Having grown up in the golden age of CB radio, I have fond memories of movies about truck driving heroes played by the likes of Kurt Russell and Clint Eastwood. While such movies were a passing phase, real truck drivers are heroes of the American economy. In addition to moving stuff across this great nation, they also earn solid wages and thus contribute as taxpayers and consumers.
While most media attention has been on self-driving cars, there are plans to replace human truckers with self-driving trucks. The steps towards automation might initially be a boon to truck drivers as these technological advances provide new safety features. This progress will most likely lead to a truck with a human riding as a backup and eventually to a fully automated truck. But perhaps driverless vehicles are the vehicles of the future and always will be.
In terms of the consequences of full automation, there will be some positive impacts. While the automated trucks will be more expensive than manned vehicles initially, not needing to pay drivers will result in savings. There is also the fact that automated trucks, unlike human drivers, would not get tired, bored or distracted. While there will still be accidents, it would be reasonable to expect a significant decrease once technology matures. Such trucks would also be able to operate around the clock, stopping only to load or unload cargo, to refuel and for maintenance. This could increase the speed of deliveries. One can even imagine an automated truck with its own drones that fly away from the truck as it cruises the highway, making deliveries for companies like Amazon. While these will be good things, there will also be negative consequences.
The most obvious negative consequence is the elimination of trucker jobs. Currently, there are about 3.5 million drivers in the United States. There are also about 8.7 million other people employed in the trucking industry. One must also remember all the people indirectly associated with trucking, ranging from people cooking meals for truckers to folks manufacturing or selling products for truckers. Finally, there are also the other economic impacts from the loss of these jobs, ranging from the loss of tax revenues to lost business. After all, truckers do not just buy truck related goods and services.
While the loss of jobs will have a negative impact, it should be noted that the transition from manned trucks to robot rigs will not occur overnight. Assuming it occurs. There will be a slow transition as technology is adopted, and there will be several years in which human truckers and robotruckers share the roads. This can allow for a planned transition that will mitigate the economic shock. That said, there will presumably come a day when drivers are given their pink slips in and lose their jobs to rolling robots. Since economic transitions resulting from technological changes are nothing new, it could be hoped that this transition would be managed in a way that mitigated the harm to those impacted.
It is also worth considering that the switch to automated trucking will, as technological changes almost always do, create new jobs and modify old ones. The trucks will still need to be manufactured, managed and maintained. As such, new economic opportunities will be created. That said, it is easy to imagine these jobs also becoming automated as well: fleets of robotic trucks cruising America, loaded, unloaded, managed and maintained by robots. To close, I will engage in a bit of sci-fi style speculation.
Oversimplifying things, the automation of jobs could lead to a utopian future in which humans are finally freed from the jobs that are fraught with danger and drudgery. The massive, automated productivity could mean plenty for all; thus bringing about the bright future of optimistic fiction. That said, this path could also lead into a dystopia: a world in which everything is done for humans, and they settle into a vacuous idleness they attempt to fill with empty calories and frivolous amusements.
There are, of course, many dystopian paths leading away from automation. Laying aside the usual machine takeover in which AI kills us all, it is easy to imagine a new “robo-planation” style economy in which a few elite owners control their robot slaves, while the masses have little or no employment. A rather more radical thought is to imagine a world in which humans are almost completely replaced, the automated economy hums along, generating numbers that are noted by the money machines and the few remaining money masters. The ultimate end might be a single computer that contains a virtual economy; clicking away to itself in electronic joy over its amassing of digital dollars while around it the ruins of human civilization decay and the world awaits the evolution of the next intelligent species to start the game anew.