Retasking long-haul truckers

[El_Machinae]

I was pondering this article today. Self-driving truck okayed in Nevada

This automation will be a great reason to drive down the wages of long-haul drivers. Good for us, bad for them. So there will likely be some temptation to leave the industry once wages start stagnating. In my neck of the woods, a long-haul driver has a hard life but makes a reasonable living. The long-term thinkers here will start wanting to think about augmenting their education in order to either get new jobs or value-add to their jobs to counter-act the downward pressure on wages.

What they have is a lot of time to listen, which is a great way to listen to audiobooks or audio lectures. What types of jobs could a trucker do that would benefit from pre-training/pre-learning through their ears? If you knew a trucker as a friend, and wanted him preparing for the future, it would be nice to have some advice on this front. I'm somewhat blanking on what "their next job" would be as well as what audio-based learning would benefit this future trend. So, I'm putting it out there to y'all.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Looks to me like this technology means that long haul truckers need all the skills they already have, plus the tech savvy to operate an autopilot, and probably perform minor maintenance on it as well. How do you think this is going to lower their wage?

 

[Borachio]

Bah! I was a long-distance truck driver 30 years ago, and I went in for distance-learning stuff in the hope of getting me out of it. And also for something to do. Truck drivers very frequently wait for 3 hours to get loaded/unloaded, so there's plenty of "downtime" anyway.

Studying did me no good at all though, since my next job was as a dock worker.

 

[Farm Boy]

Looks to me like this technology means that long haul truckers need all the skills they already have, plus the tech savvy to operate an autopilot, and probably perform minor maintenance on it as well. How do you think this is going to lower their wage?

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Farm_Hand/Hourly_Rate

 

[IglooDame]

The problem is, some people do well at auditory learning, and others are much more visual or kinesthetic students. But if one is good at learning via listening, there's no end to what they can learn via tapes.

 

[Perfection]

Long haul truckers are very hard to find and most are older. The current trend is to migrate to roadrailers for long haul and use short haul truckers who can go home at the end of the day. It's exciting to see how autonomous vehicles will impact these trends.

 

[Cutlass]

With any and all jobs which have gone into decline because of some external changes, some people have an easier time of adjusting than others. But over time new people don't enter that field, and so the pool of people who can do it dies up.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Long haul truckers are very hard to find and most are older. The current trend is to migrate to roadrailers for long haul and use short haul truckers who can go home at the end of the day. It's exciting to see how autonomous vehicles will impact these trends.

This depends on how you define "long haul." California has huge numbers of 'load today, unload tomorrow' drivers making two or three round trips a week from the central valley into the LA markets. If you consider them as "long haul truckers" you can find hundreds of them on any given night in Castaic.

 

[warpus]

Things can change rather quickly in my field - I have to keep up with technology to stay competitive and relevant. A trucker does not really have to keep that in mind.. (until now) but .. well, this is just a case of the economy changing and people having to adapt. It happens in most industries, to one degree or another. It will be tough on some people, and that's why you need to have a good social safety net in place, so that they can get back up on their feet after the dust settles. That is key.

 

[El_Machinae]

The problem is, some people do well at auditory learning, and others are much more visual or kinesthetic students. But if one is good at learning via listening, there's no end to what they can learn via tapes.

It's very true. But there's still the ol' "no better options" problem. In essence, I'm trying to think of things that are amenable to the audio opportunity. That way, at least a subset of people can get ahead of the ball. Some is better than none.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Once they put the truck on auto pilot they can use any study materials that they want.

 

[Cutlass]

Assuming self driving trucks are viable in the foreseeable future (as opposed to the indefinite future), there still will not be a hard switch, today we have drivers, tomorrow we don't. Instead we'd have a lengthy transition period. The costs involved are just too high otherwise.

The US already has a shortage of truck drivers. Has for decades. As companies replace equipment with self driving rigs, fewer jobs will be offered, and that means fewer new people will enter the field. Those remaining will take the jobs of the machines not yet switched over.

 

[Farm Boy]

There seems to me to be a subsection of the population that is well suited to spatial thinking, attentiveness, and a degree of careful physical coordination. As we phase these jobs out of relevance it's a pipe dream to think we're going to replace the work they did(and need to do) with human labor in order to keep them productive. Many of them will simply no longer be particularly useful people. Nor will their type be useful in the future either.

 

[Cutlass]

There seems to me to be a subsection of the population that is well suited to spatial thinking, attentiveness, and a degree of careful physical coordination. As we phase these jobs out of relevance it's a pipe dream to think we're going to replace the work they did(and need to do) with human labor in order to keep them productive. Many of them will simply no longer be particularly useful people. Nor will their type be useful in the future either.

This is a problem I have when thinking about any of the various ways that people are displaced in the economy. In a nation of 300+ million people, we have people of all sorts, and many of those people just aren't suited to the skills and abilities of a technomarvel world.

Sucks to be them.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Assuming self driving trucks are viable in the foreseeable future (as opposed to the indefinite future), there still will not be a hard switch, today we have drivers, tomorrow we don't. Instead we'd have a lengthy transition period. The costs involved are just too high otherwise.

The US already has a shortage of truck drivers. Has for decades. As companies replace equipment with self driving rigs, fewer jobs will be offered, and that means fewer new people will enter the field. Those remaining will take the jobs of the machines not yet switched over.

Auto pilots on commercial aircraft have been capable of managing takeoff to landing for at least two decades. How many airlines are running without pilots?

This autopilot for trucks might mean that trucks spend less time idling due to drivers having maxed their allowed hours according to DoT regs, but it isn't going to change the number of jobs in any time frame that will affect people currently alive.

 

[Formaldehyde]

If the drivers of the two trucks in operation do anything other be prepared to immediately take control of the trucks, they should be criminally charged for violating the law.

THE FIRST SELF-DRIVING TRUCK TAKES TO THE STREETS OF NEVADA

But even with all that technology, a driver with a commercial license still has to be in the cab, ready to take over if driving conditions get bad, or the truck has to exit the highway--because the truck can only be driven in autonomous mode on highways, not local roads.

By diverting some of the more monotonous tasks of driving to a machine, Freightliner (owned by Daimler) hopes that truck drivers can be less stressed and more alert, even on long hauls. But it might be a while before you see one of the Freightliner Inspirations on the road. There are only two licensed, and both are operating in Nevada, one of just four states (plus the District of Columbia) that has developed laws regulating autonomous vehicles.

While they might be able to get away with being distracted while listening to audio tapes, they still have to pay attention, which may actually become more difficult to do the more automated the job becomes.

This is really no different than airline pilots using the autopilot on commercial flights, as Tim pointed out.

 

[Zelig]

Not just long-haul truckers: How Canada’s oilsands are paving the way for driverless trucks — and the threat of big layoffs

“It’s not fantasy,” Suncor’s chief financial officer Alister Cowan told investors at an RBC Capital Markets conference in New York last week. He said the company is working to replace its fleet of heavy haulers with automated trucks “by the end of the decade.”

“That will take 800 people off our site,” Cowan said of the trucks. “At an average (salary) of $200,000 per person, you can see the savings we’re going to get from an operations perspective.”

 

[Farm Boy]

This is a problem I have when thinking about any of the various ways that people are displaced in the economy. In a nation of 300+ million people, we have people of all sorts, and many of those people just aren't suited to the skills and abilities of a technomarvel world.

Sucks to be them.

Well, it's not like we ever gave up the spirit of the Gilded Age even when we became more "liberal." If the people of your country are wrong for your economy and policy, then the people need to change. Hadoi. Progress!

 

[Cutlass]

Well, it's not like we ever gave up the spirit of the Gilded Age even when we became more "liberal." If the people of your country are wrong for your economy and policy, then the people need to change. Hadoi. Progress!

People can't stay the same. The world changes. Nothing can stop that. It is an inherent feature of life. Humans change things. It is an inherent feature of humans.

Sure, it's hard on people. But to go on as if nothing is changing will be even harder for them. They'll get run over either way. But they'll take a lot fewer innocent people down with them if they are more willing to adapt over time rather than fighting to the final loss.

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, it's progress when somebody else is rendered obsolete without the means to be useful. It's efficient to cut their cost out of our trinkets. It's something that liberal democracy needs to fix when the obsolescence is personal.