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.
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...
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.
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.