I frown when we look at a technology negatively for the impact on the JOBS out there. Instead, let's take a look at the tech for the benefits it provides the person doing the job, how much it will improve the quality of life and the quality of work, and how much more a worker can accomplish.
Few people realize there is a caveat here too: Driver efficiency goes up and that means drivers can get paid more. The cost of driving goes down and that means more goods can be shipped.
I view this as a key task for societies: Insuring that quick changes due to technological progress (or any other quick changes that are hard for anyone and especially individuals to foresee and plan for, like natural disasters) don’t leave people behind, in destitution or poverty or without any perspective.
If the World’s societies were up to that task more frequently less talk about jobs would be necessary.
Natural disasters are obviously a quite different story (but one where some societies are at least marginally better at supporting people, mostly because everyone accepts that people are just blameless and that makes it somehow easier to help), but technological progress usually benefits some people immensely and frequently has a positive (on average) on society as a whole. (But even that rising tide can leave people behind and leave people behind until they eventually just die of old age. So not a pleasant situation and those people have to be taken care of.)
Because of this it should be no problem to temporarily support those who are left behind. If current assumptions hold that support might even just have to be quite temporary (since beyond a certain point people will just stop wanting to do certain jobs because it’s obvious those have no future), so it’s not like we have that obligation forever.
Obviously, if current assumptions don’t hold (and large segments of the population will be permanently out of a job with no way to really change that, even across longer timeframes) we have to look for alternate solutions, like basic income, but that doesn’t seem too difficult, either. We just have to want it.
Few people realize there is a caveat here too: Driver efficiency goes up and that means drivers can get paid more. The cost of driving goes down and that means more goods can be shipped.