1978: mostly secretaries, now largely replaced by computers.
2014: mostly truck drivers. To be replaced by computers by 2034?
2014: mostly truck drivers. To be replaced by computers by 2034?
He left them up for a about a minute, looked at all of us, said "All of your actions have consequences, some of them unintended." and moved on with the lecture for the day.
A whole lot more stuff is being delivered to people's doors today than twenty years ago.
I would expect that anyone who's worked on enterprise software has been to client meetings where ROI is expressed in terms of human resources.
It's part of advancement that certain jobs will no longer be viable for people. People will train for other work instead.
It's not like suddenly, with no warning, 100s of thousands of drivers around the world will need to find new jobs. But in the very long term, fewer drivers will be needed. People who would have, at one time, become drivers, will do other work.
And folks out of work are finding it harder and harder to find word. Automation's ultimate goal is putting us all out of work. We're in a transition, and admitting that will help guide policy from here on.
Isn't that exactly the case? (Except that are tens of millions.)
Why not, are those people warned?
I certainly won't be overnight. But you are assuming current truck drivers will have time to migrate to new jobs as those appear - I really doubt two decades is "gradual" by that measure. Yet, I can not see how it could take that long.
No, and I'm not even assuming that new jobs will appear.
That there will be warning and that there will be much that can be done with the warning are very different ideas; OTOH...
> I really doubt two decades is "gradual" by that measure.
Two decades is enough time for people who are mid- (and often even early, though not quite at the beginning) of a career to retire and not need to worry about a new job, so its potentially gradual enough.
Its amusing to think that some people think of themselves as above the economic fray. Sorry, but we're all in this together.
But the real problem, I think, lies somewhere in your interpretation of of the the goals of pointing such things out. I'm sure "Mr. Professor" is more than capable of recognizing that kids in schools aren't political leaders. "Mr. Professor" is pointing this out, not because they fancy themselves above the economic fray, but precisely because we're all in this together.
That, in fact, is the actual message being conveyed by what you perceive as "liberal guilting".
If you're looking for people who act above the economic fray, a far better source of those sorts of airy pronouncements would be, for instance, David Brooks or Tom Friedman, for whom massive economic dislocation tends to be a "to be sure" or "perhaps" tacked on to the end of a column about how great disruptive innovation is.
Of course, self-driving trucks could help with truck fuel efficiency by driving at a more fuel-efficient speed, and they may be deemed safe enough to haul more trailers behind a single truck. Though whether or not human drivers (even if their cars drive themselves) will put up with a 4 trailer 40mph truck on the freeway is a different question.
Repacking your cargo from one container to another sucks for a lot of reasons: cost, time, theft, damage, etc.
There's also a latency and performance improvement if you can go door to door with a truck, vs. do intermodal with a train in the middle. Unless you're moving a bulk commodity to a high-volume location, it's unlikely they have rail directly to the destination. (Coal power plants do; lots of modern light industrial manufacturing sites do not.)
Optimizing air vs. truck vs. rail vs. ship across your whole supply chain is an interesting problem.
Another fun thing: with robo drivers, you could go essentially non-stop (except for fueling) door to door. Otherwise, you need a team driver or relay concept (usually you carry 2-3 drivers and swap them enroute; you could also do something with depots where you swap out drivers while retaining the vehicle, which I think is done for some high security convoy operations.) That makes the truck vs. rail advantage even greater.
The main reason had to do with how our rails are setup in an inefficient way and that all freight currently has to stop route through Chicago (iirc). This is a manual process where cars are manually moved, counted and routed.
Many former railways I know have actually been abandoned as I have an uncle who worked for Rails for Trails converting them into bike paths.
Rail freight is also quite a bit larger than truck freight in the USA. A lot of things are railed across in an intermodal and then hitched onto a truck for regional delivery. [2]
In short, rail freight is massive in the USA and our primary mode of goods transportation.
[1]https://www.aar.org/BackgroundPapers/Cost%20Effectiveness%20...
We (the USA) as a country should begin thinking about the ramifications of this and how we might need to change to preserve not the economy, but society.
It was intensely discussed on HN as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555295
edited for spelling
If a farmer could simultaneously monitor just 4 tractors, you could make tractors half the size while having twice the work done. This would double the number of sold tractors, which gives economy of scale. While also making assembly lines lot smaller and simplifying logistics.
Trucks don't scale in similar fashion. Inter-modal containers are lot bigger than ploughs.
There's not much opportunity to steal stuff from a truck except when it's being loaded/unloaded. That doesn't change whether or not it's driverless. If you're planning on hijacking it enroute, then whether or not there's a driver makes little difference. cf, carjackers.
Scenario today: truck stops at rest stop, driver gets out, truck is stolen.
Alternate: truck stops at rest stop or for traffic light, driver does not get out. Robber gets in passenger side, points gun at driver's head and tells him to GTFO. Drives off about as fast as a loaded semi can, which is not very.
Scenario with automated truck: truck never needs to stop at rest stop except for fuel and will need a human attendant (unless we also automated those away). Odds are, there are no windows or steering wheel/human controls anyway since it's automated. Now the robber needs to unload a trailer onto another, waiting truck which is a time consuming operation. And take off with that one. All the while the automated truck is reporting its location, and that it's being tampered with.
So yeah, I don't think crime will change much. It will still be far, far easier to steal stuff from the truck when it's being unloaded. And that has nothing to do with a driver being present or not.
Of-course it will probably detect you doing that and call for help complete with its GPS position.
I also expect some enterprising think-outside-the-box robbers will temporarily come up with some creative way round this. (Will phone jammers stop the truck calling for help?)
It'll be interesting when it happens.
So while Secretary/Admin Assistants haven't disappeared completely, there aren't as many as there used to be.
Some secretarial tasks much less common these days and/or mostly automated so primary worker does them themselves.
Typing, retyping, dictating, managing calendars, meeting scheduling, appointments, taking voice messages, dealing with mail(physical opening/organizing), internal memos, filing, searching for stuff in those files, copying, faxing.
What office floor use to look like https://themalcolmauldblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/secre...
For the very high end employees, sectaries morphed into admin assistants. Executives and other other very high level people still get a single assistant.
But the junior executives and middle management don't have a designated assistants. They may share one with many other employees. But most of them just do a lot of the work themselves or have underlings do it in addition to their other work.
I work in the legal field, one of the few that still has secretaries. Our office space is set up with a secretary desk right outside each attorney office. But now I share my secretary with NINE other attorneys.
My mom is a secretary. She's gone from working for one executive to essentially being the secretary for the entire staff.
So yes, the title and role changed. But there still has been a massive reduction.