Disruption Winners and Losers: Vehicular Automation
[Student name withheld]
- Autonomous vehicles are modes of transportation which do not require a person to operate it, with existing examples being the Tesla self-driving models or the discontinued Google self-driving car. Without human drivers, the productivity of autonomous delivery would prove to be more consistent. There would be no need for bathroom breaks, pulling off for fast food, or even sleep, and the margin of human error being present. However, that just replaces human error with artificial intelligence error and glitching where humans would be equipped to, such as more accurately braking for pedestrians and navigating harsh weather conditions, or even getting held up to an extent. Driverless cars would potentially increase vehicle travel to non-drivers and improve the owner’s endurance and road covered during long car trips and commutes, with the total vehicle travel projected to increase by 10% in the United States.
- However, though day trippers and those who drive to work would encounter improvement in a positive direction, this would not be good news to those who can work because driving itself is the work. If the nearly 73,500 ambulances (2020), around 11.6 million shipment trucks (2023), 2,441,885 taxi/limousine services (2023), and over 1,000,000 buses (2021) went driverless, about 15,055,385 vehicles would be entirely autonomous. The mass influx of jobless vehicle operators (not counting their replacements and driving partners on the job) while counting the six million currently unemployed Americans would yield a national unemployment rate of around 16.3%. This percentage would blow the 14.7% unemployment rate of April 2020 (the highest rate since records began in 1948) out of the water, affecting the United States on a massive scale, let alone globally.
- If the old way of hiring drivers disappeared completely, this mode of technology would disrupt the cycle of providing driving workers for the taxi, trucking and general car-driving job market. Most drivers being let go hold more experience, technique and knowledge than any software-hardware car-handling mix could, though it won’t always be enough to keep their job when AI vehicles are made cheaper in the long-term. It would truly become an “AI takeover” matter, and not the exciting, sci-fi TV kind. As of right now, there are roughly 30,000,000 self driving cars in the world, with the previous hypothetical numbers making up just over half that figure in the United States alone. The matter of which would only be exacerbated by more and more minimum wage positions being replaced by robotics and AI, making it even harder for such former minimum wage workers to find work. With technology improving at the rate it is, the issue becomes more dire and difficult to solve with more machinery.
Citations (sorry if this is too many)-
-“National Association of State EMS Officials releases stats on local agencies, 911 calls”: www.ems1.com/ambulance-service/articles/national-association-of-state-ems-officials-releases-stats-on-local-agencies-911-calls-LPQTHJrK2oIpxuR1/#:~:text=More%20than%2018%2C200%20local%20EMS,every%20year%20in%2041%20states.
-“Driverless cars: The dark side of autonomous vehicles that no one’s talking about”: www.euronews.com/green/2023/01/16/driverless-cars-the-dark-side-of-autonomous-vehicles-that-no-ones-talking-about#:~:text=There%20are%20currently%20more%20than,the%20development%20of%20such%20vehicles.
-“Number of bus registrations in the United States from 2000 to 2021”: www.statista.com/statistics/196383/number-of-registered-buses-in-the-united-states-by-state/#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20the,to%20some%20939%2C200%20licensed%20buses.
-“Autonomous Vehicle Implementation Predictions: Implications for Transport Planning”: //www.vtpi.org/avip.pdf.
-“United States light vehicle sales in 2021, by type”: www.statista.com/statistics/204225/united-states-vehicle-production-in-october-2011/.
-“Taxi & Limousine Services in the US – Number of Businesses 2003–2028”: www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-businesses/taxi-limousine-services-united-states/#:~:text=There%20are%202%2C441%2C885%20Taxi%20%26%20Limousine,over%20the%20past%205%20years%3F.
-“Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey”: www.bls.gov/cps/.
[BWG]