The founder of Starsky Robotics, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, appeared on Fox Business recently and remarked, “We’ve been testing on Florida roads with people in the cab for [...]]]> Self-driving trucks have been in basic test mode for several years now — meaning a human is present behind the wheel — but now Florida moving toward full auto.

The founder of Starsky Robotics, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, appeared on Fox Business recently and remarked, “We’ve been testing on Florida roads with people in the cab for couple of years. We’re now gearing up to take the person completely out of the cab on public roads in the state of Florida.”

Still, the Starsky boss says is is not ignorant of the job threat posed by self-driving vehicles, as he described in a June 11 interview:

Seltz-Axmacher explained to Freightwaves, “While others are trying to build fully autonomous trucks, we are building a truck that drives with no person in it and is remote-controlled for the first and last mile and that’s a completely different mindset. We are not eliminating drivers’ jobs. Instead, we are moving them from a truck to a safe and comfortable office where they utilize years of their long-haul trucking experience, but remain close to their families and go home between shifts.”

Perhaps. We’ll see how long that strategy lasts when other companies compete with cheaper hauling rates by deleting drivers entirely.

Below, a Daimler self-driving truck near Hoover dam in 2015.

I thought that trucking would go first for the intermediate strategy of platooning, where a driver pilots the lead truck with two or three vehicles following electronically. But Starsky is going for the big enchilada of full automation straight away. Perhaps they want the publicity of being first.

Keep in mind that driving is a major employment category for Americans. A 2015 Department of Commerce study said that one in nine US workers is employed as a driver:

So Washington won’t need to import any immigrants to work as drivers, since

Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete

Here’s a report from central Florida about the self-driving trucks:

Driverless big rigs could be hitting Florida highways next year. Are you ready, good buddy?, Orlando Sentinel, June 13, 2019

Driverless semi-trucks could be sharing Florida highways as early as next year, and there will be no requirement that surrounding motorists know it.

Nor will autonomous driving systems need to be tested, inspected, or certified before being deployed under a new state law that takes effect July 1.

10-4?

Starsky Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup company that’s been testing its driverless trucking technology in Florida and Texas, has put out a call for job applicants who one day want to pilot big rigs remotely.

Starsky envisions its remote drivers logging onto computers in an office environment to take the reins of its trucks during the first and last miles of their long hauls.

That means the trucks will be on autopilot for the vast majority of their highway journeys.
Driverless deployments should begin in Florida by the end of 2020, Starsky says.

That’s much sooner than 2027, the year consulting firm McKinsey & Company projects fully driverless trucks will be ready to hit the highway.

This brave new world is brought to you by a new state law authorizing driverless transportation networks to operate on public roads without the presence of human drivers in the vehicles.

On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill enacting the law in a ceremony at SunTrax, the state’s new autonomous vehicle testing track in Auburndale.

While the law will also open the door for ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft to deploy fleets for commuter use, DeSantis’ signing ceremony was staged in front of a Starsky-branded semi-truck. Starsky demonstrated its technology during the event, the company said.

Co-sponsored by Rep. Jason Fischer, a Duval County Republican, and Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, the new law replaces an existing one that required a human driver be present and able to take over driving chores in autonomous vehicles operating on public property for any other reason than testing.

Brandes, Fischer and other proponents of driverless vehicle technology say automated systems will make transportation safer by removing the potential for human error. Driverless technology proponents envision a day in the not-too-distant future in which most driving becomes automated, freeing commuters to stare into their smartphones or their dashboard video screens.

Safeguards in the new state law are limited.

Companies will be allowed to deploy their systems with no state inspection or certification.

“Companies [that] wish to operate in the state can do so as long as they are in compliance with any applicable federal regulations and the insurance requirements outlined in state law,” said Beth Frady, communications director for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

Owners of autonomous commercial vehicles will be required to carry at least as much liability insurance as the state requires for commercial vehicles driven by humans. Currently, that means a minimum level of $300,000 in combined bodily liability and property damage coverage for trucks with a gross vehicle weight of 44,000 pounds or more, and lesser amounts for lighter vehicles.

Autonomous vehicles used for “on-demand” networks must be covered for at least $1 million for death, bodily injury and property damage, the law states.

Autonomous vehicles also will be required to achieve what’s called “minimal risk condition” — such as coming to a complete stop and activating their hazard lights — if their operating systems fail.

Existing traffic laws requiring drivers to promptly notify law enforcement agencies of crashes and then remain on scene to provide information or render aid will be exempted if law enforcement is notified by a vehicle’s owner or by the vehicle’s automated system.

After a Senate committee hearing in March to consider the new law, Sen. Janet Cruz, D-Tampa, prevailed in her push to require owners of autonomous vehicles to carry insurance and be held responsible when vehicles fail to operate as intended.

But she was unsuccessful in her call for a requirement for some sort of signal to passengers and surrounding motorists that the vehicle is operating in the autonomous mode. (Continues)

Below, a 2015 map of [...]]]> The Christian Science Monitor recently took a good long look at how the automated future will affect workers in one of the nation’s largest job categories — trucking. Self-driving vehicles will likely cause a great number of the two million-plus truck drivers in America to be put out of work.

Below, a 2015 map of employment in the US from National Public Radio (NPR) shows the most common occupation in every state, where truck driving now predominates.

It’s interesting to look at NPR’s chart of “Common Jobs” that accompanies the map above: in 1978, for example, Secretary was a top employment category, but office technology has already reduced the number of persons in that job with more reductions to come.

It would be nice if official Washington were paying attention to the fundamental economic changes coming our way from the automation wave. There’s not a whole lot that can be done, since machines will be utilized whenever they become cheaper than humans. Still, an emphasis on appropriate technical training would help, and of course we needn’t be importing foreign workers when nearly half of Americans will be made jobless in 20 years if the forecast of Oxford researchers is correct. Therefore:

Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete

The Christian Science Monitor looked at the technology largely from the viewpoint of the drivers who will be affected, which is a pleasant change from the Silicon Valley opinion that any tech advance is totally cool, no matter the human consequences.

Self-driving trucks in US offer window into where machines may replace humans, Christian Science Monitor, November 14, 2018

POMPANO BEACH, FLA. — On a muggy morning, Matt Brauneck noses his semi with its 53-foot trailer out of the yard, past the puddles left by a tropical storm. From his driver’s seat in the cab he has a clear view of the road and of the light suburban traffic leading to Interstate 75 in southeastern Florida. Atop the pearly-white cab are six cameras and three radar sensors that are feeding data to a computer stack behind Mr. Brauneck’s seat and to a remote operating base in Jacksonville, Fla., 300 miles away. Brauneck’s boss, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, the head of a small robotics company, is wedged in the back. I’m sitting up front.

And we’re about to turn over command of 16 tons of aluminum and steel to an algorithm.

After the truck eases onto the highway, Brauneck talks into his headset to the technicians in Jacksonville. Ten minutes later he gets the all-clear: Time to engage automation. He turns a cracker-sized red knob on the dashboard and flicks a switch. “We’re rolling. It’s on,” he says.

Brauneck lifts his hands from the wheel, which jerks occasionally to correct our path. The accelerator pedal at his feet is working itself up and down, or so it seems, as we cruise along I-75. Brauneck says the first time he “drove” a truck in automation it felt like the first time he scuba dived. Like breathing underwater, “it didn’t feel right,” he says. Now it’s routine for him.

Yet it’s not routine for me. I can’t stop watching the twitching wheel. Outside, the narrow highway shoulder is hemmed by a 10-foot fence to keep out alligators from the surrounding swampland. I see vultures wheeling overhead – seriously.

Welcome to tomorrow on the nation’s highways. Your local truck stop is one of the latest places where machines may soon replace jobs now done by humans.

For decades, robotic devices have been remaking the world of work, principally on the factory floor. They build our cars. They fetch our TVs and toasters in massive consumer warehouses. They weld the turbines used in jet engines.

But with advances in artificial intelligence, machines are poised to invade workplaces that once seemed immune to automation. A 2013 study by Oxford University found that fully 47 percent of jobs in the United States were at risk of being automated based on existing AI and robotics capabilities.

Transportation is one of the key areas where machines are on the march. People are both captivated – and frightened – by the prospect of self-driving cars pulsing through the nation’s streets. But for all the hype about automated cars, trucks may well begin hauling freight along highways, without the grizzled trucker at the wheel, first. Highway driving is more straightforward to automate than unpredictable urban driving and holds the promise of lower fuel costs, higher productivity, and improved safety.

Automated trucking is already a reality in remote mines and logging camps, and the US military has built its own robo-trucks to deploy in war zones. Volvo recently unveiled a prototype of an electric self-driving truck that doesn’t even have a cab for a driver.

While all this represents progress to many people, others worry about a looming loss of jobs. Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and author of a book on automation, says AI could replace millions of semi-skilled humans in industries from fast food to retail. No job is immune, not even in white-collar fields such as accounting, insurance, and pharmacology.

“People talk about this as if it’s speculative and in the future, and we’re in the midst of it,” says Mr. Yang.

That warning may be premature – or prescient. What can the trucking industry tell us? (Continues)

Driving is indeed a threatened occupation, and one big reason is the money being invested in the new technology by companies that don’t want to be left [...]]]> It’s good to see the press covering the coming revolution in the workplace caused by automation, as the San Francisco Chronicle did Sunday with a front-page story:

Driving is indeed a threatened occupation, and one big reason is the money being invested in the new technology by companies that don’t want to be left behind. So there is a rush for market dominance because huge money is involved. For example, Ford announced in February that it was investing $1 billion in a self-driving startup company. The same CNN Money article mentioned that GM spent $1 billion to acquire Cruise Automation in 2016.

One helpful item in the Chron piece is the instructive chart that analyzes all the sub-categories of driving jobs that may be affected — sobering!

Also, the Chronicle has a section of articles titled On the cusp of a car revolution that has some interesting stuff.

The article does mention the “platoon” strategy for trucks, which seems like it will have to be a long-term intermediate step before full automation: a human drives the lead big rig and a couple of digitally connected vehicles follow. Self-driving technology may be safer overall, but it’s not perfect, and a 40-ton 18-wheeler run amok is too awful to contemplate. Plus, how would self-driving trucks get fuel and other on-road maintenance?

Meanwhile, even as robo-vehicles are rapidly coming this way, the usual suspects are scheming to import still more cheap-working immigrants as drivers, according to a recent article from an industry publication:

Immigrant truck drivers: Shhhh. We don’t talk about it., FleetOwner.com, June 11, 2017

. . . Fleet Owner reached out to eight industry stakeholders with multiple phone calls and email messages to discuss immigrants in the U.S. trucking industry and either received no response or the equivalent of “no comment.”

This reluctance belies the fact that recruitment of immigrant drivers appears to be successful. Currently, of the 1.2 million motor carrier-employed U.S. truck drivers (operating Class 8 trucks) about 224,722 or 18.6% are immigrants, according to U.S. Census data for 2011-2015 as analyzed by Justin Lowry, PhD, a Postdoctoral Researcher at George Mason University’s Institute for Immigration Research. Figures for 2010-2012 clocked in at 15.7%, he said.

It’s crazy for the government to allow large levels of immigration to continue when we are entering a period of increasing unemployment caused by automation in the next few years.

Finally, note the weak title in the online version of the article: of course there will be more tech jobs in the automated future, but fewer people will have jobs overall because the point of employers installing machines is to save money.

Robot cars may kill jobs, but will they create them too?, San Francisco Chronicle, December 10, 2017

Millions of people drive for a living; autonomous technology could make their work obsolete

Barreling through California’s Central Valley, his big rig’s 48-foot refrigerated trailer loaded with lettuce, peppers and tomatoes, Brett Goodroad acknowledged that he’s probably among the last generation of long-distance truckers.

At 38, he has been driving trucks since he was a teenager working on summer harvest crews in North Dakota. With a master’s degree in fine arts and a penchant for listening to classic books on the road, he doesn’t fit the standard trucker profile. But the aptly named Goodroad, who has put in more than a decade driving for Veritable Vegetable, an organic produce distributor, is an eloquent spokesman for his millions of comrades now traveling America’s highways.

“The end of our species is coming — it sounds like it should be a country song,” he said as he finished his regular five-day haul from San Francisco to New Mexico and back, his dog, Louis, riding shotgun. “I definitely see that truck drivers are going to be a relic of the past in the future.”

That future — one in which our vehicles, including trucks like his, will drive themselves — is fast approaching. Some experts say fleets of driverless vehicles will be on the road within two years.

Along with utopian forecasts of far fewer traffic accidents, cleaner air and cheaper transportation, there’s another sobering prediction: Self-driving vehicles could cost millions of people their jobs. Autonomous autos will also create new jobs, but those most likely to lose their livelihoods, including many truck drivers, may not easily find new occupations.

Some 3.8 million Americans work as motor vehicle operators, driving trucks, delivery vans, buses and taxis, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Truck driving is the most common occupation in 29 states and the second- or third-most common in most others. On top of that, an estimated 1 million people drive part time for Uber and Lyft in the U.S. Globally, more than 100 million people are estimated to work behind the wheel.

“This will be the biggest disruption in work and jobs that the country has ever experienced,” said Andy Stern, a labor expert and president emeritus of the Service Employees International Union. “It will happen relatively soon, and we are in denial and avoidance.”

Naturally there is the usual chirping about safety — “far fewer traffic accidents” — as is the case above, but the mega-profits for future winners are mentioned further down in the article:

Then there are more esoteric opportunities. A report from Intel predicts the rise of a new “passenger economy,” worth a jaw-dropping $7 trillion by 2050. The bulk of that revenue would derive from ride hailing and the freight industry.

Some $200 billion would consist of goods and services provided to people during their rides in robot taxis. Think manicures, massages, lattes, fast-casual meals, mobile health care, remote meetings, immersive digital entertainment. (Intel doesn’t mention it, but practitioners of the world’s oldest profession might ply their trade in self-driving cars as well.)

(Continues)

A lot of reporting over the last few years has had too much fan-boy wonderment at the rapid growth of admittedly amazing technology. [...]]]> It was nice to see the Los Angeles Times recognize the negative effect of self-driving cars and trucks which will cause severe job loss, as shown by a front-page story on Wednesday.

A lot of reporting over the last few years has had too much fan-boy wonderment at the rapid growth of admittedly amazing technology. But the automation gizmos are being designed to replace millions of workers: tech designers and business owners win, and workers lose.

The self-driving sector is now engaged in something of a gold rush. There is huge money involved on who prevails in the marketplace, and the big players in the automotive and tech companies don’t want to be left behind.

As a result of the haste, safety may not be given proper attention by Washington because nobody in Congress wants to see China or any other competitor overshadow American technology. The Times article refers vaguely to a hearing which must be the September investigation which I reported: Senate Hearing Paves Way for Self-Driving Trucks. The Teamster representative Ken Hall was the only one who discussed safety much, noting:

For instance, I have yet to hear a serious discussion about how we will make sure an 80,000 pound automated truck will be able to maneuver around a warehouse or drop yard and not injure the countless workers also occupying that same space. Or how we would make sure that the rules governing a driver’s training requirements would be updated the moment one of these new vehicles is put on the road. And we haven’t gotten to the largest issue of them all, the potential impact on the livelihoods and wages of millions of your constituents.

Read Hall’s full testimony here

My optimistic self hopes that 80,000-pound self-driving trucks will not be loosed on the public highways any time soon — a software malfunction could be catastrophic. A reasonable (and hopefully long-term) introductory step would be the “platooning” strategy where a human driver pilots one truck with a small number of other vehicles hooked up electronically to the leader.

Furthermore, as the article points out, the political blowback will likely be severe when the public begins to see society transformed in a way nobody asked for, and the driving environment looks to be just an early harbinger of change. Many jobs are liable to face a die-off or at least be affected by the automation revolution. The Oxford study that got everyone’s attention in 2013 predicted that nearly half of occupations in the US were likely to be automated within the next 20 years. Yet Washington remains asleep to the danger, as demonstrated by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s clueless remark last spring that big automation was 50 or 100 years away.

There’s not a lot that can done to stop the harmful effects, because capitalism and invention go hand in hand. But ending immigration would be a prudent step, since it makes no sense for America to continue importing workers when machines will be doing many of the jobs in a few years, because:

Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete

This is one of the better articles from a mainstream newspaper about the difficult automated future:

The driverless revolution may exact a political price, Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2017

A driverless truck is seen at a garage in San Francisco in May 2016. Such autonomous big rigs already are being tested on the roads. The Teamsters warn millions that of truck-driving and related jobs are threatened. Economists see a political backlash brewing.

In its race to embrace driverless vehicles, Washington has cleared away regulatory hurdles for auto companies and brushed aside consumer warnings about the risk of crashes and hacking.

But at a recent hearing, lawmakers absorbed an economic argument that illustrated how the driverless revolution they are encouraging could backfire politically, particularly in Trump country.

It was the tale of a successful, long-distance beer run.

A robotic truck coasted driverless 120 miles down Interstate 25 in Colorado on its way to deliver 51,744 cans of Budweiser. Not everyone at the hearing was impressed by the milestone, particularly the secretary-treasurer of the Teamsters, whose nearly 600,000 unionized drivers played no small role in President Trump’s victory last year.

Driverless vehicles threaten to dramatically reduce America’s 1.7-million trucking jobs. It is the front end of a wave of automation that technologists and economists have been warning for years will come crashing down on America’s political order. Some predict it could rival the impact of the economic globalization and the resulting off-shoring of jobs that propelled Trump’s victory in the presidential election.

“This is one of the biggest policy changes of our generation,” said Sam Loesche, head of government affairs for the Teamsters. “This is not just about looking after the health and welfare of America’s workers, but also their livelihoods.”

Washington isn’t ready for it. The Trump White House already has indicated it sees it as some future administration’s problem. Silicon Valley remains in shock over Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin’s remark in the spring that economic fallout from this type of automation is 50 to 100 years off and “not even on my radar screen.”

“I don’t think anybody there is thinking about this seriously,” said Martin Ford, author of “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.” “They are still looking at this as futuristic and not having an impact and not politically toxic. … Once people start seeing the vehicles on the roads and jobs disappearing because of them, things will quickly become very different.”

The arrival of that reckoning is getting accelerated by Washington’s bipartisan excitement for self-driving technology, one of the few policy issues advancing. New Trump administration regulations don’t require industry to submit certain safety assessments, leaving it voluntary. And legislation — already approved in the House and expected to pass in the Senate — strips authority from states to set many of their own safety guidelines.

Objections raised by the National Governor’s Assn. and the National Council of State Legislatures don’t seem to be slowing things down. Consumer groups are dismayed.

(Continues)

Some non-automotive companies are investing the big bucks, [...]]]> Anyone who cares about automation’s threat to jobs should know that industry is moving ahead rapidly to develop and market self-driving vehicles which endanger the employment of 3.5 million Americans. As noted here, the House passed a self-driving car bill earlier this month despite its busy schedule.

Some non-automotive companies are investing the big bucks, like Google putting over $1.1 billion into the technology. But that amount pales in comparison to Intel’s purchase of Mobileye, an Israeli-based company developing vision-based advanced driver-assistance technology, for $15 billion. Automotive and tech businesses have decided that the future is automated, and nobody wants to be left out.

Look closely to see there is no driver in the Otto truck shown below.

The Senate page for the hearing with video and text of testimonies is here: Transportation Innovation: Automated Trucks and Our Nation’s Highways, September 13, 2017

I watched the hearing on C-SPAN and would rate it as watchable, only moderately wonky.

The issues around self-driving trucks are somewhat different from cars, particularly because of the size and use. A self-driving car will always have a human in it — unless “Come and get me” is planned as a future function. A platooning strategy will probably be the norm for a while, where a driver will be present in the lead vehicle.

Of course, nobody in the hearing was so unPC as to mention that:

Automation makes immigration obsolete.

America won’t need to import foreign workers to drive its taxis or trucks — or do anything else in the roboticized future.

Experts in the field see automation as a job shrinker. Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years. Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi believes that in 30 years humans will become largely obsolete, and world joblessness will reach 50 percent. The Gartner tech advising company believes that one-third of jobs will be done by machines by 2025. The consultancy firm PwC published a report earlier this year that forecast robots could take 38 percent of US jobs by 2030. Forrester Research Inc. has a more optimistic view, that there will be a net job loss of 7 percent by 2025 from automation.

Self-driving trucks could hurt drivers, Teamsters tell U.S. senators, USA Today, September 13, 2017

WASHINGTON —- A U.S. Senate committee is considering whether legislation dealing with the future of self-driving cars should also pave the way to self-driving trucks, considering the impact such technology could have on millions of workers.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee held a hearing Wednesday on automated vehicles focusing on the future of self-driving commercial trucks and 3.5 million commercial truck drivers nationwide.

“Self-driving vehicles have the potential to change the transportation industry as we know it. That can be for the better or for the worse depending on the actions that this committee, workers and others take,” said Ken Hall, general secretary treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “It is incumbent upon the members of this committee that workers are not left behind in this process.”

Even as Hall and others — including U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich. — suggested that it may be too early to allow for widespread testing of autonomous commercial trucks across the nation, others said that the future of autonomous trucks could greatly help reduce traffic fatalities and improve safety.

Legislation passed by the U.S. House last week paved the way toward more testing of autonomous cars across the nation — allowing for as many as 100,000 cars to be exempted from safety standards while  they are being tested — but did not address the future of autonomous trucks.

(Continues)

Certainly the [...]]]> It’s funny how with all the vitally important legislation that needs doing, such as Houston hurricane relief, raising the debt ceiling and funding the government, the House still had time to squeeze in a bill to facilitate the self-driving industry’s movement to the next stage. Who knew it was such a priority?

Certainly the automotive industry regards the self-driving technology as a priority because American companies don’t want to miss out when some foreign businesses are quite keen on it.

Many of the news stories emphasize the safety aspect of vehicles not being driven by imperfect humans, so we will likely hear about those benefits during next Wednesday’s Senate Hearing: Transportation Innovation: Automated Trucks and Our Nation’s Highways.

Below, Daimler tested a big-rig self-driving truck in May 2015 over Hoover Dam in Nevada where automated vehicles are permitted if a driver is present for emergencies.

Not all self-driving news is upbeat however. It was recently reported that some self-driving vehicles could become confused by street signs with graffiti (Autonomous car brains fooled by graffiti on street signs, Fox News, August 7). The automotive computer might interpret a redecorated stop sign as signifying a speed limit of 45 mph. So the guarantee of safety is not quite there yet.

The big picture is that America faces enormous job loss from automation, and blue-collar jobs will likely be among the first to go, but they won’t be the only ones. Oxford University researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were susceptible to being automated within 20 years.

The Los Angeles Times reported a year ago: “There are 1.7 million truckers in America, and another 1.7 million drivers of taxis, buses and delivery vehicles.” Many of those jobs are threatened, and Washington apparently has no Plan B for what millions of unemployed citizens should do to support themselves in the not-too-distant future.

The least the government could do is cut back severely on immigration, because the automated future won’t require imported human workers.

Remember: Automation makes immigration obsolete.

House Passes Bill to Speed Introduction of Self-Driving Cars, Bloomberg, September 6, 2017

U.S. House lawmakers passed a wide-ranging bill to speed the introduction of self-driving vehicles championed by tech and auto companies racing to develop and deploy the technology.

“With this legislation, innovation can flourish without the heavy hand of government,” Ohio Republican Bob Latta said on the House floor ahead of the voice vote in the chamber Wednesday. Latta is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that developed the legislation.

The action now moves to the Senate, where Republican John Thune of South Dakota and Democrats Bill Nelson of Florida and Gary Peters of Michigan are leading work on legislation of their own. The trio serve on the Senate commerce committee, which on Wednesday announced a Sept. 13 hearing to examine autonomous commercial vehicles and how they may fit into the Senate’s self-driving vehicle legislation. The House bill only applies to passenger cars and light trucks.

The House bill would put the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in charge of regulating self-driving car safety and preempt competing rules at the state level. Manufacturers would eventually be able to introduce as many as 100,000 self-driving cars per year that don’t comply with current safety rules that assume the presence of a human driver. It also instructs NHTSA to develop new standards for self-driving cars. Companies must draft security and privacy plans for autonomous vehicles and document their approach for ensuring self-driving car safety.

(Continues)

But driving is a major jobs category, as shown by the map below, taken from an interactive NPR [...]]]> Self-driving vehicles are coming on strong, faster than anyone knowledgeable thought a few years ago. Self-driving vehicles are being tested for real world use, and highway laws are being rejiggered to accommodate the new tech future.

But driving is a major jobs category, as shown by the map below, taken from an interactive NPR graphic in the 2015 article Map: The Most Common Job In Every State.

Millions of driving jobs still exist in the US because it’s one gig that could not be outsourced to China, but self-driving technology now threatens that employment. Indeed, as a San Francisco writer asks, Self-driving trucks: what’s the future for America’s 3.5 million truckers?

Of course, it goes without saying that America no longer needs to import immigrants to drive our trucks given the coming technology. There is supposedly a shortage of drivers now, leading to a push for immigrants, but that won’t last long. The future is automated, including on the highways.

It was news last October when a self-driving truck from the Otto company traveled 120 highway miles to deliver a load of beer:

The following article was written by Martin Ford, author of the book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. His knowledge on the subject adds to the big picture of how our society is on the edge of a foundational transformation to work and the economy.

Driverless trucks: economic tsunami may swallow one of most common US jobs, By Martin Ford, The Guardian, February 16, 2017

America is producing more than ever before, but it is doing so with fewer and fewer workers. Once trucks become automated, where will these jobs go?

In April 2016, Uber announced the acquisition of Otto, a San Francisco-based startup that has developed a kit that can turn any big rig into a self-driving truck.

The Otto technology enables complete autonomy on highways: trucks can navigate, stay in their lane, and slow or stop in response to traffic conditions completely without human intervention. Otto’s equipment currently costs about $30,000, but that is certain to fall significantly in the coming years.

Otto is by no means alone. Massive automated vehicles are already commonly used to move materials for the Australian mining industry. Daimler, the German multinational company, has likewise demonstrated its own model, a giant 18-wheeler with a “highway pilot” mode available (meaning a driver has to remain present, prompting the head of the US branch to say that “tomorrow’s driver will be a logistics manager”). Another approach is to use automated convoys, in which self-driving trucks follow a lead vehicle.

It seems highly likely that competition between the various companies developing these technologies will produce practical, self-driving trucks within the next five to 10 years. And once the technology is proven, the incentive to adopt it will be powerful: in the US alone, large trucks are involved in about 350,000 crashes a year, resulting in nearly 4,000 fatalities. Virtually all of these incidents can be traced to human error. The potential savings in lives, property damage and exposure to liability will eventually become irresistible.

There’s only one problem: truck driving is one of the most common occupations in the US.

Once replaced by automation, where will these jobs go?

As of 2015, a typical production worker in the US earned about 9% less than a comparable worker in 1973. Over the same 42 years, the American economy grew by more than 200%, or a staggering $11tn.

For millions of average Americans, the reasonable expectations of their youth – a steady job, home ownership, college education for their children – have degraded into decades of stagnation, even as they have been continuously bombarded by news of the overall growth and prosperity of the US economy.

The driving force behind this transition has been technology. It is widely recognized among economists that while the impact of globalization has been significant, especially in specific regions of the country, robots and factory automation have been a far more powerful force. Indeed, even those jobs that did migrate to China are now evaporating as factories there aggressively automate.

Among those workers who remain employed, it has become almost cliche to complain about good, well-paying factory jobs that have degraded into far less lucrative and reliable positions at Walmart. The few good working class jobs that remain are those that – at least so far – have been exempt from the forces of both globalization and automation.

Jobs such as long-haul driving.

Indeed, truck driving is arguably one of the final barricades protecting a traditional world where diligent effort exerted in a blue-collar profession is respected, essential – and well compensated. It is likely no coincidence that a map highlighting the states where truck driving reigns as the lead occupation is closely correlated with a map showing the states that voted for Donald Trump.

This perfect storm creates the perception that America is “no longer winning” at manufacturing and that “we don’t make anything any more”. This could not be more wrong. Since 1990, the total value of goods produced in American factories has increased by 73% (after accounting for inflation).

The jobs story is very different, however. That near doubling in output has been accompanied by a 30% decline in manufacturing employment – a loss of more than 5m jobs.

America is producing more than ever before, but it is doing so with fewer and fewer workers.

• • •

For the foreseeable future, automated trucks are likely to be limited to long-haul highway operations, and it will probably require human intervention to pilot the truck along the final few miles to its destination.

In other words, there will still be some jobs, but it is easy to imagine that the nature of the “truck driving” occupation might be radically transformed. Piloting a future, computerized truck might well be perceived as a “technology” job. These workers will be freed from days and nights on the road and would be able to live normal lives, often in desirable urban locations.

In other words, piloting trucks for those final few miles might eventually evolve into a white-collar profession actively sought after by college graduates. This might be especially true in the wake of the onslaught of software automation in many other traditional white-collar, knowledge-based occupations (financial analysts, lawyers, computer programmers – any job that involves manipulating information in a predictable way).

The upshot could be that truck driving, like many other occupations before it, will eventually be subject to “credential inflation” and thus could become far less accessible to the roughly two-thirds of Americans who don’t have a four-year college degree.

While truck driving may eventually become the poster child for the automation wave, the disruption will, of course, be far broader, eventually encompassing the fast food, retail and office jobs that currently employ tens of millions of Americans.

The impact will be especially sharp in those regions where factory jobs once ruled and truck driving now offers the best path to blue-collar prosperity. And as a quick glance at the US electoral map demonstrates, these states punch above their weight politically – both in presidential elections and in the US Senate. An earthquake that is centered here will be felt far and wide.

It is entirely reasonable for every industrious and diligent person in our society to expect access to dignified, important and adequately compensated work. That is, indeed, one of the foundations of the American dream. Yet over the course of the coming years and decades, we may face a stark question: what are we to do if advancing technology makes that reasonable expectation impossible to fulfill?

Resolving that question may ultimately require a fundamental shift in our basic values. One viable solution is some form of direct income supplementation, perhaps in the form of a guaranteed minimum income or universal basic income.

This is an idea that is beginning to gain some traction. Currently, limited experiments are under way in Finland and the Netherlands, and there will soon be a privately funded trial in the San Francisco bay area. And this spring, the Canadian province of Ontario will also launch a trial run of universal basic income, at a cost of C$25m.

Still, a basic income is easy to disparage as “paying people to be alive”. We may need to instead begin thinking in terms of a “citizens dividend” – the idea being that all citizens should receive an ownership stake in the overall wealth and prosperity of the country, in much the same way that residents of Alaska currently receive an annual payment that derives from tapping that state’s energy resources.

If jobs are indeed poised to begin disappearing – or if the wages they pay will be relentlessly driven down as occupations are deskilled and access to a middle-class income requires ever increasing levels of education and intellectual capability – then we will need to find an alternate form of income distribution, or face the potential for both economic stagnation and social and political instability. We will also have to ensure that individuals find meaning and fulfillment in a world where they spend less time working.

All this is easy to say, but the challenges associated with any real solutions will be staggering.

The populist disruption that began rolling in June with Brexit and seemed to crest in November may well be just gaining steam, and navigating through a landscape where technology shreds jobs as never before may well turn out to be one of the seminal challenges we face in the coming decades.