Autonomous vehicles have gained tremendous traction as many companies rush to pour development hours into their self-driving systems. What once was thought of as science fiction is starting to look more and more like a realistic goal.
While self-driving cars are impressive from a technological achievement viewpoint, the development of fully self-driving vehicles holds the key to unlocking cheaper and faster logistic and transportation solutions as well as making roads safer, leading to fewer injuries and deaths.
However, as with any technological advancement, the ever-impending dreadful thought of robots completely replacing humans grows stronger. Plenty of jobs are based on people driving a vehicle from one point to another. If we have vehicles that can do that themselves, then that person’s role begins to look redundant. While autonomous vehicles can have a monumental economic benefit, they will also impact the job markets, both good and bad.
Jobs Under Threat
The Upjohn Institute for Employment Research researched the possible impact that autonomous vehicles will have on the job markets. The research found that AVs would directly eliminate anywhere from 1.3 to 2.3 million jobs over the next thirty years. They predict there won’t be any significant job losses until the late 2030s and into the 2050s. This would raise the annual unemployment rate by about 0.1%.
Truck drivers who do most of their driving on highways will be most at risk as these types of roads are the easiest for self-driving systems to tackle. Eventually, the “last mile” drivers, like delivery drivers, will also need to contend with Autonomous vehicles. Still, it’s unclear how long it will take for a reliable commercial self-driving vehicle that can handle city streets will appear.
These estimations will change if it takes longer than expected for autonomous technology to develop or if employers decide to retain much of their current staff and retrain them elsewhere. Still, in some form or another, trucking will be autonomous decades down the line.
A Story About The ATM
The introduction of the ATM is perhaps one of the closest analogues we have to the current situation. With a machine able to do all the basic tasks of a bank teller, every bank teller role must have eventually been eliminated, right? That might have been the case for a brief moment, but the trend reversed in due time.
The ATM allowed the average number of tellers required to run a branch office to drop from 20 to 13. But, once operating these existing branch offices became significantly cheaper, banks began to expand their branches to cover more markets. Overall, while each branch needed fewer people, the creation of all these new branches created more jobs for tellers. Additionally, these tellers now were responsible for giving their clients a personal touch that ATMs simply cannot, helping with community involvement and pleasing business owners so that they continue to use the bank’s services.
Creating Jobs
At the moment, autonomous vehicles have been a boon in the job market. There are many aspects when it comes to creating a functioning system. These include writing the code, collecting and training the data/models, integrating the sensor suites with both the software and the car itself, validation, etc. With how complex the task of creating a self-driving car is, coupled with plenty of companies looking to be the first to achieve it, there are a tremendous amount of new jobs in the space.
While many of these jobs seem to be tech-oriented, there are also important jobs that can be done by people with little technology experience, as listed in this blog post by autonomous vehicle developer Aurora.
Whether this job market will continue to be this large as time passes is up in the air. There is plenty of current rapid progress, facilitating the need for plenty of employees. However, there will come a point where the system will be “perfect”, or at least as close to perfect as possible. At this hypothetical point, the development of the system finishes, and the need for all these employees will be gone. Of course, whether such a system can even reach perfection is uncertain.
An Overall Benefit?
It’s still tough to predict the impact of self-driving cars on future jobs, mainly due to the uncertainty of how good the systems will be and how long they will take to develop. This is perhaps the greatest shift in transportation since automobiles first replaced the horse-drawn carriage. Undoubtedly, similar fears of lost jobs were had over a century ago. While carriage businesses did go away, the automotive industry was estimated to offer ten times the jobs it erased. Perhaps the same will happen again.