
Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs - blondie9x
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-automated-trucks-labor-20160924-snap-story.html
======
GarrisonPrime
>“If you can get rid of the drivers, those people are out of jobs, but the
cost of moving all those goods goes down significantly,” Kaplan said.

This is a major point of automation. Yes, many jobs will be lost. But the
prices of many goods will decrease.

The problem is that the current transition threatens to be so rapid as to
seriously disrupt society. Perhaps new jobs will eventually be created to make
up for those lost to automation (or perhaps not), but they won't be created
fast enough to avoid the pain of all the rapid job losses that are coming.

Thankfully, society seems to be coming around to the idea that resistance is
futile, and we need to address this problem before it becomes too
overwhelming. Personally, I feel one of the most realistic options would be to
reduce the standard work week to 4 days and/or 30 hours. People need to be
kept busy, or society overall tends to start to crumble around the edges. This
would mean people will need to shift their perspective on income, as it will
likely be reduced. But this shouldn't be too bad, since all the automation
will likely lead to reduced prices all around. Reducing your income by 25% may
sound bad, but if practically everything becomes ~20-30% cheaper then you
should have essentially the same standard of living, but with fewer working
hours. Isn't that what we more or less would all like?

No matter what we wind up doing however, chances are there will be some period
of difficult transition. All we can hope to do is make it as short and
relatively painless as possible.

~~~
fjjrxcbdhx
This assumption that everything will be cheaper seems a bit disingenuous,
because why would these companies want to automate themselves so badly if they
weren't going to keep most of the savings as profit?

Even if prices were lowered by a few percent for some goods thanks to cheaper
shipping, that's little help when you have no source of income. This will only
exacerbate the demand-limited economic slump we're currently experiencing.

~~~
stale2002
Because of supply and demand and competition.

If companies could squeeze more money out of customers why wouldn't they just
do so right now by raising prices?

~~~
falcolas
Well, if truck driving were automated, they certainly wouldn't lower then.

Personally, I imagine a lot of companies will use that extra money to buy out,
take over, or otherwise eliminate their competition. I doubt the consumer will
win.

~~~
MarkMc
If transport companies don't lower prices, won't new companies enter the
market and undercut the incumbents?

~~~
falcolas
I imagine (some of) the transport companies will lower their prices, it's the
McDonalds, Best Buy, Wallmart, and everybody else who has no reason to lower
their prices, even though their costs have dropped.

And so long as the cost to get into the industry is high (the up-front cost of
a driver is effectively 0, whereas AI will be non-0), and the incumbents have
the ability to drop their prices lower than any new startup (thanks to the
efficiencies of scale), serious new competition will be rare.

Even considering all that, the cost for shipping something is remarkably low
to begin with. $400 for an 40' shipping container worth of goods over 300
miles? Drop the driver from the equation entirely, and that cost would only go
down by about $100. As a point of reference, a 40' shipping container full of
bananas is worth in excess of $58,000 (1000 boxes per container, 100 bananas
per box, $0.58 per banana).

------
jobu
If you haven't seen the short (15min) documentary "Humans Need Not Apply",
then I highly recommend it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

A hundred years ago 'horseless carriages' replaced a lot of horses, and in the
next couple decades we're going to see 'driverless trucks' are going to
replace a lot of humans.

------
DavidWanjiru
I always have a question about this stuff: when the robots take all of our
jobs (or the jobs of a critical mass of the human population), who is going to
buy all this stuff the robots make if the humans who are supposed to buy the
stuff are broke because they lost their job to a robot?

Has anybody tried to do some kind of study/educated guess about this impact?

At the end of the day, while robots can do our jobs better than we do, they
can't consume stuff better than we do, and ultimately our consumption of stuff
is what creates the jobs the robots are taking over.

With jobs even as "safe" as surgeons potentially under threat, how long before
everyone is in trouble?

~~~
beaner
Haven't people been asking this for the past few hundred years? And yet we're
better off in life than we ever have been.

Robots do things cheaper. This allows prices to fall.

Also, if a business has nobody to sell to, then they themselves are in
trouble. That they remain profitable is a sign that things are fine.

Humans are adaptable creatures and we find other things of value to do.

People from some industries will experience short-term pain. But pre-empting
that with politics runs the risk of creating socioeconomic cruft that
unnecessarily and inefficiently drains more resources in the long run.

~~~
duaneb
> Haven't people been asking this for the past few hundred years? And yet
> we're better off in life than we ever have been.

I don't think everyone--in this time or others--would agree with this. I
certainly don't believe in being "better off", I think that's an illusion born
out of minimization of our greatest fears. Just because you aren't about to
die of tetanus does not mean your quality of life has improve at all.

~~~
WalterBright
> I certainly don't believe in being "better off"

I do. Archeological evidence of American colonists' bones reveal that they
worked extremely hard and died young. Look at their clothes in a museum - they
look like childrens' sizes. Look at their teeth in bones in museums. Do you
prefer teeth like that?

I can buy an orange any day of the year. I have hot/cold running water. I'm
warm in winter. I have clean water to drink. I have ice cream in the summer. I
have endless entertainment at the push of a button. I can talk at any time to
any family/friend anywhere in the world at my whim.

I'd probably be dead by my age if I lived 200 years ago.

~~~
duaneb
If you have no option for better teeth, how much does that impact you? Serious
question.

I really should have framed my example in terms of happiness rather than
quality of life.

~~~
WalterBright
There are many terrible diseases today for which there is no effective
treatment. Do you believe people are happy with that situation? I don't.

------
afarrell
The Box[1], a book about the history behind the shipping container which
eliminated the jobs of bunches of longshorement, seems very instructive.

[1] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-
Econ...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-
Economy/dp/B00I38SQOI/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)

------
okket
I guess it will more likely pan out like flying: You still need humans to
steer the colossus through cities and other complicated terrains, to keep them
running, for emergency situations, for the insurance company and, maybe, for
the unions. But most of the time the truck will drive on autopilot.

Slowly humans will fade completely from the picture, but it will not be a hard
cut. Also, we are far away from auto-fixing trucks. So at least the repair
crews will stay for long while.

~~~
alpineidyll3
It will be a slow-motion economic calamity, similar to how internet sourcing
of materials and sales has gutted the lower middle class. The generation in
the out-automated job never retrains or productively re-enters the workforce.
Instead they turn around and vote for people who want to flip over the
economic card table.

Democratic capitalism has to get this isht figured out, or the next century is
going to be unpleasant.

------
topkai22
The transition won't be good for people who currently drive semi-trucks or who
aspire to. However, there are some reasons that this may actually take a bit
longer to fully play out than it appears. To start, there is the transition
time from existing capital stock of trucks (those things are hundreds of
thousands of dollars); there are also many activities that drivers do that
aren't just driving- delivery drivers are often responsible for stocking and
displaying the goods they bring; there are various paperwork issues that
drivers deal with; there is the care and feeding of these large complex
machines in often austere circumstances.

I imagine you'll see a lot of hybridization of activities before (or if) you
see the elimination of the human- such as a human riding "shotgun" and dealing
with any issues or activities that arise when the truck is stopped, or where
you see more humans employed in servicing and response roles.

That being said, hauling shipping containers around the port of long beach is
probably on its way out. I feel for those drivers.

------
mishchea
I'm surprised at how _few_ posts/articles like this there have been, so far:
self-driving cars are taking off and are a big looming imminent threat to
Uber/taxi/truck drivers.

Every time I take an Uber now, I wonder if the driver realizes that his job
will most likely be automated away in a couple of years.

~~~
nsgi
More like a couple of decades.

~~~
monkmartinez
I disagree. At most one decade, but I would bet it happens much sooner. As
some have mentioned... the economic incentives are too high.

------
pcrh
We don't have self-driving trains yet, except in very tightly controlled
environments. So I think it's going to take more than a few test runs to show
that self-driving trucks will displace drivers anytime soon.

~~~
enraged_camel
Make no mistake: technologies like this -- which bring massive cost-savings to
companies -- tend to arrive sooner than most people think. The incentives are
just too big to ignore.

Mining companies in Australia are already using self-driving trucks to
transport ore.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-
driving-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-driving-
trucks-to-transport-ore-2015-10)

And self-driving cars are just around the corner in the USA. Trucks will
follow maybe half a decade after that, at most.

~~~
harryh
You think cars come before trucks? Trucks seem easier to me. Driving 500 miles
on a very standardized highway seems like an easier problem than negotiating
city streets and picking up hard to identify passengers from a curb.

~~~
maxerickson
A lot of the time the passenger will be holding a beacon that communicates
their position to the car.

It also seems to me that such things won't be a big deal. Some Google demo
shows their system recognizing a bicyclist making a hand signal. It's the
dynamic traffic stuff that will take longer to deal with.

I was thinking about one problem the autonomous systems will have to handle on
my run yesterday; pedestrians can look at drivers and use eye contact to make
sure the driver has noticed them. An autonomous system doesn't have eyes to
look at. The first idea I came up with was a highly directional light source
that the system could point at the system could point at the heads of
pedestrians it had recognized. Not a laser, but a moderately bright light in a
recess that limits the direct visibility of the source.

------
grecy
I'm continually dumbfounded by how Americans are so concerned with holding
onto jobs, rather than moving forward.

When the automobile was invented think of all the farriers and hay people that
went out of business and had to move on.

Think about the milkman or the guy that used to put ice in the back of your
ice-chest out in the back yard.

When we eventually move off coal, think of all the millions of people involved
in the coal industry that will be out of work.

Those lay-offs are a _good_ thing, and we should be doing everything we can do
expedite the process.

Of course for individuals in an industry that will be soon redundant it sucks,
but that's the nature of life. Move on, adapt, re-train. Job security was
fleeting in the 70s and 80s. It's not real anymore.

~~~
dcposch
This is global, it's not specific to America.

Fun story, the word luddite comes from Ned Ludd, an 18th century English
weaver. He destroyed some mechanical looms and inspired a bunch of people to
copy him. They were angry about automation taking their jobs.

This is a timeless problem.

> Of course for individuals in an industry that will be soon redundant it
> sucks, but that's the nature of life. Move on, adapt, re-train.

You're gonna need more empathy than that. For someone like a 50-year-old coal
miner living in Kentucky, "adapt, retrain" is easier said than done.

------
WalterBright
Long haul trucking should be replaced by trains anyway. Heavy trucks are the
primary cause of expensive highway damage, and are environmentally destructive
with all the fuel, tire dust, etc. The reason trucks are economically viable
at all is they shift their costs to the taxpayer, who pays for the highways.

(A truck loaded to the legal limit inflicts 9,000 times as much fatigue damage
to the road as a car, and trucks are often overloaded.)

I propose that the government drastically increase weight fees for highway
use, and use the revenue to subsidize freight trains. (The truck container can
just be picked up and dropped on a flatbed rail car.)

Trucks for the last mile are still necessary.

------
Shivetya
the turnover in that career is pretty damn high. having met many truckers,
especially newly set on the road from school and such, like 9 out of 10 don't
stick with it.

Wait for the shit storm when they attempt to fully automate ports

------
astazangasta
Recently I am interested in the end of the Bretton Woods system. For the past
few years, I've been interested in this graph:
[http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/family_income_med...](http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/family_income_median_income_growth_productivity1.png)

This is the main story. At a time, perhaps because of fixed exchange rates
curbing the flow of speculative capital, perhaps not, productivity (viz.,
increasing automation) gains meant median wage growth - ordinary people
participated in GDP growth.

Now this is no longer true, and we get pieces lamenting the death of blue
collar jobs through automation. We'll blame robots, but perhaps we should be
looking at the fundamentals of our economy - how we've set the free movement
of capital above all else, to our detriment.

~~~
harryh
Pay/productivity gap graphs are nonsense

[http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=30585](http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=30585)

~~~
astazangasta
I disagree with this conclusion, and I tend to disfavor the PCE. The argument
is that employers are spending more on benefits, therefore pay has not
actually fallen. However, the largest component of the difference between the
PCE and CPI is based on employer-provided healthcare; in the US, healthcare
spending has been growing at faster than inflation for decades, and medical
costs are one of the main avenues of wealth transfer (for example, $300
billion a year, 2% of GDP, goes in patent royalties to owners of
pharmaceutical companies).

It is a bit crap to suggest that because we are paying people more so they can
pay their doctors more, for worse outcomes than anyone in the rest of the
developed world, they are somehow turning out better. In any case, the fact
that real wages have remained essentially flat requires us to believe that
workers are fine with not having made any gains in disposable income in
exchange for better benefits, which seems unlikely.

Also, the fact that labor peaked in 1973, when the graph _begins_ to diverge,
should reinforce, not contradict, this argument.

~~~
harryh
The conclusion isn't that everything is hunky dory. What he does conclude is
that labor's share of income hasn't much changed. What has changed is the
distribution of income between laborers. As has been noted in about a million
places, gains have increasingly been going to those at the top.

Your chart implies some sort of breakdown between productivity and income but
does not demonstrate that productivity gains have been equally distributed. In
fact, there are a lot of reasons to think that most productivity gains are
going towards the top end of the labor pool as well. Due to the lever of
technology, we see increasingly small (in terms of # of employees) firms serve
increasingly large markets.

~~~
astazangasta
Median income remaining flat is entirely consistent with productivity being
absorbed by the high end.

~~~
harryh
I'm not sure what you mean by "absorbed"?

My point (well Scott Sumner's really) is that there hasn't been a breakdown
between pay and productivity. People are still getting paid more if they are
more productive. It's just that somewhere around 1970 or so the median worker
stopped getting all that much more productive.

Now, maybe that's what you meant by your graph. In which case, fine. But most
people look at that and they think that the median worker started getting
cheated out of their productivity gains. And that's probably not what's
happening.

~~~
astazangasta
I think that's exactly what happened. For example, what I described earlier,
medical costs increasing at twice the rate of inflation in the US while
outcomes did not improve much at all, is the median worker being cheated out
of their productivity gains: it means they are paying more and getting less,
while health care providers and people who own patents on drugs or medical
devices get more. This change has absolutely zilch to do with changes in how
productive anyone is and much more to do with how income is distributed, how
property rights are enforced, how high-tech industry is regulated, etc.

~~~
harryh
Increased costs for health care(1) are a measure of where workers are spending
their money. That's an orthogonal issue to measures of worker productivity.

1\. It's a side issue, but I'd also dispute your statement that people are
getting less. Life expectancy has increased ~10 years in the US since 1970.

~~~
astazangasta
People in the US are getting less than in other places, in terms of health
care. Other countries also haven't seen the same gap in gdp/income.

Arguing that workers are less productive because they earn less is a
tautology; it also requires us to believe that workers magically stopped being
more productive in 1973 after decades of improvement.

~~~
harryh
1) Our health care system is certainly unusual and it might very well have
problems. But, again, that has nothing to do with measures of worker
productivity outside of the health care sector.

2) Other countries have significantly larger transfers from the rich to the
poor. That certainly puts more spending power in the hands of the bottom half
of the bell curve (which might be a good idea!), but it doesn't mean they're
more productive.

3) I don't magically believe that increases in median worker productivity
slowed in the 1970s, I believe it because it matches what I see in the world.
GM used to employ 100s of thousands of people when it was one of the most
valuable companies in America. Now Facebook holds that status with something
like 15,000.

Technology has become this huge lever where fewer and fewer people are needed
to make more and more stuff. So increasingly it's the people at the top end of
the bell curve that are capturing these gains. A programmer can write software
that gets used by more people than ever. A retail store employee is doing
pretty much the same job now that they were doing 30 years ago.

~~~
astazangasta
> increases in median worker productivity slowed

> fewer and fewer people are needed to make more and more stuff.

You're arguing against yourself, here. The latter is productivity increase,
the former is productivity decrease. Also, productivity growth is not new, it
has been going on as long as the economy exists. Machine automation has been
occurring since the industrial revolution started, it did not start in 1973.

What started in 1973 was that the high end (basically, the owners of capital)
stopped sharing productivity gains - meaning that where previously, workers
were able to bargain for a share of the increase, now they cannot, because of
various mechanisms of taking. CEO pay did not go up 10X because CEOs were
suddenly drinking tiger blood and winning the Fields medal.

My original contention was that one of these was the shift away from the
Bretton Woods system, with fixed currency exchange rates based on the dollar;
going from here to speculative international currency flows and floating
exchange rates is one possible mechanism for making workers less able to
bargain for those productivity increases.

~~~
harryh
_What started in 1973 was that the high end (basically, the owners of capital)
stopped sharing productivity gains - meaning that where previously, workers
were able to bargain for a share of the increase, now they cannot, because of
various mechanisms of taking._

NO! This is EXACTLY what I (really Scott Summers) am saying has not happened.
The share of national income going to labor (vs the owners of capital) has
remained almost exactly constant since 1973 (and before then as well).

~~~
astazangasta
I already commented on this; his assumption is that the PCE is "correct" and
the CPI is "wrong". I made a criticism of PCE that you did not address; it is
merely counting increased health care spending (a significant mechanism of
wealth transfer) as "labor share" of national income.

~~~
harryh
That is not his assumption:

This is not one of those “he said, she said” where reasonable people can
disagree on whether the PCE or CPI is a better price index. This is a
pay/productivity gap being invented by using the slowly moving price index
(NDP, which is similar to the PCE) to make worker productivity look better,
and the faster moving price index (CPI) to make real wages look lower. That’s
not kosher. You need to use the same type of index for both lines on the
graph.

~~~
astazangasta
There is no difference between using NDP and GDP; the shift emerges only when
you switch between PCE and CPI. It is totally about whether the PCE or the CPI
is a better index. We can see this clearly enough from the fact that there is
a notch in the graph one way and not the other.

If you simply don't believe in wage stagnation, then I'm not sure what this
whole conversation has been about.

~~~
harryh
Wage stagnation is definitely a thing, but it's due to increasing wage
inequality between different employees not due to capital grabbing an
increasing share of national income. Labor's share is remarkably stable over
time:

[http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/...](http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/FF467_charts_5.png)

~~~
astazangasta
Getting hard to find this thread again, but I've been enjoying this
exchange...

While that graph shows labor's share as stable, many others do not, e.g. in
this piece by Jared Bernstein:
[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/why-labors-
shar...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/why-labors-share-of-
income-is-falling/)

Of particular interest to me is that if you look at the BEA numbers, they
split 'labor share' into wages and non-wage compensation (benefits, SS,
medicare, etc.) - the latter share has climbed over time to 20%, meaning much
of the stability in the "wage share" is just increasing money being paid to
Medicare.

It's not clear what's being measured and not in that chart, but, for example,
this St. Louis Fed data shows both an increasing Dividend share of GDP and a
declining wage share of GDP:

[http://qvmgroup.com/invest/2012/09/05/profits-cash-flow-
divi...](http://qvmgroup.com/invest/2012/09/05/profits-cash-flow-dividends-
and-wages-as-percent-of-gdp-since-the-1940s/)

------
hyperliner
It's not just the drivers. Drivers stop at stores along the highways. They
will suffer impact too. Drivers need to take laundry to the cleaners. That is
gone. They need to sleep along the way, so let's hotel rooms needed and less
hotel personnel needed.

The ripple effect is significant.

------
shams93
The basic premise going back to Jamestown is that if you don't work you don't
eat this goes deep into the collective psyche of this country DC is entirely
unprepared for these changes they still think unemployment is largely an issue
of people having bad morality.

------
SIGALARM
sounds like the self-driving trucks would need to be protected by security
teams, otherwise they may be susceptible to out of work pirates.

~~~
monkmartinez
This really needs more attention/consideration. Self-driving anything seems
like a ripe target, as the perceived "harm" is to a corporation not a human
driver/operator. That is, theives will not have to hurt anyone to get the
goods.

~~~
topkai22
This seems like it has already been "solved" by trains- moving targets are
hard, cargo is anonymous, stationary targets are in semi-secured railyards,
and shrinkage is part of the cost of doing business.

Who wants to hijack a truck and find its full of breakfast cereal?

~~~
monkmartinez
I would guess that a train is much harder to stop than a truck. Further, one
can drive next to a truck and have people jump on the truck to do some
"snooping." The "driver" is not going to freak out/swerve as the drone truck
just keeps going towards its destination at a perfectly efficient speed,
perfectly centered in the lane.

~~~
gsnedders
In plenty of places, you can stop a train simply by cutting the signal wire
(because it will fail-safe).

------
bogomipz
Sure the cost of goods will go down the same way that we all work less hours
now due to efficiencies that technology has provided.

It would seem that having trucks that can be on the road for 24 hours straight
will result in less trucks being needed. I am sure the auto industry will make
up for that that decrease in units sold by increasing the price per unit sold.
I don't think there will be any dividend passed on to consumers.

------
maverick_iceman
All the Luddites arguing here that quality of life hasn't really increased in
the past 200 years due to technological revolution should spend a year in a
third world country away from modern medicine/electricity/internet. Also your
viewpoint is incredibly patronising towards billions of people alive today who
don't have access to these.

------
xbmcuser
Automation is also going to hit white collar jobs. Tax attorneys, paralegals
insurance agents and many such jobs will be effected. Self driving cars and
trucks are just the tip of he iceberg because of Google more people are aware
of it but machine learning and automation now is going to start hitting white
collar jobs not just blue collar jobs.

------
MichaelMoser123
A truck has quite a lot of kinetic energy, accidents involving trucks tend to
be lethal. I wonder how long it will take until self driving technology will
be save enough for this application.

------
intrasight
Truck drivers need to work with their union(s) to lobby for a law that says
that only union members can own an autonomous driving agent. Problem solved -
we have self-driving trucks but trucking companies must "hire" an agent via a
union member. To become a union member, you'll still have to a rigorous
apprenticeship and training program - and of course pay your union dues.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sounds like featherbedding. Putting pointless people in the middle just to
skim money from the process. Who benefits? Nobody but them. Reminds me of how
the railroads had to pay into the pension fund for Firemen, long after steam
engines were dead and gone. Just because.

~~~
intrasight
Is no more fetherbedding than any other regulated profession (doctors, layers)
who get to themselves decide who is a member in good standing.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Ha! A guy that takes a cut for 'managing' an autodriving truck - which then
drives itself - is very different. Because doctors and lawyers _actually do
work_.

------
h4nkoslo
I could see a primary disadvantage of self-driving trucks being that they're
much easier to rob.

------
animex
No, millennial lack of interest in trucking careers threatens the industry and
self-driving trucks will save it.

