When will they come for the truckers?

[Timbuk2]

I see your conservativism reflex reacted to my characterization in "sucks to be you...". But if you read my post carefully, you'll understand it isn't about today, or the conditions workers are facing today. Find new work has always been a solution, but what happens when virtually all work is automated? Sounds impossibly ridiculous, I know, so I'll understand if you don't want to talk about that. But that's the topic.

Virtually all work automated? It's a looooong time before the office-based work I do can be automated. When it can, artificial intelligence will be at or beyond current human thought-pattern levels. And once we're at that level, well, we'll be at some Banks-esque Culture type of semi-utopian society where no one has to work, everything that needs doing is done by artificial automatons of some sort, society is not monetary-based, and we're free to pursue fulfillment or hedonism or spiritualism or whatever without the shackles of needing to work to live. And I think that would be great.

And mentioning the work I do, I have team-members and at the PhD-level working with Google scientists on their Machine-Learning product, developing it for the bank to train it in understanding patterns of payment behaviour to aid in the detection of financial crime. This is cutting-edge stuff, it's software capable of learning, but it's still pretty damn basic in the context of what we're discussing here. AI is centuries away from taking over the work of the middle-classes. We're only just reaching maturity on automation taking over the repetitive work of the working classes, where automative-intelligence at Step 1, 2, 3, Repeat is all that's needed.

~

And on the subject of driving - we're not 5 or 10 years but many decades away from fully-automated cars being commonplace, and I'm not sure it will reach ubiquity in our lifetime. It only really becomes viable and safe when human drivers - and their inherent unpredictability - are removed entirely from the roads. That's a long way off.
I watched a recent test on the UK roads of Tesla's Model X, which has the intelligence capable of staying in lanes on motorways, and of moving lane automatically should a slower car be encountered ahead - it detects the movement and speeds of all surrounding vehicles and has the intelligence to drive within that fluid and dynamic environment. Yet even in a brief test, it nearly caused an accident because a car approaching in a different lane accelerated suddenly, and the Tesla pulled out in front of it. Human unpredictability will always flummox and undermine even the best-trained AIs.

There is inertia too. Driving is so central to our society, so much a part of human life on this planet currently, that changing that will be a sloooow process, even if the technology is capable and safe enough to remove the squishy unpredictable pink thing from the equation entirely. I for one don't want to stop driving.