You may be right, I don't know. I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about this, just that I'm personally skeptical, and not really in favor of restructuring society for a problem that might be coming. If we had done that all those times in the past...
To take the truck driver thing, here's a plausible scenario (to me anyway).
First of all, "top job in X states" seems like a really weird way to express this. It honestly feels like a way to make it seem as dire as possible.
There are something like 3 to 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. That's a lot. However, BLS reports that only about half of these are heavy and tractor trailer truck drivers [1]. So maybe the rest are driving smaller trucks and vehicles around town? Those seem safer from job loss to me, I suspect that any job that requires driving a truck here and there and loading / unloading things will not be replaced by AI as fast.
Side note: BLS is predicting 6% growth in this job from 2016 to 2026, which is about average. But let's assume they're wrong.
So let's say that 1.8 million are long haul truckers that can be relatively easily replaced by AI. How long will that really take? I know everyone thinks that self-driving cars are around the corner, but I'm really not convinced. We've been hearing that for a few years now, and it seems like lots of teams are hitting some roadblocks (heh) in terms of their ability to solve some of the remaining issues. Just my ambient observations though, I'm no expert.
Even if we do get there with some cars in the next 3-5 years, are we really going to be ready to put heavy loads on highways unattended? We're going to handle the technical issues, security issues, legal issues, insurance, in a few years? I'm really skeptical. Maybe we can do point-to-point on highways in 5 years, but then what? Do we have huge lots where these trucks park and then drivers ferry them to local warehouses to be loaded / unloaded? What about fueling these things along the way with no drivers? How do we keep these loads safe from theft? None of these are insurmountable, but are we really going to solve these things in the next few years such that we're ready to start laying people off?
I think 10-20 years is much more realistic to put the majority of truckers out of a job. Not all, but the majority. But truckers are already old (49 average) and many will be retiring over that period anyway. Why can't we just not replace them as those jobs dwindle?
The other stat I think is relevant is that the average car today is 11.5 years old. Or looked at another way, in 11 years, HALF of the cars on the road are the cars that are on the road today. I guess if we cut down the number of cars total due to efficiencies of self-driving carshare maybe that goes down but still... If Level 5 autonomous drive were available TODAY, it's still a long metaphoric road towards complete switchover.
It's hard to tell what the average tractor age is, but it looks between 6 and 10 years old so you have the same rough math in the 6-10 years after we have fully autonomous self-driving trucks where we'll still have half the trucks on the road as human-driven.
Plus if autonomous trucks increase capacity and/or efficiency and cut shipping costs, that might also stimulate shipping demand and therefore keep human drivers on the road longer as well.
Your 10-20 years guess feels right to me, but only after we actually have the autonomous truck thing fully sorted out, IMO.
To take the truck driver thing, here's a plausible scenario (to me anyway).
First of all, "top job in X states" seems like a really weird way to express this. It honestly feels like a way to make it seem as dire as possible.
There are something like 3 to 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. That's a lot. However, BLS reports that only about half of these are heavy and tractor trailer truck drivers [1]. So maybe the rest are driving smaller trucks and vehicles around town? Those seem safer from job loss to me, I suspect that any job that requires driving a truck here and there and loading / unloading things will not be replaced by AI as fast.
Side note: BLS is predicting 6% growth in this job from 2016 to 2026, which is about average. But let's assume they're wrong.
So let's say that 1.8 million are long haul truckers that can be relatively easily replaced by AI. How long will that really take? I know everyone thinks that self-driving cars are around the corner, but I'm really not convinced. We've been hearing that for a few years now, and it seems like lots of teams are hitting some roadblocks (heh) in terms of their ability to solve some of the remaining issues. Just my ambient observations though, I'm no expert.
Even if we do get there with some cars in the next 3-5 years, are we really going to be ready to put heavy loads on highways unattended? We're going to handle the technical issues, security issues, legal issues, insurance, in a few years? I'm really skeptical. Maybe we can do point-to-point on highways in 5 years, but then what? Do we have huge lots where these trucks park and then drivers ferry them to local warehouses to be loaded / unloaded? What about fueling these things along the way with no drivers? How do we keep these loads safe from theft? None of these are insurmountable, but are we really going to solve these things in the next few years such that we're ready to start laying people off?
I think 10-20 years is much more realistic to put the majority of truckers out of a job. Not all, but the majority. But truckers are already old (49 average) and many will be retiring over that period anyway. Why can't we just not replace them as those jobs dwindle?
1. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/h...