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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.
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.
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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As someone who used to drive big rigs for my dad back in college, I can say that anyone who thinks an AI will be able to drive a modern tractor-trailer anytime soon has obviously never driven one. A tractor-trailer is about 100 times more difficult, complicated, and dangerous to drive than a regular car. And we don't even have AI's that can reliably drive cars yet. Shit, they've only just recently developed reliable automatic transmissions for those beasts.
You just show me a AI that can safely and consistently alley-dock a 62-ft trailer down some ancient one-lane road with a turn-in that the trailer can barely even clear, in a city filled with unpredictable traffic and 4-wheel drivers who HATE waiting on tractor-trailers and don't care about traffic laws.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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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I don't think anyone thinks they will dock themselves soon, but it would still be a great money saver if they could park themselves at a hub and wait for a couple jockies to drive a foldable scooter out and bring them in. Eventually docks may be designed to accommodate self driven trucks rather than the other way around. I could see Amazon doing something like that.
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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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I could also see Amazon partnering with one of Musk's companies to build hyperloop for freight. It seems like building a 1-meter or even 30-cm freight pipe would be a heck of a lot easier than transporting people. 1-meter could fit almost everything they sell, and 30cm would still be useful for a lot of products. We'd get an operational test of the hyperloop concept. The train people would really sweat bullets over that one; but I'm not sure where they'd acquire the rights-of-way.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It could happen in my lifetime (I'm assuming i'll live another 40 years). But not with the roads that we currently have.
The Nissan CEO saying it will happen by 2019 was just fantasy. AI is nowhere near good enough to handle rainy roads, icy roads, construction debris, pedestrians, basketballs rolling from the playground, etc. etc. etc. Hell, it can't even handle a gigantic 18 wheeler blocking the road because it was painted WHITE and some dude got his head decapitated in a Tesla.
In fact I don't think AI will *ever* be good enough to handle current roads. However autonomous cars taking over can still happen if the laws change and roads are retrofitted with sensors and rebuilt to exact dimensions and uniform markings, everywhere.
Maybe by the time I die of old age.
Exactly. Automating trucking (and other transportation) would be a huge boon to our economy, not a drag on it. Suppose for a moment that in one day, every truck was capable of moving itself around automatically, sans person. What do you think will happen to the cost of shipping goods? What will happen to the volume of goods moved? What does that do to the volume produced / consumed? There may be 3,000,000 truckers, but there are 300,000,000 consumers, and everyone of them benefits.
These stories are very one sided and usually portray the losing side. Just like crying for the buggy whip manufacturers when buggies got petrol-powered engines.
Food will cost less. More people can therefore afford to eat. This is a good thing.
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.
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It depends. People keep telling me computers are far safer because they can process information faster than anyone can. I can't say I believe it is remotely that simple.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
'Processing information' incorrectly or inadequately hundreds of times faster than a human being can is still incorrectly processed information. The difference here is that instead of just a few people getting injured or killed (in the case of a passenger vehicle), or some sheet metal getting crumpled, dozens or maybe hundreds of people could DIE when 18000 gallons of flammable liquid is spilled all over the place and ignited.
When it comes right down to it, this whole damned subject is supposed to be about safety of human beings, and it CANNOT be about anything else. I have said for as long as this whole 'self driving car' subject has been around, that if a 'self driving' vehicle of ANY KIND cannot be AT LEAST as flawless and safe as a human vehicle operator, then it has no business operating a vehicle at all. So far all I'm seeing is this entire technology being rushed to market as fast as they possibly can, and, apparently, to hell with who might get hurt in the process. Apparently, human lives are cheap, compared to the profit to be made from this.
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.
> cannot be AT LEAST as flawless and safe as a human vehicle operator, then it has no business operating a vehicle at all.
Leaves lots of room for computers. Doesn't have to beat the best driver in their best condition, just has to beat the average driver, the sleepy drugged up ones, the vindictive ones...
Their are many things autonomy beats your average driver at today, and getting that on the road will be a big advantage. That is obviously step one (same as light vehicles today) Get it to save sleepy drivers from leaving their lanes, get it to slow down rigs driven past their safe limits, get it to warn of hazardous drivers and conditions... Then it will be take over the low hanging jobs like clearing railway and shipping terminals. Take over long haul interstate, so one driver can can handle more miles safely. Like oil and coal power, Trucking is likely not sustainable (at least at current levels.) So it does need re worked anyway, so they will figure out what can be automated and what can be optimized, and eliminated that a computer may not be able to handle as well. Since computers can control many more variables more precisely likely that will result in trucks and docks, and containers optimized for those conditions, and removing those hard for automation.
Autonomy is already controlling bigger rigs with more precision than 90% of truck drivers today can. (3500HP mining trucks going over 50 mph with a million pounds carrying thousands of gallons maintaining 3" precision in backing, also railways, steel mills, ships.) So yes the software and hardware is not complete today for OTR, but 20 years ago most people said internet banking would never happen also.
If you're beating the average driver you're cutting accidents in half.
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Horse shit. The average cost of moving freight via truck averages between $1.60 - $2.10 per mile. An excellent driver with ten plus years experience will make maybe .45 per mile. The majority of drivers make less than 35.
I work in a specialized part of this industry where an average move is $5K. Of that the driver makes around $1K.
Do the math. ‘Trickle-Down-Economics’ has never worked in the real world. The consumer will never see that cost savings. Marketing bullshit from companies that pretend to care about you, notwithstanding.
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