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The Economic Consequences of Self-Driving Trucks
An anonymous reader writes: Last week we learned that self-driving big-rig trucks were finally being deployed on public roads in Nevada for testing purposes. Experts consider trucking to be ripe for replacement with AI because of the sheer volume of trucks on the road, and the relative simplicity of their routes. But the eventual replacement of truck drivers with autonomous driving systems will have a huge impact on the U.S. economy: there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers, and millions more are employed to support and coordinate them. Yet more people rely on truckers to stay in business — gas stations, motels, and restaurants along trucking routes, to name a few.
Now, that's not to say moving forward with autonomous driving is a bad idea — in 2012, roughly 4,000 people died in accidents with large trucks, and almost all of the accidents were caused by driver error. Saving most of those lives (and countless injuries) is important. But we need to start thinking about how to handle the 10 million people looking for work when the (human) trucking industry falls off a cliff. It's likely we'll see another wave of ghost towns spread across the poor parts of the country, as happened when the interstate highway system changed how long-range transportation worked in the U.S.
Now, that's not to say moving forward with autonomous driving is a bad idea — in 2012, roughly 4,000 people died in accidents with large trucks, and almost all of the accidents were caused by driver error. Saving most of those lives (and countless injuries) is important. But we need to start thinking about how to handle the 10 million people looking for work when the (human) trucking industry falls off a cliff. It's likely we'll see another wave of ghost towns spread across the poor parts of the country, as happened when the interstate highway system changed how long-range transportation worked in the U.S.
The summary says "in 2012, roughly 4,000 people died in accidents with large trucks, and almost all of the accidents were caused by driver error. Saving most of those lives (and countless injuries) is important." My brother is a truck driver, and from what he has told me, and also what I have seen reported multiple times, and what I have seen myself, the vast majority of accidents involving trucks are caused by car drivers misbehaving around truck. They pull stunts like pulling in front of them at merges then hitting the brakes. An autonomous truck will hit such a car just like a manned truck, so I think the claim that automating the trucks will save most of those lives is wrong.
In NJ, you aren't allowed to pump your own gas so that you will keep the guy who pumps it employed. They *could* have employed him dong something useful--thing TVA-type programs where he's doing a job to improve the environment, for example--but this is what they picked. There will be pushback against automated trucks in a similar fashion, although of course they're so much more proficient that they will prevail in the end.
There are a lot of trucks where liability or small tasks that still require human judgment will keep with human drivers for a good long while yet. Fuel Trucks delivering to local gas stations, septic trucks and heating oil trucks that have to find a port in every person's yard, etc...
I do wonder whether the amount of stuff that falls off the back of the truck will go up or down. Less oversight of the stuff, but less chance for a driver to be in collusion with the people who fall things off the back of trucks.
I can't imagine that even with trucks driving themselves, that we wouldn't want or need someone being with the truck. For interactions with people for delivery, to handle mechanical problems or unexpected issues that would arise.
I just don't think it'll be the employment collapse everyone is imagining, I just think we'll move from truck driver to truck manager.
Yeah, God knows we don't need any of that advanced technology crap!
Next thing you know, they might develop big machines to replace covered wagons and plows. Then where will we be, when all those teamsters and farmers are put out of work?
And what's with these "computer" things? Everyone knows a computer is a (usually) young woman who calculates (by hand) the numbers required by Real Scientists (tm). Replace them with machines? I say no!
I say we just destroy all that automation and go back to the tried and true ways we've always known! Ned Ludd Lives!
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
But the eventual replacement of truck drivers with autonomous driving systems will have a huge impact on the U.S. economy: there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers, and millions more are employed to support and coordinate them.
Who said anything about replacing truck drivers with autonomous driving systems? Airplanes have autopilot, but they still require TWO pilots. Autonomous trucking systems will be no different. Somebody will have to drive it in city traffic and park it at the freight terminal, and take over when the autonomous system doesn't know how to handle a situation. The difference is that in a plane you usually have seconds or minutes to take over the system, whereas on a road with cars mere feet away, a trucker will have fractions of a second to respond and take over to a situation.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
let the markets sort themselves out.
No worries, millions can move into the "big rig hijacking" business! A semi-trailer full of something easy to sell on the street, or a tanker full of a chemical useful in making meth, or of gasoline (gasoline smuggling was the mafia's most profitable business for years) - all very valuable targets. Today that theft is kept somewhat in check by the real risk of getting shot in the process, or of wrecking the rig if your try a scene out of a Fast and Furious movie. But an AI truck with safety reflexes on a lonely stretch of road? Well, the markets will sort themselves out.
As for the legal trade, driving is a crappy job unless you own your truck, and I rather suspect the owner/operators of today will become the owners of tomorrow. Truckstops may go the way of the buggy whip, but I can't see that happening fast - like all infrastructure changes, the capital outlay is so high this will be a 20-50 year transition.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Also, refueling? En route maintenance. Stuff like that?
There is more to being a truck driver than just driving.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This time around I think the services sector, which is kind of the only thing absorbing overflow, might just be unable to grow further. If anything, it might implode and add to the bulk of socialism/violence, as the truckers who use the services can't do that anymore. Call centres can only call so many people, and they need those people to have some sort of revenue they want to give to the call centre people. But when it gets to "my call centre people call your call centre people" for the purpose of profit generation, it kind of ends up with both call centres firing their people and shutting down.
Oh, I know, all those truckers could learn PHP and take the jobs of the H1-B Indians :) Code quality-wise, and wage-wise, nobody would be able to tell the difference.
I have been hammering this point for at least a year and daily on Slashdot. Taxi drivers are also about to be eliminated. Fast food workers will rapidly almost vanish. School teachers are even more prone to no longer being employable. After all one Algebra 1 teacher can serve the entire nation. The challenge is not unemployment . Massive unemployment is a given. But as jobs vanish businesses will fold quickly. The REAL CHALLENGE is a complete change in social and economic policies so that people are well payed, not to work. Sales taxes will have to support the system as income taxes will be quite restrained except from the investment sector. If we do not do this quickly we are a dead nation. If we believe in survival of the fit over the weak then what we are seeing is that socialism is fit to survive under conditions that capitalism can not.
The majority of jobs today aren't needed (I.E, Sales). Service will continue to grow as productivity increases.
Today's problem is uneven trade. The USA median hourly wage has been stagnant for 50 years while Asia's has increased 400% - we gave them our jobs. That needs to be reversed.
I think the transition will take at most 2 to 5 years once the tech is commercially available, because the cost of a driver is $40k minimum per year. If you can outfit a truck with an auto-driver for $40k it starts to pay off really quickly.
It also lets you operate the trucks 24 hours per day (minus maintenance and refueling).
Next thing you know, they might develop big machines to replace covered wagons and plows. Then where will we be, when all those teamsters and farmers are put out of work?
It actually is pretty tough to make a living as a small farmer these days.
A functioning society requires jobs that pay a livable wage to people who, for whatever reason, aren't cut out for collage. These are the jobs that are rapidly vanishing, due to automation.
The industrial revolution brought high atmospheric CO2 levels, the likes of which haven't been seen on this planet in over 20 million years. There's no avoiding it, "progress" always comes at a cost.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Apparently you are the one who doesn't understand economics. Prices are whatever the market can bear. If the costs can be lowered, it does not mean that the prices go down because they are already at whatever the market can bear. Prices will stay the same, corporate profits will raise.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
What always happens is that these people all seem to be capable of finding other work
So far.
When there are no more unskilled jobs left, the people who can't get skills will not get a replacement job.
...I was a trucker long before I was a geek.
Autonomous trucks will still need fuel, most truckers don't sleep in hotels and I can't speak for anybody else but when I was a driver I ate one sit-down meal a day when I stopped for fuel.
Will be interested to see how AI deals with a mountain pass or city traffic; I think autonomous trucks will need human assistance for at least the foreseeable future.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
This fool wants to keep makework jobs where people pretend they're useful just so they can have a bullshit job.
That isn't going to give you a healthy economy.
Do we need to worry about how people are going to get work? Yep.
But you do that by getting them competitive jobs that robots don't do better than them.
Did holding back automation save the manufacturing jobs in the rust belt? Nope. All the work went to china instead. So good work. Instead of losing 50 percent of the jobs in the factory you lost 100 percent. Genius.
This is a tech site... embrace the technology or I don't even want to hear your stupid whining Luddite ass.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Honestly, we can kick that can a lot farther down the road than you may suspect. When self driving trucks first become a reality, they are going to be used as 'autopilot' where they do the over-the-highway driving, and human drivers do the 'last mile' because the last mile can be a tricky bastard for a human, let alone a computer. Many deliveries take place where the truck must jack knife the truck in the middle of a street, back into an ally and around a corner in reverse, and center up on a loading dock, or some variant thereof. As the initial action (blocking all lanes of traffic) requires something that by most standards would be a traffic violation, it becomes extremely hard to program a computer to make the final approach to the dock, while still following all its 'road safety' rules. It could be decades before we get our software/AI advanced enough for that, and until then, self driving trucks are going to require skilled drivers in the seat, waiting their turn.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
*pfft* And you're telling me the Democrats give a flying fuck about your jobs either? Who is pushing the H1-B visas so fucking hard? Oh that's right, Democrats.
The politicians are shitty but a lot of the reason they're so shitty is because of tribalistic asshats like you that slavishly associate with a faction. This permits which ever faction you associate with to get away with ANYTHING and you'll forgive them. And the opposing faction could be fucking Jesus Christ walking around giving sight to the blind and you'd still hate them.
You're a fucking cancer on the political system.
Do not vote political parties. Neither the democrats nor the republicans are actually on the ballots. It is just people. PEOPLE. Individuals. Vote for them. Fuck parties. Just look at the people. Evaluate them on a personal level.
That's as good as you'll be able to do in this political system. But really you're not helping anyone by saying "oh its all this political party's fault"...
What if the republicans didn't exist at all? And lets say we a choice between the democrats and some other leftish party. I don't know... the Greens or something. Who wants to bet that someone would be saying in no time "If only the greens weren't there everything would be better".
Its bullshit. This is the sort of crap dictators tell their starving people to explain why their country is shitty. They say "it is because of those evil foreigners!"...
Look at Baltimore, chump. You know the city that recently rioted. Riddle me this, when was the last time that city was run by Republicans? Exactly. The whole country could be run lock stock and barrel by the democrats and most of the shit you're upset about would either not change or might even get worse.
You're mad about markets and capitalism? Tough shit. Not even the Soviets could kill capitalism INSIDE the soviet union during the cold war. The market is forever. You can't kill it. It is a dynamic inevitability, No stable society can exist that does not account for the market in a substantive way.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
let the markets sort themselves out.
No worries, millions can move into the "big rig hijacking" business! A semi-trailer full of something easy to sell on the street, or a tanker full of a chemical useful in making meth, or of gasoline (gasoline smuggling was the mafia's most profitable business for years) - all very valuable targets. Today that theft is kept somewhat in check by the real risk of getting shot in the process, or of wrecking the rig if your try a scene out of a Fast and Furious movie. But an AI truck with safety reflexes on a lonely stretch of road? Well, the markets will sort themselves out.
As for the legal trade, driving is a crappy job unless you own your truck, and I rather suspect the owner/operators of today will become the owners of tomorrow. Truckstops may go the way of the buggy whip, but I can't see that happening fast - like all infrastructure changes, the capital outlay is so high this will be a 20-50 year transition.
How are these not targets already? To me, it seems like it'd be a lot simpler to hijack a truck driven by a human who can accept alternate programmed instructions (also known as "threats," in this context) given in natural human language, than a computer-driven truck. You can't just mess with GPS to hijack a truck; telling a truck that he's not where he thinks he is won't work as well as some people might think, and there's the dual-threat of counter-spoofing technologies (easy to build in if you want to..and if GPS spoofing gets used for hijacking they'll want to) and GPS-interference monitoring (which is happening today as we speak). And even then, the "getting shot in the process" risk runs both ways...at least with theft of an automated truck you don't have the safety of the driver to worry about.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
What you describe sounds analogous to harbour-pilots that are used to navigate big ships in and out of port. They belong with the port, not the ship.
You could imagine that long distance truck journeys could happen without any driver on board, then they pick up a driver just on the edge of a city to take them to their final delivery.
We had no regulations under Laissez Faire, and it killed growth. Monopolistic abuses, and anti-competitive actions were the norm. How many times do we need to try it before it works the way the neo-liberals (the non-US term for the us term "conservative") say it will?
Learn to love Alaska
Apparently you are the one who doesn't understand economics. Prices are whatever the market can bear. If the costs can be lowered, it does not mean that the prices go down because they are already at whatever the market can bear. Prices will stay the same, corporate profits will raise.
You have over-simplified the economic situation. When costs fall, if there are enough sellers, one of them will reduce his profit margin to try to gain market share. The others must follow, until prices reach a new equilibrium. An example of this is the computer industry. Prices for a unit of computing capability have been falling steadily for 60 years.
stop repeating this nonsense about technology not disrupting peoples lives. Yes, over the course of several decades the economy replaced those jobs. In the meantime millions were without work. There's a reason why the Luddites existed. That word has meaning beyond an insult. There was nearly 60 years of joblessness following the industrial revolution before other tech caught up. Google it. Read some history. Jeez.
I agree the solution isn't to go back on technology though. It's socialism. Plain 'ole socialism. When we don't need these people to work we don't just let them starve while we all take turns seeing who can make the 1% the happiest. And btw, I said _socialism_, not communism. And not a fascist dictatorship that occasionally publishes a pamphlet with something written by Karl Marx either...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The majority of jobs today aren't needed (I.E, Sales).
You're dead wrong. You know a job is needed when somebody is willing to pay you to do it. When I was doing my PC repair business in college, I would love to have had a sales person who could track down leads and find me customers. It would have made my work much more profitable, because people are looking for that all the time, however I don't have the skills to find them. Salespeople do.
The trucking industry USED to be pretty well regarded for having top notch drivers. I don't think this is the case today. Some of the trucking schools were caught red-handed passing students who had "stand ins" taking the exams for them, for example. And all too often, long-haul drivers are pressed to drive so many hours at a time that they're really not that safe and alert at the wheel some of the time.
The drivers I saw hired at a manufacturing place I used to work for were not exactly pillars of society either. Many had previous criminal records and we had to place GPS tracking systems on the trucks and keep constant watch on where the went, since people tended to use the trucks for non work-related activities otherwise and bill the company for the fuel. That doesn't mean they lacked driving skills ... but it does mean I wouldn't trust them not to misrepresent the truth if they were involved in an accident.
I don't doubt that the majority of accidents involving large truck are still the fault of passenger vehicle drivers -- but I suspect the "big rig" drivers aren't really all that superior of drivers themselves, as often as not. (I've seen some of the guys around here who can barely get the trucks around traffic circles without tearing things up, and who knock down traffic signals going around corners.)
If we put these doomsayers back about 40 years, they'd say the sky is falling for the telecom industry when switchboard operators were being replaced with automated circuit switching systems.
Some of medium.com's articles are really good, especially the ones about physics. But some of them (like this one) are either based on hearsay or make some really dumb assumptions.
Take for example the map they show that indicates that most of the states have trucking as their top income sector. If we rolled back the clock about 150 years, that entire map would show farming. 90% of the US population were farmers at that time. However as the industrial revolution progressed, those people moved away from farming and towards other sectors.
Right now what we're seeing is basically another industrial revolution, which began somewhere around 1995, something I myself want to refer to as the information revolution. Information technology (IT) is advancing at such a high rate that its encroaching into other sectors that previously had nothing to do with computers.
Where medium (and these other doomsayers) are going wrong is they just assume that overnight suddenly 10 million people will be out of a job. That isn't at all accurate. The trucking industry will probably continue to grow for about 5 more years, and after that it will see a slow but steady decline until it has very few members remaining, and those few members will retain their jobs. There will probably be far fewer people driving trucks, but more people managing them (be that route planning, load planning, maintenance, etc) because the number of trucks on the road is likely to continue increasing for the foreseeable future.
This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. Meanwhile Luddites will continue to be Luddites.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
You're not trying to steal the truck, you're trying to steal the cargo. You either hook up and haul the trailer off, or just unload what you can and scatter. If it's in a county where the sheriff is the brother of the guy doing the robbery, and the nephew of the guy in charge of the local organized crime, well, the police will get there just in time to not quite catch anyone.
Why would you waste money on a cab for a truck that drives itself?
Why do airliners still have pilots?
Most likely, the driver will still be in the cab for the next 20 years, with fewer husband-wife driver pairs, and more owner-robot driver pairs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Taxis, buses, professional drivers, insurance claims, body shops, traffic cops...
Those individuals will be just as affected. And this technology will advance regardless of whether people like it or not. Either we're prepared to accept a future where labor is no longer as important as it once was and we move to allow all people to pursue other interests (work week reductions as well), we're just going to have larger and larger prisons or social as people won't just accept not eating, or the less fortunate will revolt and there will be blood in the streets.
I think there's more peaceful ways to do make the transition but I doubt the elite will necessarily approve. For some reason, re-training will continue to be a fantasy solution in their eyes.
Other things that are cheaper: food, fuel, clothing, entertainment. If you measure the price by "how many hours would the average person have to work to buy it", then almost everything is cheaper.
This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.
When the resource sector automated everyone moved to manufacturing, when manufacturing automated everyone moved to service, now that service is automating where exactly do you expect them to go?
A functioning society requires jobs that pay a livable wage
No, Capitalism requires that. There is nothing fundamental to society that requires capitalism.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
"Amazon has been around for a couple of decades and during that period, prices of books have been the same as that before internet bookstores."
Stop lying. I can get books that used to cost $20-30 for $5-15 on Amazon, brand new.
And real prices for cars have fallen dramatically--it's just that our real wages have also fallen dramatically, because we have redistributed purchasing power away from capital and to asset prices, which has killed the funding pool for jobs. Get rid of the Fed, and nominal prices will start falling and real prices will plummet.
Moore's law exists because there is reletively little regulation in computer space. If the government got involved, regulation would quickly be subverted to prevent increases in efficiency, allowing those who subverted the process to cut R&D funding and give that money to the CEO's. The free market is like Moore's Law, only for EVERYTHING. When we had a free market, so-called monopolies like Standard Oil increased the quality of kerosene dramatically even while cutting both the real and nominal prices by 90%.
"We had no regulations under Laissez Faire, and it killed growth"
No, it didn't. In fact, the economic growth seen under such policies was extreme. So extreme, that it had never been seen before, and has only been duplicated in less free countries due to access to existing capital bases.
You cite "monopolies" and I suspect that you refer to the Standard Oil monopoly (where SO gained 90% of the market share in the kerosene market). What you fail to understand is that under SO's monopoly, the price of kerosene fell by 90% while the quality improved enough to allow it to be used as the source of motive power for machinery, rather than just being used for heat and light. "Anti-competative" is fine, when your competitors produce a crappy product at a high price. SO bought them out, and upgraded their facilities, often hiring the former workers back AT HIGHER WAGES. They were able to do this because they could increase their productivity with their superior knowledge and vertical integration. Further, that same monopoly CREATED the very concept of research and development, something the government has sadly co-opted and has thus ruined.
But those facts hurt your feelings, so I guess you can just ignore them. But you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring them.
...Guaranteed minimum income. It's the most humane way to integrate full automation into an economy without forcing tens of millions into abject poverty. We're going to have to provide them with welfare one way or another. So why not just provide everyone with the basics for living in this world and allow people to work for what they want beyond that? The key is to move beyond the societal stigma of joblessness.
Huh? My friend who works/owns a sawmill that the workers bought produces something and that is as socialist as you can get, with the workers owning the means of production. Then there is the credit union that I own a share of which produces the same kind of stuff that private banks do. Also the co-op that I also own a share of which produces much the same stuff as any other store.
Even when the government is involved, the community owned damns do a good job of producing the electricity that enables posting this.
Meanwhile the capitalists keep saving up their capital or gamble it on the stock market. If capital and lack of regulation created jobs the unemployment rate here would be dropping instead of increasing as my government has been hell bent on deregulating and the rich have been getting richer very fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Exactly.. except the top end has laws to allow them to sell products in asia for 10 cents and here for five dollars and it's illegal to simply buy the product for 10 cents and ship it back here.
So it's more than just wages evening out-- it's like a leech actively pumping blood out of the wealthier economies into the pockets of under 1% of the population.
And at the same time, automation is replacing workers even in low wage countries at an increasing pace.
And at the same time, boomers can't retire and free up jobs because of depressed wages so it's really hard for the 30 year olds to get started.
In 30 years it won't be worth hiring chinese... in 40 years, it won't be worth hiring indians.
But before that- perhaps as soon as 2035, you'll see lots of jobs eliminated by automation. and the automation does higher quality work, for more hours, without benefits- without paying retirement taxes, and at a lower cost to begin with (even ignoring other factors).
Meanwhile the people at the top are doing everything they can to keep inflation going when everything is screaming deflation.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There's currently no system to handle distribution in such an economy. It doesn't matter if there are resources a-plenty if many people can't access them. Robot farms may be able to make food at almost no cost, but there's still a cost - and if most of the population is unemployed, they can't pay even that.
You brushed on an interest fact which I haven't seen in the robot vehicle discussions. Surely a ship is a lot easier to robotify than a truck? Why isn't anyone talking robot ships? For security reasons, I can't see how trucks can secure their cargo without a human on-board (whether it be driver/safety observer, or security guard)
Laissez faire has really never been actually tried. It is rather like capitalism which also has never been tried. If you think about it a bit some terms are absolute. It is like my sister being pregnant. She either is or is not. There is no in between. Free markets have never, ever existed. All kinds of taxes, rules, regulations and controls always exist to some degree. Even primitive tribes have taboos that restrict freedom of trade. The simple reason is that no group or nation has ever been dumb enough to allow a free market or trade. In the US we have a mixed economy and always have. We have social and religious customs regulating business or trade. We have taxation and we have laws designed to protect the public in place as well. Many of these controls are socialist in nature. We have no way to judge whether pushing more towards socialism or capitalism would be better for us. But due to technology beginning to eliminate human employment we have no choice but to shift towards socialism. But the worst of it is that society and government are not adjusting for what will soon be upon us. Rising seas in America will cause more social disruption in the next ten years than we ever saw in WW2. Your taxes are already being altered by planning for rising sea resistance.
This is one I've been wondering for a while... Of course it helps a lot that ships tend to get their crews from the developing world at very low wages, but reducing ship crews to one or two people would seem to be possible with 1980s technology.
If the driver is only needed during emergencies, they won't be awake enough to do much when the emergency hits. The same is true for cars as well, after sitting in the car for hours doing nothing you'll zone out. Even a short trip you take every day will get ignored.
Besides, in an emergency the two choices are to brake or to try to turn. In a big rig trying to make a fast turn is probably just going to make the situation worse. A computer can hit the brakes just as well as an unprepared human.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.