Autonomous Vehicles and the Job Market; Accelerator or Cause of Crash?
By Sylvie Barak for Mouser Electronics
In 1957 there were 400,000 elevator operators in Manhattan. A decade later there were hardly any. The reason? As
technology progressed, autonomous elevators could ferry people up and down hundreds of floors quicker and more
efficiently than any human could. We now find ourselves poised on the edge of a very similar precipice: The era of
the driverless car is fast approaching. Will autonomous vehicles have the same effect on workers that robotic
elevator controls had on the now extinct human elevator operators? Opinions on the subject seem divided.
“The driverless car will completely upset the way traditional commerce works,” said Ben Miller, CEO of FundRise, an
online investment company. Miller believes that there is a list of industries -- totaling about $5 trillion of the
United States’ GDP -- which the driverless car will render worthless, from long-haul trucking, to auto insurance, to
Amtrak and commuter airlines, to taxis. The auto insurance
industry, for example, Miller said, generates $220 billion in revenue a year. “Without human error to account for,
the industry will disappear.”
Figure 1: Nissan's autonomous driving technology is an extension of
its Safety Shield, which monitors a 360-degree view around a vehicle for risks, offers warnings to the driver and
takes action if necessary. By 2020, Nissan plans to introduce vehicles that can navigate without driver
intervention in nearly all situations, including complex city driving. Courtesy NissanNews.com
Taxi cabs, other experts say, will become the horse-and-buggy of the early 21st century, while delivery trucks will
go semi-autonomous. “UPS
trucks will have personnel on
board because someone has to load and deliver those packages, but the onboard system will be telling that person
what to unload and where to take it at each stop,” said Dr. Harry E. Keller, President, Chief Science Officer, and
Founder of Smart Science Education Inc.
Other experts seem far less resigned to autonomous vehicles taking over from humans, arguing instead that with a
growing population and aging infrastructure, the addition of driverless cars and trucks fills a much needed void.
“There are 3.5 million long-haul drivers in the US today, and there still aren’t enough,” explained Tom Green,
editor-in -chief of Robotics Business Review. Recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine
reinforce Green’s opinion.
The Financial Times recently reported that the amount of freight that will be shipped via trucking is to triple
between now and 2050. This is where semi-autonomous trucks like Daimler’s newly tested “Highway Pilot System” come
in. The German automotive company recently took advantage of the long, straight highways of Nevada to try out its
fleet -- a modern-day caravan, consisting of a lone manned 18-wheeler trailed by three or four unmanned trucks. When
human intervention is required, the system alerts the driver, and he’s able to take control, either remotely or
directly, of any truck in his personal fleet.
The efficiencies of such a system are numerous. For one, they are more fuel efficient, and because they are able to
keep driving for 24 hours a day, they complete their routes faster, meaning less of them are required to begin with.
Secondly, they’re thought to be safer, and with 4,000 fatalities a year from collisions with big trucks (statistics
point to 11 fatal accidents per day), that’s significant. Only 10-15% of truck drivers in the US are long haul, and
since autonomous trucking is really only useful on long, straight roads under fairly optimal conditions, it’s hard
to make the argument that Daimler is about to put truckers out of business any time soon. Indeed, Green notes, the
firm didn’t even manage to take weather conditions into consideration during the design process, meaning that when
the trucks encountered strong winds, the lead driver was forced to take control to ensure the caravan stayed on
track.
Not that it’s a bad idea for truckers to start educating themselves about how to operate trains of autonomous
vehicles. “[Eventually] the drivers will have to be sophisticated enough to operate within the cab of a self-driving
truck,” Green said. “They will have to learn something about electronics, something about radar.” It’s not just the
vehicle technology that has to keep on improving for autonomous transportation to become a meaningful reality;
roads, too, are going to have to change. “Right now [in the USA] you have an infrastructure that was put in 1958,
and that infrastructure is falling apart,” Green noted. “Maybe in the future, like they build railroads, they’ll be
building twin-lane highways that go coast to coast, and only driverless trucks can be on them.”
“I can imagine a scenario in which certain lanes are reserved for AVs and, later, entire roads are
reserved for them, especially in California,” added Dr. Keller, noting that once a critical mass of these vehicles
do make it to our roads, the changeover would be rapid. Re-building infrastructure on such a grand, national scale
will likely act as a huge boon to employment, rather than to its detriment, and is likely to take decades to
complete. “We have a great many technical and structural problems to overcome before we reach the critical tipping
point and see AVs taking over our roads almost completely,” Keller said, adding that his best guess as to timing is
between 2025 and 2030.
Regulation, too, has been a sticking point for autonomous vehicles.
“The technology is already there, but regulation hasn’t yet allowed us to fully exploit it,” said Remy Glaisner of
Myria research. This, along with huge uncertainties in true public demand, make it very hard to estimate whether
privately owned autonomous vehicles will take off, and if so, when. “All automotive makers are currently developing
self-driving models and have prototypes, but they don’t really have any estimates about how many will sell when they
do come to market,” he added. This despite the fact autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles are thought to be safer,
overall, which might mean a hit to the auto insurance industry.
“It’ll be great for teenagers, we’ll keep more of them alive,” Green said. Keller added that AVs also have the
potential to make the driver’s license a thing of the past. “Even if people ‘drive’ their cars, the car will have
override capability in the event of bad decisions. After all, driving is a privilege and not a right as we often are
told.”
It’s not just the physical highways that will need a serious overhaul to accommodate the advent of autonomous
vehicles. The information superhighway is also about to be sent into overload, with connected cars causing massive
bandwidth jams if networks don’t work rapidly to increase capacity. In addition to in-car WiFi, now becoming a
normal feature, autonomous vehicles will also rely on wireless connectivity to interact safely with each other and
things like traffic lights and road signs.
And then consider Moore’s Law, which posits that computer power doubles every 18-24 months, a far shorter cycle
than most car buyers will be comfortable with. In a world dominated by computer-automated cars, having 10-year-old
electronics isn’t really feasible. “Can I get my car upgraded every two years? That’s a whole industry in itself,
just upgrading cars,” Green noted, musing that many electronics will have to be hot-swappable, and that entire
industries could be set up to help people download and install the best apps and software for their cars, cleanse
them of viruses, and sell malware protection specifically for them.
“There are millions and millions of jobs that are going to come from this industry and billions and billions of
dollars,” he said, adding, “We don’t even know what jobs are coming down the line.” Keller agrees. “We never lose
one category of job without another taking its place,” he said, though he noted the primary problem was that the
skill sets of the lost jobs and the new ones rarely overlap.
Both experts agree that the transition period may appear to be one of increasing unemployment, but that will
evaporate in the sunshine of new service industries and entrepreneurs finding new ways to make money from the new
way of life that AVs will bring. “With AVs, that sudden tipping point will most certainly be disruptive and hurt
lots of those who do not anticipate it,” Keller said, adding that, “once the disruptive period ends, we will be on
an upward path once again.”
Green said he’s getting rather fed up with the media trying to terrify people with the notion that automated
machines are out to steal their jobs. "There has been a lot of scaremongering going on. People are getting
really tired of opening up a newspaper and seeing headlines that say your job is going to be taken over by a
robot," Green said. “History just doesn’t really bear it out. Let’s move on, if we need to be educating
ourselves better, let’s do it. If we need our kids to get into STEM education, let’s do it. But let’s stop wallowing
in fear. Let’s just get prepared and move forward.”
Keller is of the same mind and believes the advantages outweigh any of the counterarguments. "We know that
autonomous vehicles will not flood our highways tomorrow or next year," he said. "We also know that they
have the potential to reduce highway fatalities, reduce gasoline usage, and reduce driving time from point of origin
to destination and to do so at lower cost than driving yourself. In simpler terms, this is an unstoppable
force." As with all such unstoppable forces of progress, which have seemingly eliminated jobs from librarians
to bank tellers to elevator operators, we’re likely to look back at this in 50 years and wonder what all the fuss
was about.
Sylvie Barak is a contributing writer for Mouser
Electronics and a regular speaker on the tech conference circuit and a Senior Director at FTI Consulting, Sylvie
Barak is an authority on the electronics space, social media in a b2b context, digital content creation and
distribution. She has a passion for gadgets, electronics, and science fiction.
