Self-Driven Vehicles to Eliminate Countless Jobs

Automation has already been responsible for the loss of countless jobs in America and around the world. You can see brilliant accounting for this here and here.

Well, you’ve got less than ten years warning that millions more will go unemployed due to self-driven cars. Two fresh reports outline where this is all going.

The first, titled “Computer driven cars will convulse the automotive industry” appeared yesterday in the Detroit News. The article praised the many benefits of self-driven cars, but also pointed out that there will be some losers:

Obviously taxi companies will find business disappearing. Railroads, bus companies and short-haul airlines will suffer. If you can move from your home to your destination, door-to-door in the comfort of your car, who’s going to take the train, bus or plane? Hotels might be in for a shock too. If you can travel overnight to your business meeting in the morning by sleeping in the back of your self-driving Winnebago, showering and breakfasting on the way, who’d want to do it the traditional way?

But that’s not even close to telling the full story. The next report on CCJ explores how the entire supply line of goods will eventually be replaced with autonomous planes, trains, and trucks.

CCJ asked industry expert Fred Andersky, the director of government and industry affairs for Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems, about the implications of automation on jobs.

“The policy implications around autonomous vehicles, and their impact on truck drivers, taxi drivers, package delivery drivers, bus drivers, chauffeurs, etc. are pretty broad,” Andersky says. “I would have to think that any legislation/regulation around autonomous vehicles would have to take this implication into consideration; meaning there could be requirements that, like pilots in airplanes, we’ll see a need to keep a driver behind the wheel for a long time. Not necessarily because he or she needs to be there, but because there’s not another job to move into or to help ease the transition into other careers.”

As you can see, the list of jobs to be made obsolete by autonomous vehicles goes far beyond personal transportation — a technology that is already here — and the powers that be are working on policies to somehow maintain workers that don’t “need to be there.”

How much do you think those jobs will pay? Airline pilots today more closely resemble down-on-his-luck bus driver Ralph Kramden from the Honeymooners than some well-paid hot shot they appeared to be in the very recent past.

Here’s a good visual of how this technology will eventually work:

The economic machine is clearly downsizing human labor by circumstance and by design. The fragile economy is already overly dependent on welfare and warfare and will have a very hard time adapting to this rapid change. But society will have to adjust. You will have to adjust.

Watch the documentary below for a broader understanding of what to expect from automation in the coming years so you can position yourself to survive the job culling: