“The job is terrible, and the companies know it,” Viscelli told me. “It’s brutal on your family, on your body, on your life.” Viscelli says that turnover at some of these companies is 300 percent, meaning the companies hire three people for one job over the course of a year. (Trucking jobs working for specific brands, such as Budweiser, are much different, he said, because they pay much better and treat their workers as employees, not contractors.)

Celadon spokesman Joe Weigel told me he thinks people entering the industry know what they’re in for. “They understand that it’s not an office job sitting behind a desk and that being a driver can be physically exhausting,” he wrote, in an email. Celadon tries to make drivers more comfortable, by outfitting trucks with comforts like refrigerators and auxiliary power units for controlling cabin temperature. The company, which trains people and then employs them, has a turnover rate of 125 percent, he said.

In not too long, these jobs may be a thing of the past. The White House released a report in December predicting that 1.3 million to 1.7 million heavy and tractor-trailer truck-driving jobs could disappear because of automation. That’s 80 to 100 percent of all truck-driving jobs. Though the White House did not specify over what time period this replacement would take place, some of the technology that will automate truck driving is already in use. In 2015, Daimler received permission to test a self-driving truck, the Freightliner Inspiration, on Nevada roads. A truck from Otto, Uber’s self-driving truck division, delivered cans of Budweiser to Colorado Springs in October. David Alexander, an analyst with Navigant Research, anticipates that most truck companies will gradually introduce automated driving technology in the next five to 10 years.

New jobs will emerge as a result. But they will essentially be in a different field—technology. Autonomous trucks use sensors and a navigation system to drive on the road. They brake independently and use radars and cameras to navigate around other vehicles. Alexander, of Navigant, says that automated trucks will still need people in these trucks, at least at first. But the jobs will be for people who can handle these systems’ on-board computers and fix problems that arise. “It will be less involved with physically driving the truck, and more with monitoring the truck,” he said.

Trucking companies are also experimenting with something called platooning, which is when vehicles use automated driving technology to drive closer to each other than they would with human operators, saving fuel costs and reducing emissions. The trucks talk to each other, slowing down when the lead truck slows down, speeding up when the lead one speeds up, without needing to read brake lights or other signs humans might use. Eventually, one driver in this group of trucks could operate the whole platoon, Alexander said. This driver would need to be more skilled than the drivers who currently operate one truck at a time.