Truckers Will Be First Victims of Self-Driving Tech
While ride-sharing apps are investing in self-driving cars, your Uber will likely require a human driver for at least a decade. Autonomous technology is simply not yet ready to handle the unpredictable pedestrians and stop-and-go traffic that comes with urban settings.
Rural highways, on the other hand, are predictable enough for self-driving vehicles to be used in the near future. So while taxi services are still experimenting, long-haul trucking jobs could soon be automated.
Steve Viscelli, a sociologist from the University of Pennsylvania who studies the automation of trucking, says that self-driving trucks will soon be able to perform what’s known as “exit-to-exit” driving.
He said industry experts believe that exit-to-exit trucking can be automated and made safe within three years.
Safety becomes more of a concern for self-driving trucks once they reach a highway exit. In a near-future scenario, this is where a human driver might step in. Truckers would finish a self-driving truck’s delivery once the straight-line portion of the route is over and technical maneuvering is needed.
Economists point to how much the U.S. economy relies on trucks. Seventy percent of all goods in the United States rely on human truckers for delivery. The American Trucking Association recorded a labor shortage of 50,000 long-haul truckers in October 2017.
Public safety advocates point to the frequent accidents associated with truck driving. Truckers had the most workplace deaths in 2016 compared to every other industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of these, 88 percent were the result of human error.
With more than $80 billion invested in self-driving technology, according to the Brookings Institute, the financial incentive to remove human drivers from vehicles is high.
The labor effects of self-driving cars raise a broader conversation around the social impacts of automation in general.
Jason Hong, a computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon University, says the long-term investment should be made in jobs that are immune to automation. He describes these positions as anything involving creative problem solving.
