Automation ia threatening millions of jobs sooner than most seem williing to admit. [View all]

[redqueen]

No other candidate ia confronting this issue with the same clear understanding or focus as Yang.

The rise of self-driving vehicles could lead to a dramatic reduction in road accidents, says Alex Rodrigues, the 24-year-old chief executive of the self-driving truck company Embark. But the ability to eliminate human drivers is also an appealing prospect for companies eager to cut costs and maximize efficiency — including by moving freight 24/7: “Right now, human drivers are limited to 11 hours by federal law, and a driverless truck obviously wouldn’t have that limitation,” he tells FRONTLINE in the above excerpt.

For now, there’s still a human sitting in the cab of his delivery trucks, but that human isn’t driving. Rodrigues says he believes it will take only a few years to “see the first vehicles operating with no one inside them moving freight” — a trend that he says will grow to encompass “more freight, and more geographies and more weather over time.”

It’s the sort of scenario that could endanger the careers of independent truckers like Shawn Cumbee, who is based in Beaverton, Mich. Cumbee says he has his doubts about the rise of automation in the trucking industry: “They’re putting all this new technology into things, but you know, it’s still man made,” he says in the above excerpt. “Man does make mistakes.”

Cumbee goes on to explain why he feels drivers like him can’t be replaced by automation: “You’ve still got to have a driver in it, because I don’t see it doing cities. I don’t see it doing, you know, main things. I don’t see it backing into a dock … I ain’t really worried about the automation of trucks.”

But when his wife, Hope, hears that Embark trucks are already delivering freight on Interstate 10, she pauses: “Really?”[

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/could-the-rise-of-artificial-intelligence-put-truckers-jobs-in-peril/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_term=20191105&utm_content=2800494669&utm_campaign=Frontline&linkId=76530269
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