Driverless trucks are delivering the future.
A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. No technology will automate away more jobs — or drive more economic efficiency — than the driverless truck.
My attention was piqued by this article Tech Crunch published about driverless trucks. Seems simple enough; driverless trucks are an interesting idea, a sign of the times and the article covers it well.
But within it is a really a powerful message about where technology is going to take the economy.
The market is going to pick robots over humans.
Driverless trucks are a big deal because they change the economics of the industry dramatically. Labour is not only the biggest cost in trucking (70%), because human drivers need to rest, it has a big impact on how fast the goods can move.
Driverless trucks will change the game considerably.
…technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost…
The market will get twice as much trucking, for one quarter the price. And the trucking of goods is currently a big factor in the cost that consumers pay in store too, so these changes will also mean cheaper things for everyone. Companies that don’t adopt, won’t compete.
There are approximately 1.6 million truck drivers in the USA today. That’s a lot of jobs facing a fast sunset. And it’s not just the drivers in the trucks. A big part of the trucking industry sits on the side of the roads. The motels, the truck stop diners, the gas stations…. These are all economies about to be massively changed from the ripples of one technology leap.
Douglas Rushkoff has been writing about this lately — the way jobs are being created in the gap between human labour and full automation, but that those jobs are transitory, and when they disappear, they’ll leave people out of work. The simplest example is supermarkets hiring people to help you with self-checkout terminals — until self-checkout terminals are so ubiquitous and so “smart” that you don’t need the human helper anymore, and those jobs disappear. For the longer version, check out what he’s got to say about Uber — he says drivers are just bridging the gap between the taxi industry and Uber’s pursuit of self-driving cars, at which point we’ll no longer need Uber drivers. New jobs with sticking power are going to be the ones that put us in the programmers’ seats.
The speed of development is getting faster and the leaps are getting bigger.
Driverless trucks are a big leap forward and this level of change isn’t slowing down — or limited to road transport. Last week the world’s first one-person passenger drone was cleared for testing.
Imagine what one-person flying machines are going to do for the transport industry — for the legal industry, for policing, for managing the air space security, for traffic jams, for motorbike sales and rooftop parking!? There is a lot we need to figure out of course, but the future we are going to be living through is going to be shaped by the development and adoption of these big leaps ahead.
Will your job exist in 10 years? 15 years? 20 years? 30 years?
It’s quite a scary question. It’s really hard to grasp the speed of change we are going through. Just half a generation ago it was really sensible to think about getting trained to stick to one stable career for your entire working life. It made sense to invest three or four or fiveor even 10 years in training to secure a lifetime of stable income and employment in return.
Skip forward just 30 years to today and, for most of us, that simply isn’t the world we live in anymore. Even those that saw the internet and mobile connectivity coming never imagined the impact it would have or how upside-down things would turn.
Skip forward 3o more and it really is anyone’s guess.
Industries change, skills change, learning changes.
One thing we can all bank on is change. The skills that we will all need to be successful at work in the future are changing faster, and moving further and further away from the skills we learn in years of formal training.
The technology sector is leading out on this trend. In Stack Overflows 2016 industry survey, the large majority of working software developers (69%) were self taught. As innovation keeps pushing out the edges of the map, learning on the job is becoming the new normal, especially in the professional, digital world.
Which opens a big question.
How do we train people properly for technology careers when we know the future will be so different from today?
This is one of the core questions that sits at the heart of Enspiral Dev Academy. The organisation exists to train great web developers, and help them launch successful careers in tech.
If you’re passionate how technology gets built, how the internet works, how the ‘big problems’ get solved, and keen on the idea of learning fast in a dynamic environment, then considering working in tech could be a great move.
