No Truck With Drivers

Tesla: Making Drivers Obsolete

by Paul Grimsley

Truck driving is a pretty well-paid job, because it isn’t an easy one. A lot of endurance is involved, and it is not a job that easily combines with having a family. For some people though, it is the perfect job — they like driving and they like the degree of isolation that it offers them.

There are not too many jobs where you can be unskilled and earn so much. Not to suggest that good driving is not a skill, but the runway is perhaps shorter than a lot of industries.

In a technological society in the stage that we are at, having technical skills such as programming, or skills that cannot be easily replicated by computers is essential. The other thing that works is to have a job such as plumbing or electrician, where it cannot be outsourced to foreign labor, because you have to be in the same geographical area in order to carry out the work.

But if factory workers can get replaced, and maybe at some point surgeons, how long before all the jobs in-between disappear. And don’t rely on the notion that there are still going to have to be people to repair the machines, because if a machine can build a car; if a rep-rap machine can build copies of itself, then what is to stop it from repairing other machines? An entire robot ecology can develop to support the expansion of the AI takeover.

It’s strange that all the attention in the media has been focused on the notion of killer robots, when it might be better employed looking at a way to help people adjust to the coming change in the job market. When the Tesla semi doesn’t need a driver, what then?

After the machines become sentient the problem changes — then you have to start questioning the ethics of slaving an intelligent being to a singular task, and if that becomes a problem, then gaps are going to enter in again. How long is the time-line on this? According to Moore’s Law it’s going to roll like a juggernaut.

Who could have guessed the ramifications of the evolution of the mobile phone?

Once you get past the loss of something that the change to self-driving trucks brings in, then you have to start looking at what the possibilities are, or you just curl up and die. Automation brought similar fears, and society survived.

Is Universal Basic Income a solution? The lack of money isn’t even necessarily the problem. How are people going to adapt when there are no 40 hour work weeks? Wait for depression to spike — wait for people to start smashing robots so they can work again. Wait for truck drivers to start sabotaging smart trucks