Self-driving trucks will be job-killers.

[whatthehey]

16. Yep they will

People get all poutraged when the question of human intellect differentials are raised, pretending for some reason that it's ok to accept that some people are born with the superior inherent traits that make them fast, or strong, or co-ordinated, but that intelligence is somehow a flat curve with only nurture and opportunity making a difference. Pretend that all, say, D.J. Qualls needs to become an Olympic gold medal decathlete is dedication and good training facilities and you'd be justly laughed at, but woe betide anybody who says that effort and good schools with good amenities can't turn even the most hapless student into an engineer.

The trouble is that's bullshit. Just like some people will never be athletes, some will never be successful scholars no matter how hard they try or how much help they are given. And that means we need some jobs for which you don't need a successful education or a huge store of knowledge, or something other than jobs. I ran warehouses for quite a while. I met hundreds of truckers, and talked to a huge number of them while they were being unloaded or loaded. Some were fantastically intelligent (for people with the inclination and ability, a job that gives you all day to listen to audio lectures and books can result in one heck of a level of erudition - I envied those who demonstrated that inclination quite a bit). Most? Not so much. Will they be getting jobs servicing robots and computers, let alone designing them? Unlikely.

We do need to decide how we will as a society handle those intellectually incapable of handling a workplace where that kind of job is rapidly disappearing, where there are far fewer "uneducated" jobs than uneducated workers. Yes education and training must be part of that. It will be many generations before robot plumbers or coders are feasible. But that's just skimming the cream. The rest need something, be it minimum incomes, WPA style programs (my favorite, but will likely run afoul of both unions and special interests), job corps, etc.