-creating machine”. Findings by Deloitte such as a fourfold rise in bar staff since the 1950s or a surge in the number of hairdressers this century suggest to the authors that technology has increased spending power, therefore creating new demand and new jobs.
Read that again: technology has increased spending power, therefore creating new demand and new jobs. This is kind of obvious if you think about it — by spending less on every good that is transported at some time in its supply chain, you can spend those savings on something else. And spending money on something else is going to increase demand for those “something elses”, which will increase employment in those sectors.
One might lament that STEM jobs require more education than trucking. And… ? Knowing more is a bad thing? We no longer think of being able to read as some advanced skill, but the reality is, reading IS an advanced skill, or at least, it was an advanced skill for most of human history.
But as human culture evolves, things that are at one time “advanced” become commonplace, then eventually are fully subsumed into the basic skill-set expectation to be a member of society. People in their 80s might consider Microsoft Word to be high-tech and scary, but a 2-year old doesn’t care what technological limitations the elderly face. Before long, programming classes will take over typing courses in middle and high-school because the commonality of typing on a computer will subsume the skill of typing and translate it into a fundamental expectation for participating in society.
Now, you might harken back to Santens’ argument about the tangential economic impacts of autonomous, the diners and gas stations and other things. Let’s not forget — these things didn’t always exist. The parents of the people working these jobs, had different jobs. And yet the world continued going around the sun, oddly enough! All aspects of the economy are always in flux, and always will be. This is a good thing. Something that is not changing is dead, and I do not want to live in a dead society. Do you?
The world is urbanizing. These small towns aren’t dying because of autonomous trucks or Facebook or anything silly like that. Small towns are dying because young people by and large prefer to live in cities!
What else do young people prefer? Not driving! The value older persons place on driving is an artifact of car ownership being a mid-century demonstration of wealth, it is not some fundamental aspect of humanity.
We have to let our children, and everyone else’s children, make the choices that are right for them, and for their future, not force upon them a reality they don’t want, out of some misguided paternalistic feeling that we know exactly the right way things “should” be.
If you want your reality to win, it dang well better be able to compete. We do not live in Kandor, the Bottled City, unable to grow, change, or evolve. Guess what? Surgery is painful. Wildly painful! But not getting surgery is worse! Temporary pain begets long-term improvement in condition.
Furthermore, the money that currently circulates in the trucking economy will not simply vanish. The money from that economic sector will be re-allocated into places it can be better used. This reallocation will result in new investments elsewhere, creating new employment options and raising the standard of living. Just like every other automation cycle.
The worst outcome is to put outdated concepts on permanent life-support out of some misguided attempt to “preserve” something — a job, a town, a zeitgeist, an ineffable feeling of lost grandeur. Only the dead live in the past.
When the trucks drive themselves, the world will get better! Fewer persons will die in terrible wrecks. Goods will arrive sooner, and at a lower cost. A really stressful and unhealthy job will eventually disappear, and the people employed in those jobs today will find new jobs they like better. People will reallocate resources to meet demand. Life will go on.
Just like always. Throughout all of human history.
The thing is, people are smart. We are adaptable. We are creative. And no machine is ever going to replace us, even if we create AI, even if we automate everything. We humans will always find ways to be useful. That’s what we do!
