Self-driving cars veer to shake up jobs
As tech companies and automakers race to make autonomous vehicles a reality, nearly 4 million Americans with jobs that require driving for a living are most at risk of being displaced, according to The Wall Street Journal; they’re often older workers with fewer transferable skills. But for some jobs that involve driving — like electricians — driverless vehicles could be a good thing. To find out more about the effect of driverless cars, the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board sought Sean Snaith, the director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness. A complete transcript can be found at OrlandoSentinel.com/Opinion.
According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 77,660 heavy- and tractor-trailer truck drivers in Florida. They earn an average mean wage of $39,330. How will the autonomous driving trend affect this state? This is just one category of jobs that will be impacted by the advent of autonomous vehicles in Florida. While it is difficult to quantify what the emerging autonomous vehicle industry’s impact will be on the economy, a study by Intel and research company Strategic Analytics estimate that it will be a $7 trillion industry globally by 2050 and it will add $2 trillion to the U.S. economy in that same year. Florida represents 5 percent of the U.S. economy, and while the impact will not be uniformly distributed across the country, we could reasonably expect the impact to be in the tens, if not hundreds, of billion dollars.
Autonomous driving could save $168 billion annually for the freight industry. How does this break down in terms of labor, fuel efficiency, productivity and accidents? The savings would span all of these categories in the freight industry, which is facing a shortage of drivers. Autonomous vehicles are not limited by the number of hours a driver has spent on the road, nor are they going to cause an accident because of a distracted driver or other driver error. Anyone who has sat on a highway that has been shut down by an accident knows that the impact of such an occurrence doesn’t just affect the freight industry. Vehicle speed and routes could all be optimized to save both time and money, getting products to the end user more efficiently and more safely. Fewer workers would be needed to move an increasing amount of product and this would have the effect of reducing overall transportation costs and thus costs to the end user of the products.
In 2014, there were 4 million driver jobs in the U.S., with 3.1 million belonging to truckers. How will the loss of these jobs affect the economy? The process of creative destruction in the economy will continue to happen. Mama didn’t take our Kodachrome away; the digital camera did. The result of this process is not some dystopian future where there are no jobs and human suffering is the inevitable outcome — but just the opposite. Greater prosperity, safer travel, more jobs, higher productivity, environmental benefits and other benefits will all emerge as consequences of this new technology.
That’s not to say that there will not be displacement along the way; change will result in the loss of traditional jobs but at the same time create many more job opportunities, some of which have yet to be envisioned.
In a rapidly evolving economy, job security is an anachronism; the best we can strive for is employment security, which I would define as always having a job, not the same job or even a job in the same industry, during your working years. This requires workers to have flexibility, ongoing training and retraining as the economic landscape is shifting. Education and training of our work force are keys to ensuring that workers have the ability to adapt even as whole industries are going extinct.