
As Tech Evaporates Jobs, “The Tipping Point Will Be Driverless Trucks” - zt
https://www.buzzfeed.com/coralewis/as-tech-evaporates-jobs-tipping-point-will-be-driverless-tru
======
Animats
It's incremental, but the jobs go away. Here, for your entertainment, is an
automated container port in Rotterdam under construction.[1] It was finished
in 2014. Here it is in full operation.[2] There are no people on those
container cranes. There are a few people in a control room. The little trucks
moving the containers around are self-driving. They're also battery powered,
and battery swap is automated. The cranes that move containers around the
container stacks are totally automated. There are no people in the cargo-
handling section of the terminal.

This is not the future. This is last year's technology, operating right now.

It's quite likely that the first trucking to be automated will be to and from
container ports.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLf0m3ucV3M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLf0m3ucV3M)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEk2v4RyFh4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEk2v4RyFh4)

------
jMyles
I find the obsession with "jobs" to be one of the most sour elements of the
corportocratic dialogue of the political and economic systems.

Many people, including most professional drivers, will be happy not to have to
do the chore anymore. They don't want or need jobs, they want and need
fulfillment of their wants and needs.

Stood next to the monumental task of actually automating the matter around us
to please us (which, if our purpose in doing so is good, is a mitzvah), the
creation of a system which fulfills these wants and needs without regard to
any connection to a "job" seems straightforward and doable.

~~~
Udik
Right, let's stop talking about jobs. Who's gonna give to today's truck
drivers the money to pay the mortgage they have to keep paying for the next 20
years?

~~~
a-saleh
Well, that is how we quickly go to the argument of "Lets replace the
complicated social security system with basic livable wage being handed out to
ever-one." comoonlz known as universal basic income.

If one looks at it from economic-theory or game-theory perspective it sounds
like a solution to many problems, nobody knows yet if that would work in
practice though, especially on large scale.

As far as I know, open questions that remain are:

\- Will we be able to afford it? Sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations can
show, that if we introduced i.e UBI in Germany for everybody (80 mil) on a
level of minimum wage (1473 E ?), it would eat their federal budget for
Ministry of Health and Social Security and Ministry of Economics and Labour

\- What would be the unintended consequences? (i.e on small scale uneployment
rose by single digits, but we can't really tell what will happen on country
scale)

~~~
eru
We could raise taxes much higher with less economic impact, by solely taxing
land rents.

(Land prices go up, as other taxes go down, as you can see on the Swiss/German
border. Taxing land rents has no economic deadweight loss, since the supply of
land is fixed.)

~~~
froogle
Not entirely true; the disadvantage to land taxes is that they discourage
prospecting and finding things like oil. You can ameliorate that in a number
of ways, but land taxes aren't entirely without their problems.

~~~
eru
That's an interesting point. And yes, it's entirely fixable.

At the most crude, you could separate natural resources from the rest of the
land rights, people already do that.

By the way if memory serves right Germany, which doesn't have general land
taxes, already doesn't let you own mineral resources below your land by
default. Would be interesting to see what effect that regulation already has
on people prospecting.

------
anoplus
Lack of social safety nets creates unhealthy bias toward preserving jobs that
could be automated completely. UBI (universal basic income) actually gives
everyone motivation to further automate - the key to freedom. I expect to see
more titles about automation and UBI, as I think it is highly crucial.

~~~
jMyles
I had a thought while driving the other day that an interesting experiment
might be to have a government whose only program is UBI.

~~~
nefitty
That would be a conservative's dream government. The reason UBI is supported
on both sides of the aisle is because it touches on the priorities of the left
and right. As far as I can tell, some conservatives advocate for UBI and
removing all other social safety nets. I don't think this is exactly what
everyone has in mind when they consider the program.

~~~
chillacy
Yes, this seems to be a divide in UBI supporters. I think some services can be
removed with UBI, but not all. In particular, unpredictable expensive things
like healthcare bills will still be a problem even with UBI, since not
everyone will know how to properly save.

~~~
majewsky
And in some cases, you just can't properly save. If I'm living off UBI in
order to do volunteer work in my local community, how am I going to save
enough to cover a sudden 100,000 $ cancer treatment bill?

~~~
eru
Isn't that what insurance is for? (And you can use your UBI to buy insurance.)

~~~
majewsky
Iff the insurance is affordable on UBI.

~~~
eru
Sure. But for that calculation, it doesn't matter too much whether the
insurance is provided publicly (think Britain's NHS) or by private companies.

------
PhilWright
I think the panic over automation of cars and trucks is a little premature. At
the moment you cannot buy a car or truck that will auto drive. I mean auto
drive in the sense of not needing a driver at all. Until you can completely
remove the driver then there is no danger to the taxi/trucking industry, it
will be only a driver aid in the same way cruise control is a driver aid.

There is a huge gap between Google testing a driverless car, with a person in
it for emergencies, and actually seeing hordes of driverless taxis of trucks
on our streets.

I can imagine a new trend with bored teenagers. Jump in front of the
driverless car or truck and watch it emergency stop. Then run away. Or wait
for the news report where all the driverless cars in the city have gone to the
same car park because a hacker thought it would be hilarious. Just one truck
accident that wipes out a few children and the trucks will be taken off the
road. After all, if one truck has the bug then they all do. When a person
makes a mistake we don't stop all trucks because we blame the person, when a
software version crashes then they all could crash.

~~~
imtringued
>I can imagine a new trend with bored teenagers. Jump in front of the
driverless car or truck and watch it emergency stop.

I'm not sure why it being automated would change how braking physics work. An
emergency stop at 50km/h will still result in a minimum 25m braking distance
no matter who is behind the seat.

~~~
bertil
Having a fairly guaranteed reaction (from software) rather than randomly
effective human reflexes turns what was a dangerous game into a prank.

~~~
machinshin_
but since the truck can/will have external camera mounts, the interaction gets
recorded and the kid gets _ARRESTED_? :)

------
Razengan
A century ago there were people [1] whose job was to manually light street
lamps. How did they transition into the advent of electricity?

There's been countless other jobs where previously-essential human
participation was rendered unnecessary by technology, sometimes with entire
social classes finding themselves unemployed; why should this time be any
different? How can it be different?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter)

Also interesting: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-
boy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy)

~~~
ensiferum
Because now through technology the compression rate will be enormous. How many
new jobs do you think will be created when those 3.5m trucker jobs are
automated? Probably some small fraction.

And now the main thing to keep in mind that this will happening across work
domains and technologies. A truck driver can't go on and switch career to a
factory worker because those jobs are gone too!

In the future more and more of these laboros grunt jobs will become automated.
Just a while ago there was news how Foxconn cut 60k jobs at a _single_ factory
through automation.

And this is the right way to go. Why should any human or sentient being be
forced to work a boring mundane job in some factory when machines can do it?
The only goal for the human race as a whole should be the liberation of people
from back breaking labor. The only question is now, how will our societies
react to this forthcoming change in the system. One way or another this change
will come and if we're not prepared it will turn into dystopia everywhere with
masses of the people sidelined out of jobs which means without means to
support themselves or their families. Crime, poverty and massive slum cities
are the only way this can turn out. Not to mention that since the consumer
base is gone the whole world economy will simply collapse.

~~~
shubhamjain
Even if driverless transport technology arrives, it would take quite sometime
for it to be adopted on a massive scale. In that time, there would be a rapid
rise in number of companies around this industry which would create a lot
better work than those mundane jobs.

I think people are underestimating how many new jobs could be created.
Driverless trucks would give rise companies selling fleet tracking software,
integrated inventory management software, and automated vehicle servicing
applications. Imagine hundreds of such companies, employing engineers, sales
people, marketers, customer success guys and you have a world where you think
- "Did we really have humans to do that?"

~~~
roel_v
"Even if driverless transport technology arrives, it would take quite sometime
for it to be adopted on a massive scale."

It will take as much time as factories can produce 100's of millions self-
drive retro-fit kits, or alternatively, the average write-off time of a truck,
say 5 years? Because 95% of companies that don't start transitioning to self-
driving the day after it becomes available on the general market, will not be
able to compete within the year or 2 after.

"I think people are underestimating how many new jobs could be created."

A company providing a fully automated solution for all of that is, what,
300-500 people? So let's say there would be 10 of those (which is too many,
consolidation and all). Let's say that we round that up (double) to 10000, and
_then_ say we're off by a factor of 10. That's 100k, vs 3.5 million jobs now
(counting just truckers, and just in the US, so not even counting all
'associated' jobs).

This whole 'but there will be new jobs' thing doesn't stand up to even the
tiniest bit of math, even with very generous assumptions. And that's not even
considering the nature of those new jobs. Someone who is a truck driver now,
isn't going to be a software engineer, or even a sales guy. There are going to
be vast portions of the population who will not be qualified to do any of the
jobs that the automated ones will generate.

I don't know the solution, and I don't think UBI is it, but what I do know is
that the commercial availability of self-driving cars will hit the labor
market like a Mack truck (pardon the pun).

~~~
shubhamjain
I agree that you can't replace 3.5M truckers with highly technical jobs but
this is an oversimplified analysis that doesn't consider how industries will
grow. When Power Loom was introduced, it was often a centre of vandalism
because it was destroying jobs. Within few decades, the textile industry was
employing more people than it was ever before.

Replacing truckers with highly reliable and automated transport, would only
increase the size of the industry and volume of goods transported would
multiply . Analysing what are the exact jobs that would replace these truckers
is flawed. There is so much interdependence in industries and technology is
changing at so many points that you have to assume there would different kinds
of work that would be created. I can guess that, with more goods transported,
there would be more humans needed to transport it to their destination.

Of course, there could be flaw in my argument that there is an upper limit on
products we can create that need transportation but I am assuming this won't
be a case for a long time.

~~~
Razengan
> When Power Loom was introduced, it was often a centre of vandalism because
> it was destroying jobs.

You just gave a very good example right there of a potential for new jobs but
you overlooked it:

Employing former truckers as guards for self-driving truckers to protect them
and their cargo from vandals and protesters.

Until self-driving vehicles also become self-defending, humans will still have
to sit in the automatic trucks. They'll still need places to grab food from
along the way, and so on.

------
ecubed
Otto ([http://ot.to](http://ot.to)) provides a solution for converting
existing trucks into semi-self-driving trucks. I'd be very interested to hear
a truck drivers take on using a device like this. In my (not a truck driver)
opinion, it seems like in the short term it'll be hugely beneficial to the
drivers, since the government will still be mandating that drivers be in the
vehicles, but in the long term will completely kill the job.

~~~
slapshot
I've seen their giant demo truck parked in San Francisco. I was wondering why
a huge truck had what looked like parking cameras and radar domes on top. And
who in the world was driving a full size semi into SoMa just to park it on the
street. Thanks for solving a mystery!

------
chx
From a technical standpoint, this was crystal clear for years now: the first
point where automation will happen is long distance trucking on highways. A
human drives a truck out of town where (s)he gets out -- and perhaps into a
truck just arrived -- and the robot drives it to the destination city. Many
hard technical and regulatory problems in automated driving do not even appear
in this scenario. There are no pedestrians to hit, traffic lights to navigate
etc. Just drive. And this will be quick to be accepted, everyone knows the
dangers of truck drives dozing off. The robot never dozes off. And yes, a real
large amount of jobs will disappear within the next 15 years if not the next
ten due to this.

------
stretchwithme
Automation of human labor is the single biggest cause of prosperity. Its not a
new process and robotics isn't doing anything radically different.

Nor will the supply of jobs dry up because of automation. There will continue
to be a demand for what humans can do and a supply of humans that want to
work. As long as prices are allowed to adjust so that supply and demand tend
to equalize, there will be a labor market.

The real problem is interference in this marketplace, interference in people's
ability to sell their labor.

------
chris_va
... Until we get driverless RVs, and hordes of retirees roaming the country
reinvigorating those rest stops.

~~~
alttab
They won't have to stop for the same reasons.

~~~
forthefuture
Even with a robot driving you're going to need gas / electricity and food
every 4 hours.

~~~
refriedbeans3
Carry your own food and enough batteries to last to the destination. Or have a
hot swap battery bot like a military jet re-fueler. No stopping at all!

In all seriousness, I'm not saying there won't be stop offs and rest stops
(because really, who wants to be in a moving box for 3 days), but in terms of
feasibility I can definitely theorize a situation where stopping is no longer
necessary.

I just finished a road trip and man, would an auto-RV have been amazing.
Instead of only catching ~50% of the view because I was the driver, I could
take it all in and interact with my lady at the same time vs focused on
driving. Growing up I thought RVs were crazy awful - but now I look forward to
my auto-RV at age 75 driving my old ass around the country.

------
lukaslalinsky
We do not even have driverless cargo trains. The only automated trains I know
of are local metro trains. I'm quite sure we will need a person sitting in a
truck for a very long time. Sure, that person might not be actually driving
the truck, but the job will be still there.

~~~
andyjdavis
>We do not even have driverless cargo trains.

These are definitely on the way, if they have not already arrived. Someone I
know was a train driver for a mining company here in Australia. A lot of their
trains are already essentially automated with a driver being present largely
just in case. Bear in mind that this was several years ago and I doubt
automation has halted since then as that specific kind of train driver are
exceptionally expensive to have on the payroll.

Even a few years back the drivers were either simply supervising the computer
system or the human was driving however the computer system would alarm at the
driver any time the human driver did something that it disagreed with. In
particular, going too fast and being unsafe or going too slow and extending
the trip time.

The computer was supervising the human just as much as the human was
supervising the computer. From memory, the system could even raise alarms with
supervisors about what is happening with the train in some circumstances.

Going from human only > human supervising computer > computer supervising
human > computer only seems like a sensible progression and trains are a long
way through it.

------
Qantourisc
One thing I just wondered about: If you automate away a job, you have to pay
this persons UBI, as such you need to tax more. (Lets assume 100% at the point
where you automated.) Where is the profit for the company now ? It will now
have to pay both the automation and the UBI. The only thing we gained (and
that's a good thing) is a human with a lot of spare time. That should be
enough motivation, but not for this €€€ obsessed world.

~~~
acgourley
In this specific idealized scenario the driver has something else he would
rather do (another production of value - care for children, writing a novel,
playing video games) or else he would offer to drive the truck for less money
than the automaton costs. So that driver's alternative production + the value
from the automaton is the net positive.

------
codesnik
there's an ukrainian book, "Hunting wild trucks" by V.Vasiliev, about a
parallel world, where human, elves and dwarves hunt and tame automated trucks
moving cargo between automated factories. I for one, welcome such a future.

------
NicoJuicy
Let's generize and say truckers won't do difficult (thinking) work.

What are there alternatives for employment? (i'm NOT saying that they
can't/won't work, but that their alternative jobs could be replaced in the
short-term future also...).

There is a huge storm coming in the next 15-20 years and it's coming fast... I
just hope the world is ready

~~~
randycupertino
They will go on SSDI.

------
rch
Brings to mind this graphic:

[http://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/hist-job-
map-90/c...](http://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/hist-job-
map-90/child.html?initialWidth=800)

Truck driver is an extremely common occupation across much of the country.

~~~
refurb
How many of those are long-haul truck drivers and how many are UPS or other
short-haul delivery? You'd still need people to bring packages from the truck
to the business/home.

~~~
rch
Those people may not need a commercial driver's license any longer, making it
a lower skilled job.

------
pmlnr
I'd love to recommend a book on this, but it never was translated to English:
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8892205-menschen-wie-g-
tt...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8892205-menschen-wie-g-tter)

It was originally written to be a satire, but ended up showing a civilization
way passed the everything is automated for basic needs. From there on you need
to teach people to use their capabilities to create whatever they have in
their mind, be that music, inventions, etc. If you take away the purpose of
jobs, such as to do something with your life, you need to give alternatives,
such as the option and the need for creation.

~~~
tluyben2
It's the logical conclusion; people who can work on / in space exploration,
people who can't entertain themselves, preferably by creating but many also by
enjoying the creations. Games, movies, ...

------
_ph_
I think we are pretty close to the point where trucks no longer require a
human being holding the steering wheel to move between locations. That does
not automatically mean, that there are no human beings on board. There are
many reasons why there should still be humans involved, like

\- maintenance: Starting from refueling, to tyre change

\- security: Completely unguarded trucks would make quite a theft risk

\- any other interactions, being with the customer at the destination or
anything on the road.

So, overall there are some aspects and consequently some jobs going away, but
there might be additional responsibilities being added to the remaining job,
consider the truck driving of the future rather an office job located on the
truck.

~~~
majewsky
> maintenance

This is the most interesting part.

> security

Not an expert, but it would be interesting to see if theft is a bigger problem
with autonomous cars, or if it's hacker attacks.

> interaction on site of the customer

There you can still cut down the workforce, and have one person handle a whole
fleet of incoming trucks.

------
ajuc
People speak about surplus workers like "everybody has food and place to sleep
- we're out of things to do".

We still have to cure cancer, AIDS, deal with malaria, Alzheimer, Zika, etc.
We have to solve space exploration and colonization. We have to fix aging. We
have to understand the universe.

There's no law that says only brightest (most socialy adaptable) 1% of human
population can work on all that. It can be 50% or more if we change how we do
it (and have the resources).

That's why I think guaranteed income is stupid idea. We should have guaranteed
science/engineering jobs instead. And work on all the long-shot problems. Why
not?

So - that's the alternative costs of guaranteed income.

~~~
drabiega
We already produce enough food and housing for everyone, we just don't let the
people who don't have jobs to use the surplus.

------
partycoder
I wonder how the tire replacement mechanism works on a driverless truck.

~~~
grondilu
The machine stops on the side of the road and calls a human.

~~~
partycoder
What if people start sabotaging the robots just to have more jobs? e.g:
perforating tires

~~~
MagnumOpus
Sabotaging a target that has dozens of cameras pointed at you is a pretty dumb
move.

(And the same thing could happen today, on less-well monitored cars; I haven't
heard much of mass tyre vandalism.)

------
protobot
If driverless trucks were to be such a transformer of economies, we'd have
seen that many more trains and railroads appear, decades ago.

This is all just more puff about the massive campaign pushing for autonomous
vehicles. Any publicity is good publicity.

But let's not pretend we're being given a choice about this driverless car
thing.

~~~
bertil
> This is all just more puff about the massive campaign pushing for autonomous
> vehicles. Any publicity is good publicity.

Certainly cynical, but not necessarily a wrong interpretation.

> But let's not pretend we're being given a choice about this driverless car
> thing.

We will not have a choice on whether automation cost are much cheaper than
human driving, indeed — but we have two choices:

\- should we tax automation? if yes, should it be so that humans remain
cheaper (probably a terrible idea) or enough to have enough to help recently
out-of-work workers to re-train?

\- what should do with recently out-of-work workers? In the case of drivers,
that is less essential than it would seem, as many are ageing and retirement
is a possible option. (Hence my intuition that Unions are not that worried,
and this could be puff _for_ automation.) However, there are two generations
who have been trained for a labor-intensive world that will need re-training.
What and how we handle that is important, and it is our choice.

~~~
vkou
Re-train to do what? Be live-in servants for the owner of the robot-staffed
business?

And while we're at it, when are we going to get around to retraining the
millions of people in the Rust Belt, who were already put out of work?

~~~
bertil
Fixing robots, build or design custom furniture, something related to space-
exploration?

I work for Deliveroo (an equivalent of DoorDash/Seemless/UberEats) and our
riders need a fairly new set of skills — not unlike courier — that are not yet
really doable by a drone. Training those riders; being a rider and figuring
out which properties drones should have to take some of the workload… all
those are skills that are not directly technical, but are empowered by
automation.

