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SELF DRIVING TRUCKS * USA: To hit us like a human-driven truck
* New York - The imminent need for basic income in recognition of our machine-driven future
-- The potential effects that self-driving vehicle technology would have not only on truckers themselves, but on all the local economies dependent on trucker salaries. Once one starts wondering about this kind of one-two punch to America's gut, one sees the prospects aren't pretty... We are facing the decimation of entire small town economies, a disruption the likes of which we haven't seen since the construction of the interstate highway system itself bypassed entire towns. If you think this may be a bit of hyperbole... Let me back up a bit and start with this:
... It should be clear at a glance just how dependent the American economy is on truck drivers. According to the American Trucker Association, there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the US, and an additional 5.2 million people employed within the truck-driving industry who don't drive the trucks. That's 8.7 million trucking-related jobs... We can't stop there though, because the incomes received by these 8.2 million people create the jobs of others. Those 3.5 million truck drivers driving all over the country stop regularly to eat, drink, rest, and sleep. Entire businesses have been built around serving their wants and needs... One further important detail to consider is that truck drivers are well-paid. They provide a middle class income of about $40,000 per year. That's a higher income than just about half (46 percent) of all tax filers, including those of married households... Truck driving is just about the last job in the country to provide a solid middle class salary without requiring a post-secondary degree... If we now step back and look at the big national picture, we are potentially looking at well over 10 million American workers and their families whose incomes depend entirely or at least partially on the incomes of truck drivers, all of whom markedly comprise what is left of the American middle class... The trucking industry expects to see 21 percent more truck driving jobs by 2020. They also expect to see an increasing shortfall in drivers, with over 100,000 jobs open and unable to find drivers to fill them. Higher demand than supply of truckers also points to higher pay, so for at least the next five years, the future is looking great for truck drivers. The only thing that could put a damper on this would be if the demand for truck drivers were to say... drive off a sharp cliff...
* That cliff is the self-driving truck...
* The long-term job outlook of the American Trucker
-- Humans are dangerous behind the wheel of anything... So the question then becomes, how long until millions of truckers are freshly unemployed and what happens to them and all the rest of us as a result? ...
When will self-driving cars conquer our roads? ...
Source: Morgan Stanley
-- According to Morgan Stanley, complete autonomous capability will be here by 2022, followed by massive market penetration by 2026 and the cars we know and love today then entirely extinct in another 20 years thereafter... We're looking at a window of massive disruption starting somewhere between 2020 and 2030... There is no turning the wheel in prevention of driving off this cliff either. Capitalism itself has the wheel now, and what the market wants, the market gets. Competition will make sure of it... Any realistic time horizon for self-driving trucks needs to look that trucks only need to be self-driven on highways. They do not need warehouse-to-store autonomy to be disruptive. City-to-city is sufficient. At the same time, trucks are almost entirely corporate driven... There are market forces above and beyond private cars operating for trucks. If there are savings to be found in eliminating truckers from drivers seats, which there are, these savings will be sought. It's actually really easy to find these savings right now... Wirelessly linked truck platoons are as simple as having a human driver drive a truck, with multiple trucks without drivers following closely behind. This not only saves on gas money (7 percent for only two trucks together), but can immediately eliminate half of all truckers if for example 2-truck convoys became the norm. There's no real technical obstacles to this option. It's a very simple use of present technology... The answer to the big question of "When?" for self-driving trucks is that they can essentially hit our economy at any time...
* The eve of massive social and economic disruption
-- This is what happens when good-paying jobs are eliminated, and that money not spent on wages and salaries instead stays in the hands of owners of capital, or is given in smaller amounts to lower-paid employees in lower-wage jobs. Inequality grows more and more extreme and our land of opportunity vanishes. Economic growth slows to a crawl... This is where we're at and this is what we face as we look towards a quickly approaching horizon of over 3 million unemployed truckers and millions more unemployed service industry workers in small towns all over the country dependent on truckers as consumers of their services... The removal of truckers from freeways will have an effect on today's towns similar to the effects the freeways themselves had on towns decades ago that had sprung up around bypassed stretches of early highways... With self-driving cars and trucks, here again we face the prospect of town after town being zipped past by people (if even present) choosing to instead just sleep in their computer-driven vehicles... This time, there's no need for entire towns to even exist at all...
* The road left to take
-- As close as 2025 -- that is in a mere 10 years -- our advancing state of technology will begin disrupting our economy in ways we can't even yet imagine. Human labor is increasingly unnecessary and even economically unviable compared to machine labor. And yet we still insist on money to pay for what our machines are making for us. As long as this remains true, we must begin providing ourselves the money required to purchase what the machines are producing. Without a technological dividend, the engine that is our economy will seize, or we will fight against technological progress itself in the same way some once destroyed their machine replacements. Without non-work income, we will actually fight to keep from being replaced by the technology we built to replace us. Just as our roads a decade from now will be full of machine drivers instead of human drivers, a 21st century economy shall be driven by human consumers, not human workers, and these consumers must be freely given their purchasing power. If we refuse, if we don't provide ourselves a universal and unconditional basic income soon, the future is going to hit us like a truck -- a truck driven solely by ourselves...
No one should be asking what we're going to do if computers take our jobs. We should all be asking what we get to do once freed from them...
NY, USA - Huffington Post, by Scott Santens - 19 May 2015
Labels: autonomous trucks, self driving trucks
posted by Unknown @ 10:55 AM
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