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Comment by asaph | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly, there is no mention in the article of how the truckers feel about the threat of automation to their own jobs.

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Pretty much every single truck driver I've talked to on the subject is in deep denial. They believe that the weird layout of the loading dock at some warehouse could never be navigated by automated system or that them handing documents to someone at the point of delivery cannot be automated. They don't seem to understand just how much capital businesses are willing to spend to get rid of reoccurring labor costs.

If there are any bright spots in all of this, it's that trucking has a high turnover rate already so few will directly lose their jobs and that trucking in general is rough on the body and the mind. The difficult question to answer is where will all of the people who would have gone into trucking going to go instead?

> They don't seem to understand just how much capital businesses are willing to spend to get rid of reoccurring labor costs.

The trucking industry doesn't need to automate to slash labor costs. Exploitation is much simpler and more effective.

A lot of truckers get the lesson eventually. The hard way. See for example:

https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forc...

A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.

If a driver quit, the company seized his truck and kept everything he had paid towards owning it.

If drivers missed payments, or if they got sick or became too exhausted to go on, their companies fired them and kept everything. Then they turned around and leased the trucks to someone else.

Drivers who manage to hang on to their jobs sometimes end up owing money to their employers – essentially working for free. Reporters identified seven different companies that have told their employees they owe money at week’s end.

Company mining towns all over again, eh?

> The difficult question to answer is where will all of the people who would have gone into trucking going to go instead?

Revolution? I know and see lots of cheering in the tech world for automated driving, but not a lot of honest discussion about how it will probably be the largest upheaval in social order in at least a century, if not longer.

Last I looked, in something like 48 of the 50 states the number one job involved driving for pay. While I happen to think we are further from driving automation than is usually presented, when it does come it will basically come all at once. There will just not be enough time for these millions of people to be absorbed elsewhere in the economy. Will be very interesting to see how society responds.

LIFO, Last In First Out, likely will be the response if several million are put out of work, or more accurately, unable to find work in a labor market where demand for human drivers has been significantly reduced. In a crowded labor market, there is a desire to thin out the competition. Those with the weakest connections here will get the brunt of the response.

I'm not sure that it will happen all at once. My guess is long haul trucking restricted to interstates and certain limited access highways will be the first to be automated while residential delivery will be the last. The window might be relatively short. Perhaps five years or less from the start of autonomous driving until it's almost all autonomous. Certainly not longer that ten.

My guess is that the "death of trucking" will come in two parts.

The part they say is 'hard' - is definitely a hard nut to crack - but maybe only a few percentage of the time they spend trucking.

The "endless trips down thousands of miles of interstate, whilst remaining alert" - well that definitely sounds like something robots could do better right now.

If I were "Lord of all truckers", I'd be negotiating right now. Build some idiot-robot-proof lots near major cities that their new robot overlords could drop off/pick up from, and then focus on just the difficult short trips from these lots to drop-off/pick-up points. Nobody else seems to be working on building these hubs, and truckers themselves could send a day working to/fro and then sleep in their own beds.

Truckers are fucked because of motor carrier regulations that were changed to bust unions in the 80s.

There’s no organization going to happen because distance trucking operates from labor hostile states.

That said, the automation story is overplayed. Trains are the threat to trucking as fuel goes up.

What about electric trucks?

Almost like a railway?

You need a lot of cargo heading into the same direction for railways to work. Without a direct connection it's still cheaper but much slower than rail. Automated truck "trains" could work well for much less volume, i.e. 3-5 trucks going between two cities.

Fedex and UPS would be well suited to that, they can easily pool a few trucks that have 95%+ route overlap and drive roughly at the same time.

It will be there when auto-driving trucks come out in the near future. I think the trucks will get automated first, and then maybe city transit, especially subways, then it will spread from there.

Any work that doesn't require a huge amount of human intelligence or human interaction will be automated maybe sooner than we think.

But trucking does require a decent amount of human intelligence and interaction, for now. (My dad is a trucker. He’s 50+, it won’t matter to him if his job gets automated.)

About the only place that self-driving trucks can do decently is long-haul highway travel, and that’s probably the place where it’s most needed. Any type of intra-city travel, and low-speed maneuvering requires a lot of I/O and responding to a wide variety of conditions. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying that the work involved in automating that may not be worth the effort compared to paying a trucker.

Wow, your dad is in an unusually good financial situation if at the age of 50 it "won't matter to him if his job gets automated".

Truckers earn a lot. Especially owner-operators. Much more than you might assume. If he had been a trucker for most of his life, I would assume he probably had enough savings for early retirement.

His job isn't getting automated tomorrow or even in the next 5yr and there are very, very few 50yo truckers that are dragging a dry van around the interstates (the first job to be automated)

The opposite really, but he has poor health, and will probably rely on me to support him. Plus, the comment below mentions what I was thinking: by the time automation happens, he won't be trucking anymore.

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