I had a professor pull this visualization up on one half of the screen, and then a news article about Mercede-Benz' self driving semi on the other half of the screen.
He left them up for a about a minute, looked at all of us, said "All of your actions have consequences, some of them unintended." and moved on with the lecture for the day.
A friend of mine working as a transport economist produced used modeling and projections to estimate things like traffic congestion, road usage, miles driven and so forth over the next however-many years (this was in the late 90s and the effects were striking -- as in bad). His boss was startled by them and said "what about the effects of the internet and virtualization?" "That's what you're looking at."
A whole lot more stuff is being delivered to people's doors today than twenty years ago.
I remember seeing a documentary about why, even though rail is more efficient, it has not replace long haul trucks.
The main reason had to do with how our rails are setup in an inefficient way and that all freight currently has to stop route through Chicago (iirc). This is a manual process where cars are manually moved, counted and routed.
Many former railways I know have actually been abandoned as I have an uncle who worked for Rails for Trails converting them into bike paths.
Rail is still incredibly cheap and efficient in the USA. In fact, the USA has some of the most cost effective freight rail in the world. [1]
Rail freight is also quite a bit larger than truck freight in the USA. A lot of things are railed across in an intermodal and then hitched onto a truck for regional delivery. [2]
In short, rail freight is massive in the USA and our primary mode of goods transportation.
What is the connection between those two? Or conversely, how does the presence of human drivers prevent moving cargo onto freight trains? Isn't that what standardized containers are for?
ISO 20/40 containers are not optimal for long haul over the road trucking -- you generally want something bigger (53') and lighter. You can rail those on their own flatbeds, but that's also not optimal. Intermodal ISO containers make a lot more sense for sea and (sort of) rail; some sense for trucking, especially final delivery, but not OTR; very little sense for air freight (although I've seen a bunch of specially configured equipment shelter 20' containers shipped in cargo aircraft, it's not done for general cargo because the tare weight is in the tons when you're paying $1-20+/pound; they also don't work well with aircraft cargo handling, and can't fit as standardized ULD or loose cargo in passenger aircraft.)
Repacking your cargo from one container to another sucks for a lot of reasons: cost, time, theft, damage, etc.
There's also a latency and performance improvement if you can go door to door with a truck, vs. do intermodal with a train in the middle. Unless you're moving a bulk commodity to a high-volume location, it's unlikely they have rail directly to the destination. (Coal power plants do; lots of modern light industrial manufacturing sites do not.)
Optimizing air vs. truck vs. rail vs. ship across your whole supply chain is an interesting problem.
Another fun thing: with robo drivers, you could go essentially non-stop (except for fueling) door to door. Otherwise, you need a team driver or relay concept (usually you carry 2-3 drivers and swap them enroute; you could also do something with depots where you swap out drivers while retaining the vehicle, which I think is done for some high security convoy operations.) That makes the truck vs. rail advantage even greater.
One unintended side effect of automated trucks may be pushing more long-haul freight to rail. Fuel and driver's salary are the biggest expenses in operating a truck -- remove the driver's salary and fuel becomes the dominant expense. Right now, rail is around 4 times more efficient than trucks, so if fuel is your dominant expense, moving to rail makes more sense.
Of course, self-driving trucks could help with truck fuel efficiency by driving at a more fuel-efficient speed, and they may be deemed safe enough to haul more trailers behind a single truck. Though whether or not human drivers (even if their cars drive themselves) will put up with a 4 trailer 40mph truck on the freeway is a different question.
I would expect that anyone who's worked on enterprise software has been to client meetings where ROI is expressed in terms of human resources.
It's part of advancement that certain jobs will no longer be viable for people. People will train for other work instead.
It's not like suddenly, with no warning, 100s of thousands of drivers around the world will need to find new jobs. But in the very long term, fewer drivers will be needed. People who would have, at one time, become drivers, will do other work.
Most people who are taking classes from a professor haven't built enterprise software or been in client meetings. Most of them don't realize that their work while it probably makes life better for young rich white yuppies like them may destroy a way of life for huge swaths of other people for better or for worse. And generally college students haven't been trained to be cold or callous enough to express ROI in terms of human resources quite yet -- I'm sure the slide was gentle preparation for what is to come once they enter the capitalist workforce.
Heh, for auto-driving trucks it very likely will mean suddenly 10's of thousands out of work.
And folks out of work are finding it harder and harder to find word. Automation's ultimate goal is putting us all out of work. We're in a transition, and admitting that will help guide policy from here on.
Its not the case because its unlikely that the technology will be adopted everywhere, simultaneously, overnight; it will be adopted gradually over time; it'll probably first manifest in the job market as a decline in growth in trucking jobs, then a decline in trucking jobs, rather than going from the existing pattern one day to no humans working as truckers the next.
I certainly won't be overnight. But you are assuming current truck drivers will have time to migrate to new jobs as those appear - I really doubt two decades is "gradual" by that measure. Yet, I can not see how it could take that long.
> But you are assuming current truck drivers will have time to migrate to new jobs as those appear
No, and I'm not even assuming that new jobs will appear.
That there will be warning and that there will be much that can be done with the warning are very different ideas; OTOH...
> I really doubt two decades is "gradual" by that measure.
Two decades is enough time for people who are mid- (and often even early, though not quite at the beginning) of a career to retire and not need to worry about a new job, so its potentially gradual enough.
The kids in college don't make the big decisions on how the economy works, so these types of liberal guilt speeches always seemed hollow to me. Sure, maybe someday, but at that point market forces will be calling the shots, not personal preference or pet political activism. If it wasn't for automation, modernity, etc would Mr Professor even have a job? Before various cost savings techniques of the past 40 years, the amount of people who went to college were a much smaller percentage than the amount today. You can't have these enrollment numbers with tiny classrooms and each professor having his own secretary. It just doesn't scale.
Its amusing to think that some people think of themselves as above the economic fray. Sorry, but we're all in this together.
To me, they aren't "liberal guilt speeches", first off, just a recognition of cause and effect.
But the real problem, I think, lies somewhere in your interpretation of of the the goals of pointing such things out. I'm sure "Mr. Professor" is more than capable of recognizing that kids in schools aren't political leaders. "Mr. Professor" is pointing this out, not because they fancy themselves above the economic fray, but precisely because we're all in this together.
That, in fact, is the actual message being conveyed by what you perceive as "liberal guilting".
If you're looking for people who act above the economic fray, a far better source of those sorts of airy pronouncements would be, for instance, David Brooks or Tom Friedman, for whom massive economic dislocation tends to be a "to be sure" or "perhaps" tacked on to the end of a column about how great disruptive innovation is.
He left them up for a about a minute, looked at all of us, said "All of your actions have consequences, some of them unintended." and moved on with the lecture for the day.