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Self-Driving Cars Could Cost America's Professional Drivers Up To 25,000 Jobs a Month (cnbc.com)
The full impact of self-driving cars on society is several decades away -- but when it hits, the job losses will be substantial for American truck drivers, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs. From a report: When autonomous vehicle saturation peaks, U.S. drivers could see job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year, according to a report from Goldman Sachs Economics Research. Truck drivers, more so than bus or taxi drivers, will see the bulk of that job loss, according to the report. That makes sense, given today's employment: In 2014, there were 4 million driver jobs in the U.S., 3.1 million of which were truck drivers, Goldman said. That represents 2 percent of total employment.
The salaries are poor as there are lots of others willing to do the job as well. The ones I think took it in the shorts are the ones that bought their own rigs.
they may as well gum the works up hell if they go jail as at least the will get room and board as trump wants to cut food stamps.
We wouldn't need the thousands of self-driving trucks if the rail freight system could compete with trucking, but the deck is stacked against them.
Rail companies maintain their own "roads" and rights of way. Trucking companies buy trucks, hire drivers as cheap as possible, then turn it all loose on roads built with your tax dollars. One of my Civil Engineering prof's told us that one truck does the damage of 10,000 cars. As a highway engineer, I saw that first-hand. Then trucking companies have the gall to put stickers on the back of the trucks that say, "This truck pays an average of $5,123 dollars per year in over the road taxes." Yet they probably do 50 times that in damage.
It's time we cut off the trucking company fat cats and charged them to use the interstate roads. That would bring the rail companies up to parity. Trucking companies would just service the last few (or dozen) miles from the rail hub to the source/destination. And we all get lower taxes and less highway construction.
Just triple your price and call yourself a "luxury" service.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
For both there are options to do without. They are not cost-effective at the moment, because in both trains and planes the engineer/pilot is a lot less of a cost factor than in a car or truck.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm sure a lot of criminals who don't have the gall to assault a regular truck may be able to justify going after a self-driving truck, since there are no people onboard to leave behind as witnesses.
A driverless truck carrying millions of dollars worth of goods out on a lonely desert road? It'll be like a sitting (well, rolling) duck. They're going to have to have some clever defensive mechanisms installed to prevent an all out field day for thieves.
It's harder to fly a plane or helicopter. There are a lot of things to hit on the ground, a lot of information feeds, and a lot of decisions to make; the air is nice and clear, except for invisible turbulence, stalls, and other situations requiring massive processing of information in ways not well-documented.
To get planes to self-fly reliably, you have to make them not drop out of the sky in a stall. Pilots do that by experience, which is just knowledge and an interpretation of feedback. Since we don't have a way to explain the generalized algorithm and information set pilots use, we could, at best, use complex flight recorders and bayesian analysis to generate statistical models which attempt to use only the specific situations encountered plus a limited degree of extrapolation on variables we've identified as relevant. None of the indicators are visual; we can only pull values from temperature sensors (which are slow to react to temperature changes), accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, and stress sensors (i.e. power meters) attached to the movable parts of the plane to work out the situation. That means we have to either hope for a simple correlation between these variables or find a transformation algorithm to match them to what the pilot senses.
Cars can sense wheel rotation speed and identify when individual wheels are slipping. Accelerometers, gyroscopes, cameras, LiDAR, and prescriptive data feeds (e.g. maps, GPS) give you a pretty good sense of how the car is moving. You can tack on things like stress sensors on suspension components to model vehicular forces, and current models don't even do that--it might not even be necessary. Vehicle dynamics are pretty easy to work out from the way the car is moving now and the amount of wheel slippage; aerodynamics are negligible, so invisible forces aren't going to send your car spinning out of control or cause it to slide along the road due to a loss of traction.
As for the replacement rate, 25,000 per month isn't a lot. There are 192,000 freight trucks sold per year, or 16,000 per month. That leaves 9,000 taxi cabs or other such things.
It's not a big deal at that rate, anyway. The job turn-over is actually pretty high, and this gives a lot of recovery time. It's only 0.0166% of the workforce per month, and the adjustment rate for new contracts to push down shipping costs should pick up as soon as someone can scratch into a market--which means a freight company could even start expanding to weaken a competitor by deploying more trucks than the drivers it's eliminating and cutting its shipping pricing to attract more business. The added volume, even with the margins the same, will grow that company's cash flows and make them more capable of taking actions to gain market traction--while the competitors will have to lay off workers who they don't replace with self-driving cars.
In other words: we should see some job replacement in 2-3 months due to a slight reduction in shipping costs putting a control on consumer prices (i.e. prices rise slower than consumer wages; they'll slow their rise just a tiny bit more), but it's not going to stop the growth of unemployment at that level. It could be 6-12 months before the competition in the market really starts driving prices down, and those input costs start leading downstream businesses to price competition. We may see a full swing of 0.1%-0.2% unemployment at peak with a transition rate of 25,000.
Once that replacement rate kicks in, the rate of transition onto autonomous cars will pick up as a market imperative. It's two-fold: slightly-lower costs mean consumers can buy slightly-more, and part of that goes into increased shipping demand, which means labor on operational support, mechanics, fuel (electricity), and so forth. In total, it's still less labor in shipping, and less labor per unit shipped. Anything shipped must be sold (retail), as well, so some of the labor goes there. Even then, you've got slac
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At least not in our lifetimes.
Rather than have some guy spend days driving a truckload cross-country, howsabout...
* short-haul trailer from factory/port to nearest railroad yard
* have the train take the loaded trailer cross-country to the nearest railyard to final destination
* short-haul from railroad yard to warehouse or store
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
there are no people onboard to leave behind as witnesses.
Cameras make better witnesses than people and these will be loaded with cameras.
I know nobody likes to read 90-paragraph essays and would rather do knee-jerk reactions either forwards or (as you did) in satire, but I still prefer to do a full accounting to justify the current position.
The tl;dr is that a rapid technological deployment will cause a terrible recession due to unemploying several percentage points of the workforce and driving the remainder to tighten their wallets, creating further unemployment; while a slow technological deployment will cause hardly a whimper, and just drive up consumer wealth.
25,000 jobs exchanged per month is a slow, gradual, easy deployment. We probably won't even notice. We'll notice so little that we'll get a few percentage points richer and still complain that we're poorer and the rich are taking all the money, even as we buy more junk, buy bigger houses, get better healthcare, and generally push up the living conditions of the middle- and lower-classes.
(Seriously, nobody cares about the explosive growth of middle- and lower-class wealth in the past 30 years; whenever I've backed someone into a corner pointing out all the things we buy now and the sheer quantity of consumption on which we live, they defect to an argument that material purchasing power isn't wealth in a conversation about the rich supposedly taking all the material purchasing power. I'm too stubborn to accept that complex, abstract concepts are hard to argue because people can't be forced to look directly at broad effects; if you can't hold up a rock and a grape and drop both to show the rock doesn't fall faster than the grape, they'll just ignore what you're saying and substitute their own imaginative fantasy for facts.)
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It's a complex economical issue that demonstrates that common sense is a logical fallacy, especially when dealing with large and complex systems. As such, it gets stupid people screaming for protection from something they think will hurt them.
Slashdot, like everywhere else, is full of self-indulgent idiots. Even rednecks have complex skills and knowledge other people don't; those of us with more-refined careers, better education, and all kinds of justifications about how smart we are like to forget that anyone without our particular technical skill has some other difficult skill (accounting, etc.). All sides think the others are full of morons and that their own ideals are perfect; we all then proceed to mindlessly throw out baseless and damaged opinions about things we don't understand.
I like economics because it's complex. Economics isn't about having read a book on economic systems; it's about thinking, analyzing, and conjecturing. Generally, in all non-economist circles, economics becomes a political topic where people grab a few choice axioms to demonstrate their position--or just shoot from the hip.
Look at the two opposing arguments. If you replace a man with a machine, then you've eliminated the man's job (forever). Alternately, if you replace a man with a machine, then you've created jobs for people to make machines. Neither is correct.
If you replace a man with a machine, then you've replaced a set of labor-hours to produce a thing with a set of fewer labor-hours to produce the same things. You get fewer machinists and machine operators than people replaced by the machines. The jobs lost to this re-distribute, typically such that you get some machinists, more machines producing more of the things for a lower cost (and price) than before, and jobs doing other things entirely.
That's also complex, takes time to fully render (there aren't and can't be replacement jobs the day jobs are eliminated by new technology because the full of downstream economic effects have to cut through all pressures holding them back), and can happen in a bunch of different ways. Slow technological replacement causes negligible unemployment increases before job replacement kicks in and puts us back on stable footing; rapid replacement causes rapid unemployment build-up and recessions.
Nobody cares. What they care about is the group of people on their side--the luddites and the technophiles. They care that a bunch of people agree with whichever wrong-headed, overly-simplistic ideal they're clinging to.
As a media outlet, if you can scare people, you can get them to come back to you for more news. The ability to see threats is the ability to avoid threats. News outlets that frighten you with terrifying news are perceived as protecting you from harm. They're your look-outs. Bad analysis and sloppy reporting to imply a threat gets you more viewers and more ad revenue.
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Current owner operators essentially buy themselves a job when they buy their truck. They almost all work for freight companies that find the customers that need something hauled. They may still be able to lease their truck to those companies, but that isn't going to pay their bills.
The purpose of a taxi (or Uber, for that matter), or a delivery truck, is not to provide the driver with employment. The purpose is for the passenger(s) and/or cargo to get there. If that purpose can be achieved without a human driver for less money, than so be it.
Imagine, for a second, some wonderful pill being invented, that eliminated all disease. Would we seriously consider unemployment of doctors and nurses as a downside to the pill's wide adoption?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm sure a lot of criminals who don't have the gall to assault a regular truck may be able to justify going after a self-driving truck, since there are no people onboard to leave behind as witnesses.
Well there's also nobody to intimidate. Nobody with any keys or codes to give you access to or control over the truck. My first thoughts apart from the constant cell phone/GPS tracking to alert police would be to just kill the engine, lock the brakes, give a little light and siren show and if you can't draw anyone's attention and they're really determined to break in by force before the police get there, just set off a few dye packs/stink bombs. Sure it'll ruin the cargo but zero payoff will make the highway robberies stop pretty quick.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Self driving cars will do the exact opposite of what they claim they'll do: They won't make people more free, they'll make them PRISONERS who have no control over where or when they're going anywhere. The government, law enforcement, corporations, and criminal hackers will be in control of that.
PACCAR (DAF. Kenworth, Leyland, Peterbilt, various PACCAR country brands, Dynacraft) by itself currently produces 90% of that. Production won't be the problem.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If it weren't for the on-board computer keeping your toy drone stable, you'd never be able to fly it. Already, computers are doing a better job of flying than humans.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
To get planes to self-fly reliably, you have to make them not drop out of the sky in a stall. Pilots do that by experience, which is just knowledge and an interpretation of feedback. Since we don't have a way to explain the generalized algorithm and information set pilots use, we could, at best, use complex flight recorders and bayesian analysis to generate statistical models which attempt to use only the specific situations encountered plus a limited degree of extrapolation on variables we've identified as relevant. None of the indicators are visual; we can only pull values from temperature sensors (which are slow to react to temperature changes), accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, and stress sensors (i.e. power meters) attached to the movable parts of the plane to work out the situation. That means we have to either hope for a simple correlation between these variables or find a transformation algorithm to match them to what the pilot senses.
I've never read so much fucking bullshit about aircraft as this train wreck of a comment. Seriously, the fucking bullshit is piled so high in that one paragraph you will never be able to dig yourself out.
Do yourself a favor and read up on the Airbus aircraft or the Boeing 777s.
Holy Fucking Shit! you are stupid. Are you for real???
The correct Face Palm for this garbage would put your hand right through the back of your head.
This is one guy who had the doctor beat him with the Stupid Stick when he came out.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
What's with all of the gloom and doom when it comes to robotics taking over human jobs? Is it a fetish? Are there people reading this shit and masturbating?
Yes, they're the acolytes of Ayn Rand. This is a libertarian wet dream.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Not 25k trucks per month, there are 3-4 shifts per day, so divide that by 3 or 4 and don't forget, these will work weekends as well and don't take vacations, so it's probably closer to 5 or 6 drivers per truck sold. I would expect closer to 5 or 6k trucks per month.
And it's only crazy until you see the math behind it. If you figure each driver at a low $40k per year (they can make more) means 120-240k per year savings, so even if the truck costs an extra 200k (which is the increased estimated cost last I saw), it's not going to take long to pay off and start saving them a LOT of money. Also automated drivers are not as hard on the trucks, meaning less maintenance and less fuel (a 1/3rd mpg increase is significant), both of which also cost a fortune on these. Now consider those cost savings over a 10 year period...
As soon as they are proven, it's a no-brainer for companies to invest in these trucks as soon as possible, which is exactly why it's a rush to be the first on the road with them.
Easy, just pay a dude to sit in the truck and provide "security". Also to take over if the AI encounters some kind of weather / construction / traffic condition that the computer can't navigate.
I sort of want to write a sci-fi about the future of mining drones. There's nothing to prevent corporations from using drones to "fight" over mineral-rich asteroids... what's to stop two different companies from sending drones to harvest from the same asteroid? Is it an act of war if one company's drone hijacks (well, "salvages") another drone's cargo? No one is out there to enforce this.
I envision a future where people are sent out to "lay claim" to asteroids and other resources. If they're alive, in only the loosest sense of the word (say cryogenically frozen) then it's clearly an act of war for a drone to come and disturb them from their slumber, which could be legally enforceable back on Earth.
Anyway, that, except for long-distance trucker drones.
When I was a kid it was acid rain, population explosion and nuclear annihilation.
Why even talk about autonomous semi-trucks? It's stupid. Really.
Self-driving semi-trucks would still use-up our paved interstates. They would have loads of only 18 tons each. If they screw up, people get smashed into goo and their families sue.
The sensible solution is AI for TRAINS, which can haul hundreds of tons at one time. Forget about truck-drivers losing their jobs... it should be train engineers worried about losing their jobs that consist of just standing in the cabin, hitting an "I am at attention" button every couple of minutes, and occasionally confirming to destination controllers that they know which track their train has been set to stop on.
It was a tragedy to deregulate the rail-transport industry. We ended up with federally subsidized interstate highways, which are a major source of carbon-burning and plastic-microparticle emissions that harm the fabric of the natural world around us. Go back to rail! As a bonus, it is a far-easier AI problem to solve than to try and have a semi navigate congested freeways.
Oh, who cares? AI developers are not interested in the achievable. No. Oh, no. The final solution has to always be just out of reach...
Maybe they should join the elevator attendants union.
An AI truck can work 24 hours a day, and doesn't need to take breaks. Plus, they're going to be better at automatic routing and avoiding speed up/slow down scenarios, and fleets of such vehicles can split loads / plan routes better and with less overhead than a fleet of human-driver trucks. So probably divide that truck figure by 3-4.
Back to work doing what exactly? That won't be a good use of big data.
We're not the stable boys, we're the horses.
Bank robberies also involve threatening humans as their main tactic, so it's not a good model for ai-truck robberies.
Note that you have there 4030 bank robberies where they accosted *people*, and you "bank-related burglaries and larceny" only adds up to another 61 cases. e.g. bank robberies are far far more effective when there are humans you can force to do it for you.
. Since we don't have a way to explain the generalized algorithm and information set pilots use, we could, at best, use complex flight recorders and bayesian analysis to generate statistical models which attempt to use only the specific situations encountered plus a limited degree of extrapolation on variables we've identified as relevant.
The autonomous US Air Force X-37B is an autonomous space plane designed to spend up to 270 days in orbit at a time. It has completed four missions including autonomous landings for 225 days, 469 days, 674 days, and 718 days. Stop buying into your own hype.
it doesn't matter how many cameras you put on it: that Dominos Pizza delivery robot is still going to get kicked on a daily basis.
Not if you stop it by hacking into it, and you disable all that you mentioned.
If people are hacking cars and stealing them, why not trucks.
And the ONLY reason ALL THREE did NOT kill you is because of the warnings of the threats they hold - those warnings lead to interventions (some technological, some regulatory, some a combination of both) which changed the conditions and prevented them from happening.
When a scientist says "If X then Y" and you change X and Y doesn't happen - it makes the scientist RIGHT not wrong.
You can ONLY claim he was wrong if Y fails to happen after NOBODY DID ANYTHING ABOUT X.
Nobody just said "Acid rain will destroy all our crops" - they said "Acid rain is caused by polutants (and here follows a list of the biggest problems), and if we don't reduce or end those polutants then acid rain will cause severe damage"
So we reduced those polutants - and acid rain was largely averted.
Scientists warned that CFCs were harming the Ozone layer which could have serious negative effects on human health, laws were made to ban CFCs, new technologies developed to replace them - and the problem was averted and eventually solved.
Scientists discovered a problem with the long habit in many computer designs of storing the century as a 2-digit number, a problem that would hit peak-damage as we moved into a new century. They warned. Huge numbers of technologists from engineers to sysadmins spent years working long hours to implement ways to avert the problem - by replacing hardware with models that did store 4-digit centuries, and upgrading software with 4-digit modifications. It paid off - the Y2K problem was almost entirely solved - among the worst of what did happened was one 102-year old lady who had to go to court to get permission to vote because the voting machines thought she was 2 years old.
These successes PROVE the validity of the 'doomsday' predictions. Those predictions aren't made out of schadenfreude. The people making them do not WANT those scenarios to happen. They aren't making them to scare you. They are making scientific predictions: if X then Y and asking that we change X so that Y does not happen.
This history VALIDATES their approach - it proves that, given such warning, people ARE in fact capable of changing X and preventing Y and we've done it numerous times.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And were back at not having self driving cars/trucks then.
Who says the truck will be alone? It can be accompanied by self-driving armed escort, complete with arial drone cover support (using the other self-driving vehicles like aircraft carriers). And humans may be able to log in remotely to command those defenses as needed. The future possibilities are boundless... in all vectors.
Orbit is not atmosphere; and a UAV with a 14-foot wingspan isn't a passenger jet with a 196-foot wingspan.
Next would you like to claim that a goose is pretty fat and can fly, so an ostrich should obviously have no trouble getting airborne?
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Stalls aren't part of air; stalls are an event experienced due to interaction with air. Use your fucking brain.
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A toy drone doesn't have a 196-foot wingspan and isn't traveling at 700mph at 10,000-30,000 foot atmosphere.
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"That would require the building of 25,000 vehicles a month."
Probably more like building 3000 vehicles a month and installing 22000 conversion kits.
I suspect trucking companies will replace tractors when, and only when, it costs more to keep an old tractor on the road than to replace it.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
You're trying to explain something to creimer?
I understood the explanation well enough, especially since I lived through those times.
I'm sensing a Smokey and the Bandit remake, only this time with an Automated Truck...!!!!
Perhaps a truck driver should invest in self-driving software & technology that would allow one driver to supervise a train of semi-trucks on special interstate lanes x-country & in "delivery/service" lanes in urban areas: more trucking and specialized delivery services, smaller trucks, drone delivery vehicles. Human supervisors to handle customer events...
PlaynBass
Just kill yourself.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Says the guy who rants about how he doesn't like the facts put in front of him but doesn't offer any explanation. Your entire counter-argument has been "you're an idiot"; to the audience, I've explained things, and you've thrown a tantrum.
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Neither is your helicopter - unless it's already exploded.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
A helicopter is a different machine with different aerodynamics due to its sheer size, mass, and altitude, too.
Your argument implies that being able to fly an RC quadcopter drone implies capability to fly a helicopter. Do you know what flying a helicopter entails?
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