You may be right, I don't know. I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about this, just that I'm personally skeptical, and not really in favor of restructuring society for a problem that might be coming. If we had done that all those times in the past...
To take the truck driver thing, here's a plausible scenario (to me anyway).
First of all, "top job in X states" seems like a really weird way to express this. It honestly feels like a way to make it seem as dire as possible.
There are something like 3 to 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. That's a lot. However, BLS reports that only about half of these are heavy and tractor trailer truck drivers [1]. So maybe the rest are driving smaller trucks and vehicles around town? Those seem safer from job loss to me, I suspect that any job that requires driving a truck here and there and loading / unloading things will not be replaced by AI as fast.
Side note: BLS is predicting 6% growth in this job from 2016 to 2026, which is about average. But let's assume they're wrong.
So let's say that 1.8 million are long haul truckers that can be relatively easily replaced by AI. How long will that really take? I know everyone thinks that self-driving cars are around the corner, but I'm really not convinced. We've been hearing that for a few years now, and it seems like lots of teams are hitting some roadblocks (heh) in terms of their ability to solve some of the remaining issues. Just my ambient observations though, I'm no expert.
Even if we do get there with some cars in the next 3-5 years, are we really going to be ready to put heavy loads on highways unattended? We're going to handle the technical issues, security issues, legal issues, insurance, in a few years? I'm really skeptical. Maybe we can do point-to-point on highways in 5 years, but then what? Do we have huge lots where these trucks park and then drivers ferry them to local warehouses to be loaded / unloaded? What about fueling these things along the way with no drivers? How do we keep these loads safe from theft? None of these are insurmountable, but are we really going to solve these things in the next few years such that we're ready to start laying people off?
I think 10-20 years is much more realistic to put the majority of truckers out of a job. Not all, but the majority. But truckers are already old (49 average) and many will be retiring over that period anyway. Why can't we just not replace them as those jobs dwindle?
1. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/h...