Autonomous Trucking and the Truckers – The American Spectator

“Are you joking? In a second.”

That was Tucker Carlson’s response to Ben Shapiro way back in 2018 when asked if he would ban autonomous trucks if granted the power.

Autonomous trucking, once derided as “always five years away,” is now here. In April, the freight company Aurora completed construction on an autonomous truck terminal outside of Dallas. This fall it will finish an analogous facility outside of Houston and, in 2024, driverless freight runs between the two hubs will commence. For those taking the Carlsonian view, this technology’s arrival marks a dark social turn. Good jobs for normal men will disappear. Families will fray. Communities will be made worse off.

The standard free-market response is that, actually, creative destruction is good; that jobs may disappear, but others will emerge; and that we’re all made richer when technology improves efficiency. Those economic arguments are sound, but embracing autonomous truck driving doesn’t depend solely on adherence to market principles. Even thinking from Tucker’s own premises, emphasizing worker welfare, autonomous trucks make sense.

The worker’s case against autonomous trucking begins with a kernel of truth. It is accurate that long-haul truck driving is a relatively well-paid occupation for men who did not to go to college. We could attribute this to the acquired skill required to handle a 50,000-lb load of freight. That’s a big part of it. But the other part is that the job is almost perfectly designed to destroy a man’s wellbeing — and it takes handsome compensation to keep him in it.

The majority of a long-haul driver’s time on the clock is spent in a seat. Aside from the bookends that might involve some loading and unloading, truck driving is sedentary. Like all sedentary lifestyles, it is at odds with our nature and our needs. We evolved to stride on the plains and scan the horizon, not to sit in a fast-moving chair and stare at taillights. A lack of regular movement weakens the cardiorespiratory apparatus and saps the body’s most crucial power system, the posterior chain. (READ MORE: Unheeded Lessons From the Buffalo Blizzard)

Making matters worse is the trucker diet. There might be a square meal at a diner from time to time, but the incentive to get back on the road quickly means seed-oil-laden foods of convenience usually win out.

Perhaps most deleterious of all is the toll it takes on a driver’s sleep. Driving overnight disrupts melatonin production, throws cortisol levels out of whack, harms glucose regulation, and sends testosterone levels plummeting. Despite the masculine-coding of the long-haul truck, sitting too much, eating too poorly, and sleeping too little does not beget vitality.

Truckers themselves understand this. “You know what it does to you,” Stephen Graves, a driver for American Central Transport, told journalist Peter Goodman last year. “You’re thinking about it all the time. We’re tired. Our bodies are starting to go. Our bladders have been put to the test. And no exercise. We end up with all types of heart and other health ailments. You can’t truly fathom what it’s done to you.” On top of it all are the hazards of the road. Truck drivers are 10x more likely to die on the job than the average worker.

From the standpoint of family stability, the case for long-haul truck driving doesn’t look much better. While long-haul truck driving might pay the bills, it keeps dad away from home for weeks on end. Some estimates indicate the divorce rate for truckers is the second-highest of any occupation. It’s difficult to build a strong family structure, let alone to serve community purposes, without being physically present. For men who have yet to form families, driving doesn’t improve the prospects of doing so. The isolation long-haul trucking imposes is associated with psychological suffering, myth of the open road notwithstanding. It is unsurprising, given these personal costs, that long-haul truck driving commands a wage premium.

Amid national crises of chronic illness, loneliness, family breakdown, and deaths of despair automating the isolated, long-haul portions of freight journeys could be a salve. And that’s where the economic points come in. As is the case across many industries, artificial intelligence — and that’s fundamentally what autonomous trucks are utilizing — is altering what it means to do a particular job. AI is going to disaggregate the bundle of activities that makes up my own job and the bundle that makes up the job of a truck driver. While the prospects for writers like me are dicey since so much of what we do could be exceeded by AI capabilities soon, truck drivers do a lot of things that AI can’t, particularly at the start and finish of a freight journey — things like navigating back alleys, talking to customers, and moving goods off the truck and into irregular spaces.

What AI will soon be able to do at parity with human drivers, however, is keep a truck humming along at 65mph on a limited-access highway. But, as I discuss in my recent report for the Manhattan Institute on autonomous driving, these new systems are expensive, and a long period of industry competition is ahead of us in which some companies will add the new technology at a faster clip than others. We’re probably facing a driver shortage (in other words, the job will remain relatively well-paid) for many years yet. Some driving demand will be met by autonomous trucks. That’s what is happening in Texas with Aurora’s autonomous roll-out. But men will sit behind the wheel of big rigs for decades to come. (READ MORE: Biden Tanks U.S. Energy Economy)

In the long run it may be the case that autonomous driving systems can deliver freight more efficiently, safely, and affordably across the board. In aggregate, that’s going to boost economic activity, creating more opportunities for men to work in the freight industry, but without having to ride in the cab, degrade their bodies, or leave their families for days on end. While the long-haul portion of the job commands a premium today, the catalyzing effect that a more efficient freight industry could have throughout our economy promises to generate new career types for men who might have otherwise entered the long-haul profession. That’s a good thing. Long-haul trucking is a tough job, but someday no one will have to do it.