Earlier this week, PBS broadcast a two-hour Frontline episode, In the Age of AI. It was one of the more comprehensive media presentations on the automated future we face, and the program was broken into five sections. One of those was titled “The Surveillance State” and it described the steps being taken by Red China in “a project called Sharp Eyes which is putting camera on every major street and corner of every village in China” — chilling, and a reminder that we in America should resist the many anti-freedom influences from Beijing, as the NBA has failed to do.
There was a segment about self-driving trucks that included an interview with Hope Cumbee, the wife of a human driver, who described how tough the life was and that they made only $22,000 a year.
Below, truck driver Shawn Cumbee said he loves his job because he is a third-generation truck driver.
Frontline found a diverse young entrepreneur named Alex Rodrigues who predicted, “We’re talking less than half a decade” for self-driving trucks to be on the highways.
Perhaps, but if an autonomous truck has a deadly accident like the self-driving car in Tempe, Arizona last year, the speedy road forward may disappear. Still, the job-killing technology is coming sooner or later because big money has been invested by major companies.
One result will be the loss of hundreds of thousands of truck-driver jobs. A Department of Commerce report from 2015 estimated that one in nine U.S. workers are drivers. A lot of unemployment is coming from automation, but an excellent jobs economy now makes it easy to overlook that fact. And America won’t need to import any immigrant drivers when that job is on the way out.
NARRATOR: The challenges, the benefits.
The autonomous truck represents both as it maneuvers into the marketplace.
The engineers are confident that, in spite of questions about when this will happen, they can get it working safely sooner than most people realize.
ALEX RODRIGUES: I think that you will see the first vehicles operating with no one inside them moving freight in the next few years, and then you’re gonna see that expanding to more freight, more geographies, more weather over time as that capability builds up. We’re talking less than half a decade.
NARRATOR: He already has a Fortune 500 company as a client, shipping appliances across the Southwest. He says the sales pitch is straightforward.
ALEX RODRIGUES: They spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year shipping parts around the country. We can bring that cost in half.
And they’re really excited to be able to start working with us, both because of the potential savings from deploying self-driving, and also because of all the operational efficiencies that they see, the biggest one being able to operate 24 hours a day. So right now, human drivers are limited to 11 hours by federal law, and a driverless truck obviously wouldn’t have that limitation.
NARRATOR: The idea of a driverless truck comes up often in discussions about artificial intelligence.
Steve Viscelli is a sociologist who drove a truck while researching his book “The Big Rig” about the industry.
STEVE VISCELLI, University of Pennsylvania: This is one of the most remarkable stories in U.S. labor history, I think, is the decline of unionized trucking. The industry was deregulated in 1980, and at that time truck drivers were earning the equivalent of over $100,000 in today’s dollars. And today the typical truck driver will earn a little over $40,000 a year.
I think it’s an important part of the automation story, right? Why are they so afraid of automation? Because we’ve had four decades of rising inequality in wages, and if anybody is going to take it on the chin from automation, the trucking industry—the first in line is going to be the driver, without a doubt.
NARRATOR: For his research, Viscelli tracked down truckers and their families, like Shawn and Hope Cumbee of Beaverton, Michigan.
STEVE VISCELLI: Hey, Hope!
HOPE CUMBEE: Hi!
STEVE VISCELLI: I’m Steve Viscelli.
HOPE CUMBEE: Hi, Steve, nice to meet you.
STEVE VISCELLI: Great to meet you, too.
HOPE CUMBEE: Come on in.
STEVE VISCELLI: Thanks.
NARRATOR: And their son Charlie.
CHARLIE CUMBEE: This is Daddy, me, Daddy and Mommy.
NARRATOR: But Daddy’s not here. Shawn Cumbee’s truck has broken down in Tennessee.
Hope, who drove a truck herself, knows the business well.
HOPE CUMBEE: We made $150,000 in a year. That sounds great, right? That’s good money. We paid $100,000 in fuel, OK? So right there, now I made $50,000. But I didn’t really, because you get an oil change every month, so that’s $300 a month. You still have to do all the maintenance. We had a motor blow out—$13,000. Right?! [Laughs] I know. I mean, I choke up a little just thinking about it, because it was—and it was $13,000, and we were off work for two weeks!
So by the end of the year, with that $150,000, by the end of the year we’d made about $22,000.
NARRATOR: In a truck stop in Tennessee, Shawn has been sidelined waiting for a new part. The garage owner is letting him stay in the truck to save money.
SHAWN CUMBEE: Hi, baby.
HOPE CUMBEE: Hey. How’s it going?
SHAWN CUMBEE: It’s going. Chunky-butt!
CHARLIE CUMBEE: Hey, Daddy!
SHAWN CUMBEE: Hi, Chunky-butt. What’re you doing?
Believe it or not, I do it because I love it. I mean, it’s in the blood; third-generation driver. And my granddaddy told me a long time ago, when I was probably 11, 12 years old, probably, he said, “The world meets nobody halfway. Nobody.” He said, “If you want it, you have to earn it.” And that’s what I do every day; I live by that creed, and I’ve lived by that since it was told to me.
HOPE CUMBEE: So if you’re down for a week in a truck, you still have to pay your bills.
I have enough money in my checking account at all times to pay a month’s worth of bills. That does not include my food. That doesn’t include field trips for my son’s school.
My son and I just went to our yearly doctor appointment. I took money out of my son’s piggy bank to pay for it because it’s not scheduled in. It’s not something that you can afford. I mean, like, when—sorry.
STEVE VISCELLI: It’s OK.
Have you guys ever talked about self-driving trucks? Is he—
HOPE CUMBEE: [Laughs] So, kind of. I asked him once. He laughed so hard. He’s, “No way will they ever have a truck that can drive itself.”
SHAWN CUMBEE: It is kind of interesting, when you think about it. They’re putting all this new technology into things, but it’s still man-made, and man does make mistakes. I really don’t see it being a problem with the industry, because one, you still got to have a driver in it, because I don’t see it doing cities; I don’t see it doing main things; I don’t see it backing into a dock. I don’t see the automation part doing—maybe the box trailer side, I could see that, but not stuff like I do. So I really ain’t worried about the automation of trucks.
HOPE CUMBEE: How near of a future is it?
STEVE VISCELLI: Yeah, self-driving. So, some companies are already operating. Embark, for instance, is one that has been doing driverless trucks on the interstate and what’s called “exit-to-exit self-driving.” And they’re currently running real freight.
HOPE CUMBEE: Really?
STEVE VISCELLI: Yeah, on I-10.
MALE TRUCK STOP ANNOUNCER: Shower guest 100, your shower is now ready.
NARRATOR: Over time, it has become harder and harder for veteran independent drivers like the Cumbees to make a living. They’ve been replaced by younger, less experienced drivers.
STEVE VISCELLI: So the trucking industry is $740 billion a year, and, again, in many of these operations, labor’s a third of that cost. By my estimate, I think we’re in the range of 300,000 or so jobs in the foreseeable future that could be automated to some significant extent.
