(Originally published on LinkedIn in July 2024)
During the same driving license endeavor of mine in Germany, my driving instructor asked me this question – “they will kick me out of business, won’t they?!” I suddenly felt guilty as if I was personally snatching his livelihood right at that moment. “Actually, someone will have to teach the cars how to drive too. That would be you!” I said even though I was quite sure that it wouldn’t be him. It will probably be someone with an administrative position deciding which rules an autonomous car will have to follow and someone with an engineering degree implementing the functionality. But you know what I mean!
It’s a sad and to some extent unavoidable fact that a new technology, any new technology, eats up some jobs. It might create many more new ones but they are rarely ever one-to-one replacements of the jobs that it replaces. And new technologies are an inevitable part of human evolution and progress. So, you can delay them at best but can’t keep them completely out. If you won’t invent or implement it, someone else will. And even if a new technology promises big economic growth and large increments in employment in some sectors (in the future), it almost always replaces some jobs in some other sector in the present. Autonomous car technology, with “driverless” in the name, will be no different. But keep in mind that it will, just like all other technologies, affect different types of jobs differently.
The jobs that are more homogenous and repetitive are replaced by machines much more readily than jobs that are trickier with more unexpected elements and hence a need for “human-like” creative thinking. So, the driving jobs of the first kind, shuttle buses at the airports or taxis on with easy traffic roads are more likely to be replaced by autonomous cars than say grocery shopping (including the driving part and the loading the shopping items in the trunk part), driving on a busy road with all sorts of foot and vehicle traffic or taking a drive on a scenic route and stopping on the side of the road to take a snapshot of the sunset. In the short-term thus, professional taxi or bus drivers might lose jobs to self-driving vehicles. In the short and long term, the autonomous cars will create jobs for designers and testers of those autonomous systems/algorithms, the administrators and legislators who make the laws on autonomous cars, the architects of city and road infrastructure that might include special provisions for autonomous cars (e.g. separate lanes), the data-based post-incident investigators who will play with the blackbox data of these new type of vehicles, and so on.
Additionally, I want to add that whoever thinks that self-driving cars will replace humans, puts too little importance to some very “human” acts like giving the middle finger to the driver of the car in the adjacent lane, throwing an empty coke can on the highway or turning the music to the maximum possible volume with car windows open!