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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Hmmmmm.

So we're going to have a lot of people potentially unemployed because of this...

There's a national truck driver shortage, with a particular lack of young drivers [1]. Perhaps automation technology will become widespread just in time for the current generation of drivers to retire.

[1] https://www.iru.org/news-resources/newsroom/worse-you-though...

Survey of trucking company finds shortage of workers. Well I for one am shocked!

"Why is this the case? Why are there so few women and young truck drivers? How can we get more of them behind the wheel?"

Well, it's like literally everything else.

Pay more.

No the solution isn't to pay more. We shouldn't be trying to figure out ways to get more people into shitty hazardous jobs.

You don't "pay more" to get more young people and women to apply to moving spent nuclear fuel, you give the job to the robots.

I think most people agree on that point, but what are truckers going to do after they lose jobs to the robots? In the USA, there is never any planning for that, they just say "oh well" and in a generation those folks die out, having lived a shitty, destitute life with no chance of recovery.

The fact that there are too few younger truck drivers means that most young people have already found higher paying, better jobs than current truck driving jobs.

I don't think B necessarily follows from A, here.

There's an ideological assertion when automation happens: the workers will retrain and be better off.

If it was true, Youngstown Ohio and Flint Michigan would be jewels of the Midwest - bustling metropolises of highly skilled retrained workers in wondrous utopias. You'd have AI unicorns popping out of Huntington and Wheeling, West Virginia.

Whether you count number of bankruptcies, overall mortality rate, number of offspring, percentage that own versus rent... The fervent assertion that going from a union job to hustling for say Postmates, is somehow the rising tide lifting all boats is baseless.

Doesn't matter though. It's ideologically, not materially based so evidence is irrelevant.

There Are state interventionist ways to make it work. China moved from agrarian to industrial. South Korea, Taiwan Japan.... The difference is they don't have this pentacostal snake handling level blind faith in the free market where they go around like Peter Popof preaching Hayek and Rothbard like it's sacred scripture.

I know this is a convenient meme and narrative but this post is literally the consequence of having to pay more for labor, you get more people trying to automate it. We're talking about logistics, probably the most important component of the economy. Trucking salaries are probably the closest thing to "market clearing wages" that exists. Pay more -> more expensive shipping -> less demand to ship things -> lower wages.

If you woke up tomorrow and the clearing price for gas was $10/gallon it would still be accurate to call it a shortage. I can buy a crappy house for $2m tomorrow, it’s still a housing shortage.

Not one mention of pay? Really?

In other news, there is a terrible shortage of Lamborghinis at the $30k price point. When will the horror end?

No mention of pay. Also not mention that for about the past 10-15 years, we've also been telling young people AI was going to make truck driving a job of that past also. I remember in 2014 (we are all getting old, that was more than 10 years ago), hearing about comments Elon made that truck drivers were gonna be a thing of the past any day now. Granted, that didn't end up happening, or at least not as quickly. But the fact is, when kids hear a good chunk of their life that a job is gonna be antiquated, we can't be surprised when kids grow up not wanting to be the people to fill those jobs.

But also automated long-haul trucking has been pretty clearly on the short term horizon for the last decade. I think most young people know that this is coming, and hence trucking is probably not the best career to invest your time in.

It won't just be truckers, there's always follow-on impact like people who work in diners along these routes, etc.

The terms "shortage" and "surplus" are usually meaningless for most economic situations.

Generally, your chosen price determines how much you get (unless you set your price at 0, where you get nothing, OR if you set your price to infinity, where there literally doesn't exist 1 more of the thing you're talking about).

So in this context, there's really no shortage because all you have to do is raise the price you pay truckers and it's pretty much guaranteed that retired truckers and others with CDL licenses start putting their hands up and saying yes to that job.

It’s not as lucrative anymore because the trucks are effectively speed limited, location constantly tracked and hours micromanaged. Some setups even have a front facing and in cabin driver facing camera recording at all times. Also, they are paid per mile so the many hours they spend at the loading and unloading stations are effectively unpaid.

It’s not as lucrative to the folks that enjoyed pretty much total freedom outside of the start and end points.

Doubtful. The trucking industry has been screaming for years that they can’t find enough people, almost every 18-wheeler I see on the highway has a “we’re hiring” ad on it, and so on. This is automation coming in to replace humans who are willfully exiting.

They are hiring, but the reason they can't find people isn't because there aren't people out there willing to do the job if it's fairly compensated. The problem is that trucking has lost a ton of upside over the last few decades, particularly after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Drivers are often paid per mile instead of per hour, which means long unpaid periods waiting for loads or stuck in traffic.

So as usual, "we can't find people" is code for "we tried to exploit the workers until they bled and for some reason we can't figure out, they went elsewhere."

Bingo. "No one wants to work [for a wage they can't live off of with pitiful benefits] anymore!"

It's an incredibly dangerous job, both in terms of chronic health and acute risk.

Since COVID happened until this year I would have told you "we can't find people" too, but this year the applications have flooded in. So at least they'll come crawling back eventually.

You're citing a 45 year old law as the reason why, say 35 years in the future, it leads to notable shortages of people who want to be truck drivers?

Doesn't hold water for me. Do you have some specific idea about how this law only had this effect decades after it passed?

I've been hearing about the truck driver shortage for > 30 years. Back then it may have been more local, though. Places like North Dakota have been short of drivers for at least 30 years.

The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated the industry, which led to a sharp increase in competition among carriers. Over time, this pushed down freight rates and put pressure on companies to cut costs at the expense of drivers. Many drivers are now classified as independent contractors rather than employees, meaning no benefits or wage protections.

Obviously this also happened against the background of a broader trend towards deregulation that proceeded under Reagan, so it's not just that act.

Regardless of the pay, I just can't imagine people really being excited to drive all day alone. I hate driving and I do it as little as possible. People like to be around other people when they work too.

To each their own. I’m not a driver either but I could see how trucker life harkens back to the American mythos of the solitary pioneer calling their own shots and working hard as they see fit.

Modern trucking is nothing like that, and often they are independent contractors in name only, driving someone else’s truck and being evaluated against strict performance criteria.

Walmart and similar employers have no trouble finding drivers. Decent pay, benefits and schedules makes it easy.

Walmart is still hiring drivers, though.

With 14,000 drivers there's going to be continuous turnover.

Edit: Also, Wal-mart's standards are incredibly high -- several years of clean driving experience. Most commercial truck drivers do not meet those standards. Despite the high standards, they still readily fill their positions. If they were having troubles, they'd lower their standards.

There is also just turn over, from my understanding from a former co-worker who had a kid go into truck driving, that truck drivers very rarely stay at the same company long term. New drivers get their training paid for and have an obligation to fill (ex walmart pays for training and pays you while you do it, but you have a 2-3 year obligation to them). Once they do that, they move on to another company. I am assuming for better pay and benefits. And even then, swapping companies is pretty common. Then also a good number stack enough money to buy their own truck and contract. I had a neighbor growing up who owned his own semi and worked on contract.

That's the rule, but AFAICT Wal-Mart is the exception to the rule. They don't train anybody without years of loyalty to the company, I don't think they have obligations. It's the dream job for most truckers from what I hear, and once you get in you don't leave. Wal-Mart pays a solid 6 figures with great home time. You can make more than that with your own truck, but it's hard.

I'm sure it's like any job -- everything else can be great, but if you get stuck with a bad boss it can make you absolutely miserable and drive you out.

UPS, too. I knew a couple OTRs who made 150k 2 decades ago. Not sure if they've kept up with inflation, but it was great money at the time.

Of course, they had people fighting for those jobs, and from what I heard, about the only way to get one was to know somebody on the inside.

Up your pay, give them benefits, and the people will come. This isn't hard to figure out.

“We study teamsters at the dawn of the motor truck, current occupations threatened by computerization, and truckers dreading robotic trucks. As predicted, wages in threatened occupations rise, employment falls, and the occupations become ‘grayer’. Older workers become more likely to enter and less likely to exit the occupation than young ones and sometimes even increase in number.”

https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2025/program/paper/eT2Ar7T...

At the same time that tariffs slow down the entire trucking industry -- truckers are gonna definitely be hurting

Not to mention the drive to remove the 10s of thousands of truck drivers that recently immigrated... E.g.,

https://nypost.com/2025/04/29/us-news/trump-signs-order-requ...

https://truckdrivernews.com/new-arkansas-bill-could-make-non...

"Not to mention" doesn't make sense here. Everything else in this thread is talking about reducing the demand for trucking labor. Your post is talking about reducing the supply.

"truckers are definitely going to be hurting"

Far fewer of them will be truckers

UBI is inevitable imo; we're going to continue to see machines replace humans in roles like this.

The guys with all of the money don't like paying people now when people actually deliver value with their labor. No way they do it once they can just have machines work for them.

Well, not with being asked politely, at least.

> Well, not with being asked politely, at least.

yep, it definitely won't happen politely

Of all the countries in the world, it definitely won't happen in the United States.

true, but on the other hand when things get bad enough the guillotine plans will probably be open sourced and freely shared.

Swarms of murderbots are cheaper than UBI. This is going to get ugly.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. It is absolutely in the cards for the ownership class to send out swarms of drones to kill us all.

The best we can hope for is to all end up in permanent slums picking through garbage to survive.

One peep of protest a little too loud and suddenly we’ll all be living the same scenario that’s visible all over the “combat footage” portions of the web: you are walking along outdoors, you hear a buzz, and then suddenly you look up to realize there’s a drone coming at you. You panic and try to run but by the time you hear it, it’s too late. It catches up to you easily and drops a bomb on you. Or maybe it’s a smaller more targeted (and disposable) one that zips straight at your forehead and explodes on contact, destroying your brain.

People may say I’m a doomsayer but just look back at the history of labor in the US. They sent out privatized security to shoot anyone who didn’t cooperate. And that was when they still needed the workers! Just imagine what they’ll do when they no longer need anyone!

There's a lot of truth to that however the supply chain for everything today has never been longer or had more intermediaries. It's like a house of cards built ever higher and no one has budgeted anything for resilience. JIT, outsourcing, etc, everything is cheaper at the cost of resilience.

Oh yes I’ve thought of that, but I’m sure they have too. If AI advances to the point where everyone is out of work, then it will have also likely advanced to the point where it can aid in getting around the current supply chain fragilities.

That angle unfortunately just doesn’t give me much hope.

Who is going to willingly fund it?

Best case scenario another Ford comes along.

I agree. I'm a pretty die-hard free market proponent, but as we move away from labor scarcity via automation there's just no other choice than redistribution that allows a basic lifestyle for the unemployable. The transition will be tough though.

That's not how any of this works. Automation like FSD will lead to cheaper shipping costs via trucks leading to more Trucks on the road and more needing to load/unload and manage last mile logistics and driving routes that can't be automated resulting in

... more trucking jobs, more loading/unloading jobs, more FSD operations jobs, more truck repair jobs, more software engineering jobs

This reminds me of how ATMs created more banking jobs because people started to use the bank more along with ATMs. ATMs handled the simple transactions and tellers dealt with the more complex tasks.

We'll see. There will be a loss of little industries that depended on truckers though, like truck stops and inns.

I also hope that this results in more jobs that are fulfilling.

Have you been to a bank branch recently? There is almost no staff, and to get help you have to call an offshored call center.

And there's like hardly any branches anymore, used to be one in every major village/small town per bank, now there's double the people and a third the banks

My little credit union usually has 3-4 tellers and some additional staff that handle more complicated stuff.

Your little credit union lacks the capital to have automated systems handle more complicated stuff... for now.

Used to work at a bank that had a few local branches as a teller when I was a senior in HS. Had old, antiquated technology but had a "person on the phone whenever you needed help".

I'm going to guess that the bank that bought them out was quite a bit more advanced, and the banks that do the same will be buying out the less advanced ones.

Initially, then it reversed.

Sounds like the logic that was used to sell NAFTA/GATT and led to a generation of jobless workers and gutted cities across the country.

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