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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.
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'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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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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