Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

For self-driving vehicles, I suspect the window of time between "commercially viable" and "common" is a few years, ten if we want to be pessimistic.

So will society (jobs, infrastructure, etc) adjust quickly enough to absorb this change without major pain?

I don't know but since we know it's going to happen, I think we should push the conversation towards "what's next" and figure out how to help people get there instead of just lamenting the loss or complaining about the lament.

If a 35-year old coal miner has bought a house with a middle-class income and suddenly gets laid off, he could be in that shelter within a year. That is why people are so concerned with holding on to jobs.

I used to make this argument, but I don't really agree with it anymore. In the past, there was significantly more on-the-job training and even people with a high school education could get fairly good jobs with the possibility of meaningful career advancement. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore, and it seems like most of the jobs that are lost due to free trade and automation result in workers that, at best, have primarily service jobs available to them that offer little possibility for advancement. Economists predicted that those displaced workers would increase their educational level and retrain, but in practice that did not happen either because people are unable or unwilling. At least part of this must be because in the past, on-the-job training was much more common than today.

See this article in the Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21695855-america...

Here are some relevant paragraphs: Until recently, most economists assumed that displaced workers could find new work relatively easily. After all, in June 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis, unemployment was 4.6%—lower than it was before the recession of the early 1990s. Between 2000 and 2007 Americans left 5m jobs a month and started 5.1m new ones. A million or so jobs lost to trade with China over more than a decade seems tiny by comparison.

But many workers displaced by Chinese imports did not simply find another job. Mr Autor and his colleagues have shown that, at local level, employment falls at least one-for-one with jobs lost to trade, and that displaced workers are unlikely to move to seek new work. The lowest-skilled who do find new jobs tend to move to similar, and thus similarly vulnerable, employment. One reason for this immobility could be that the economy is now an unwelcoming place for jobseekers without a university degree. The housing collapse of the late 2000s, which left many Americans trapped in negative equity, may have made things worse. This new strain of research has lent support to the claim of Dani Rodrik, a globalisation sceptic, that “If you are of low skill, have little education, and are not very mobile, international trade has been bad news for you pretty much throughout your entire life.”

While that article is focused on trade, automation should have a similar impact on the kinds of jobs displaced, e.g., level of education and skill required.

Take the fraction of truck drivers that will become pirates

Multiply by the number of trucks that an average pirate can hijack, deliver the merchandise to a reseller of stolen goods, get paid, and launder the money before getting caught.

Divide by how many shipments a truck driver currently makes per year.

And that's an estimate of the fraction of merchandise that will be pirated.

I suspect the answer is no more than 1%, in which case it is absorbable along with other kinds of lossage.