American truck drivers could lose their jobs to robots

>1.8 million American truck drivers ... well-paying working-class jobs

Those two items right there are exactly why they are being automated (in addition to additional efficiencies and cost reductions). If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality.

What to do about the aftermath that affects actual people and families as pay is reduced or eventually eliminated over the next 10-25 years? Well, that's the new problem. Not one that the companies that employ truck drivers will be looking to solve, but the one everyone else has to cope with in some capacity -- whether directly affected by the reduced jobs, or indirectly affected by those now looking for work in their community.

This is a perfectly reasonable intuition – that there will be large net loss of jobs as trucks are automated – but we should not mistake the intuition for evidence. There is a long history of believing that massive job losses are imminent due to technological advance.

The problem with mistaking this fear for a fact is that it often leads to an incorrect intervention. (I call this a WMD argument.)

We’d be much better served with much greater caution about what is actually, observably, measurably true. In this case, we’d have to discover the yet-unfound correlation between technical advance and employment rate.

The other question you need to ask in order to understand this future scenerio:. Shipping costs will significantly decrease, what will consumers and shareholders spend the extra money on?

Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.

It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"

Imagine telling a farmer in 1850s America, when 64% of America farmed, that in 2016 only 2% of people would be farming! Imagine the distopian horror (1)! If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today.

Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors, leading to the enormous improvement in production, income and standard of living since then. If 64% of people still farmed, or 2% farmed and 62% were on UBI - who would have had the time or incentive to create computers, software, advances in healthcare, etc?

I'm not claiming the transition is easy for someone who's laid off - it can be an extremely tough process, but it's absolutely necessary for the improvement of humanity.

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-...

Vox writers should be more worried than drivers. Driving a car, dealing with other users on the road, making regulators happy are all difficult problems.

Meanwhile, I have already seen Reddit bots which summarise submissions. How far off are from one that will rehash 2-3 articles and toss in an infographic (created elsewhere)?

> UBI

> sitting around

choose one