Yes, I’m just echoing prior predictions. Automation is bad. The robots are coming. Blah, blah, blah. But it’s not all hype and the sky is falling type fears.
I read an article the other day that discussed how the pace of change is accelerating. That future predictions which use to seem far fetched are now happening far earlier than predicted. That futurists and science fiction authors are now seeing their timetables happen earlier than they thought. Which started my mind thinking…
What will be the first industry devastated by robots?
I immediately thought of transportation. Truckers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, and basically any mass transit. Automation is already pervasive in many of these avocations. GPS tracks truckers. Disruptive competitors are applying technology to the taxi markets (think Uber). And many mass transit rail systems are virtually automatic already.
I suspect the first to feel the pinch will be truckers. Once self driving vehicles are tested and legal in all the states it’s easy to see how a self driving truck will be beneficial. Truckers have to stop after driving a certain number of hours. And they have to sleep (or remain non-driving) for a period of time. These rules are more rigidly enforced than in the past since GPS tracking replaced log books. But if the truck could drive itself and never have to stop to sleep it’s an unavoidable economic benefit to the shipping company. They remove the human salary and improve efficiency – and increase profit.
Taxi drivers will likely face the same outcome.
Once cars are self driving what’s the point of having a driver? Uber and Lyft have already demonstrated people are willing to “hail” rides via apps. This will become incredibly more efficient with a fleet of unmanned “cars” waiting or driving around. And it’s probably no more than ten years off.
Trains, buses, cabs, it will all soon be automated and self driving. Which means the 5-10 million folks working in or supporting these industries will likely be out of work within the next decade.
Herein lies the problem. Where will these folks go? Warehouses will become automated too. As will dozens and hundreds of other jobs. Heck, even my career is under assault. Creative fields once though impossible for computers are being reduced to algorithms. It’s really not impossible to think that ten or twenty years from now we’ll be living in a world similar to Star Trek… where you simply talk to your computer and describe what you want and it does it for you… no skill or talent required on your part beyond being able to speak.
It could certainly be an amazing future world. Computer and robots will be doing all the work. But of course that leads to the question… what will the rest of us be doing?
