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Comment by kadoban | Hacker News Reader

"[...] Long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages, will be replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous vehicles through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle less well than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs changing."

Uhm, that's halfway decent careers turning into far fewer and shittier jobs. That's jobs disappearing. And it ignores that eventually someone will automate even that part away, it'll just take a bit longer.

The article just seems to just be a series of quibbles that don't show Yang to be wrong in any meaningful sense.

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That's BS about being capable of navigating Interstate highways autonomously.

Whoever does the research needs go actually go along an Over The Road truck driver and actually see what challenges technology face.

Different highways with crumpling road markers. Severe weather. Unpredictable human drivers. Fueling. Construction sites and their differences between displaying markers.

I do not see autonomous technology taking over long haul truckers anytime soon, especially if the state and federal government doesn't maintain the highways and keeps cutting budget.

The few scenarios where the present technology can handle is a local route that has greatly maintained roads and stable weather. Even in this case, it's foolish to think human drivers will not be as careless as before. In fact, I predict they will think its so safe that they will cut the truck off ever closer, thus creating more disasters.

Source: I'm a trucker and know the challenges computer vision and its sensors could possibly face.

Probably caravans where you have one driver per 3 trucks will be first or something similar to that.

There are many routes which are possible to automate today. Those will become human-free first, leaving the humans to compete for the remaining 95%.

Then another 5% of routes will become computer navigable, and the remaining truckers will compete for the remaining jobs.

Then between automation and improved maintenance due to the higher regulatory fees afforded by automation, more roads will become auto-navigable by dint of maintenance and standardised marking.

There will be a pincer movement, roads coming up to standard, standards converging on what automated trucks need, and automation becoming better at navigating any road.

By 2030 there will be far fewer humans driving anything.

What? 10 years?

Exactly right. Not to mention it's the most common job in most states. That's a lot of people losing what quality of life they had.

Yes, I disagree with some of Yang's views (and his proposed solution) and the general idea that we're living in the fastest age of technological process (I'm generally quite pessimistic if one tallies up the resources we keep using, the education we have and how little change there is), but many of the criticisms of Yang seem to be worse than the caution he brings to the table.

Even if Yang is only slightly right, and I do agree on some sectors like Amazon replacing brick and mortar stores and the erosion of mid-skilled work and good jobs, that can already be back-breaking for many developed economies, and in particular the UK and the US with their strong focus on deindustrialisation have already felt the effects.

One only needs to leave London for a few hours and travel the country and go to the poor places that were former hubs of industrial production. Many of the places are in astonishingly bad shape.

Truck driving has a incredibly high turn over rate. Not that many drivers will lose their jobs but a lot who would have entered the field won't have that option. The net result as far as number of truckers goes might be the same but it is easier to divert into something else instead of retraining after investing time into a career. Of course this necessitates there being something else to be diverted into, which certainly isn't guaranteed.

Meanwhile what will demonstrate Yang wrong—conveniently for him—is just waiting a decade.

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