How Will Autonomous Driving Disrupt Workers?

Driverless vehicles are the automotive industry’s response to autonomous technology innovation. Autonomous driving has emerged as a culture-shifting intervention, and it is destined to change the way mobility is perceived and the way that motorists navigate streets.

How will the introduction and diffusion of autonomous vehicles (AVs) affect workers? Will dystopian forecasts in which mass job losses, cheap labor, and increased corporate control take place become reality? How much will AVs generate labor market disruption and employability-related social exclusion?

Throughout the post-industrial era, socio-technological restructurings have had implications for the working world. Automation, in general, changed employment through job destruction, newly defined working requirements and flexibility, and standardization. Clearly, similar anticipated changes inherent within autonomous driving, even with associated benefits, may cause many people to be disconcerted –  especially due to the employment disruptions that AVs could convey.

Technological Change & Social Consequences

Substantial disruption can lead to the rise of new opportunities. Historically, technological developments have generated jobs in the long term, but, in the short-term, they have been perceived as creative destructions and force change.  Technological variations can cause anxiety, particularly in times of upheavals in core technology, such as the period in which we live. The effects of contemporary automation on job destruction, disparate requirements from workers, the reconfiguration of the workday, and the development of digital work conditions signal doom-and-gloom for many people as they look ahead to autonomous driving.

The interconnection and synchronization of radar and ultrasonic sensors and optical cameras allow completely autonomous driving. Automated vehicles could replace corporate fleets for deliveries or transporting employees, which would allow workers to be more productive. By 2035, 75% of the total global light-duty-vehicles sales will refer to self-driving vehicles. Innovations in this field are also poised to completely change the car insurance industry by reducing accidents — experts predict that accidents will drop by 80% by 2040.

The metamorphosis is upon us. Just this week, Tesla announced that its Full Self Driving package would rise from $10,000 to $12,000. Mobileye/Intel and NVIDIA are expected to have major announcements in 2022 about autonomous driving advancements. People in the know have been waiting with bated breath for Waymo’s autonomous driving launch in New York City.

What Effects Will Autonomous Driving Have on Workers?

The Upjohn Institute for Employment Research describes how the transition to self-driving vehicles will change many lives and livelihoods, likely for the better for the vast majority. Indeed, the economic benefits of AVs have been estimated at $800 billion to $1 trillion per year. The promise of AVs includes cheaper and more efficient transportation, dramatic reduction in deaths and injuries from accidents, greater mobility for those who can’t drive, and freedom from tedium for those who can.

Yet, of course, autonomous driving trends will be costly for some people, especially workers in legacy industries. Employment disruptions are projected to start in large numbers after 2030 and will be gradual — about 100,000 jobs disrupted per year, or 0.1% of the work force, at the time of peak impact.

How much in earnings would displaced workers lose? Each laid-off worker would likely lose on average about $80,000 in lifetime income due to the autonomous driving disruption, for a total loss of about $180 billion for US workers. These adjustments take into account the probable age of workers being dislocated; on average these workers would have about 16 years of labor force participation left in their careers.

What will happen to the majority of the displaced workers? Most of the affected workers will eventually find new jobs or retire.

What new jobs will emerge with the advent of autonomous driving? Three general categories of jobs will result: growth in overall transportation, new labor inputs for the AV sector, and increased purchases of other goods and services by consumers who spend less on transportation.

What policies could smooth the transition to autonomous driving and worker stability? AV employers and stakeholders with US workforce development system will need to communicate in order to educate members of the workforce system about upcoming challenges and opportunities. They’ll have to connect affected employers with local workforce system agencies and help identify the best means to monitor labor market impacts of AVs. Efforts to design new jobs created by AVs should take advantage of the skills that people in the disrupted occupations already have.

What kind of research needs to be conducted to informing mitigation efforts for AV and future innovations? Key research topics could include measuring the impact of AVs on commuting times for employees, estimating the impact of a driving requirement on occupational wages, the potential of AVs to open more jobs to people with disabilities that prevent them from driving, and understanding the impact on workers and others of AV-induced changes in land use and vehicle miles traveled.

AV Fear Extends beyond the Automotive Sector

Deere & Company recently unveiled a transformative, fully autonomous tractor. Wired reports that the 8R tractor uses 6 pairs of stereo cameras and advanced artificial intelligence to perceive its environment and navigate. It can find its way to a field on its own when given a route and coordinates, then plow the soil or sow seeds without instructions, avoiding obstacles as it goes. A farmer can give the machine new orders using a smartphone app.

The shift is significant for the agriculture industry, as self-driving tractors could help save farmers money and automate work that is threatened by an ongoing agricultural labor shortage. The fully autonomous 8R relies on neural network algorithms to make sense of the information streaming into its cameras. Deere has been collecting and annotating the data needed to train these algorithms for several years.

Farming automation, like autonomous driving, is stirring debate around replacing workers as well as ownership and use of the data it generates. Tesla is an example of a vehicle company that gathers data that is used to hone its self-driving system. The self-driving car depends on self-learning algorithms, which have to undergo much supervised training. This requires vast amounts of manual labor, performed by crowdworkers across the globe.

Employees within future transportation industries will need to be IT-literate, better informed and knowledgeable about AVs, and develop higher communication and interpersonal skills. Together, these attributes will allow them to work in areas linked with innovation, critical thinking, creativity, and non-repetition. Standarized and repetitive low-skill transport employment will not translate well in the era of automated mobility.

Indeed, a 2021 research study indicates that low-skilled staff, non-transport professionals, younger individuals, and people uninformed about AVs feel, more than other respondents, that AVs might cause massive redundancies in the industry. Those intuitions should pose as warnings to these individuals to grasp onto opportunities for new education, training, and internships to prepare for the inevitability of autonomous driving.