The trucking industry has a driver problem. The job pays well and doesn’t require a college degree, but the long hours and lonely stretches on the road make it a tough way of life. That's why the long haul trucking market sees an annual labor turnover rate of more than 90 percent, according to Bob Costello, chief economist at the American Trucking Association. The industry estimates it will need to hire a total of 890,000 new truck drivers over the next decade.

The driver shortage is a problem for everyone, because trucking's crucial to the American economy. Two thirds of freight in the US is hauled by truckers, accounting for $54.8 billion worth of imported and exported goods in 2015.

And the coming age of autonomous vehicles won't solve this problem—at least not anytime soon—but it could fundamentally change what it means to be a human truck driver.

This being the 21st century, there are robots getting ready to fill our seats behind the wheel. Daimler, for one, is testing a truck that drives itself on the highway in Germany and Nevada.

This month, a convoy of semi-autonomous trucks drove 1,200 miles across Europe. Someday, those projects won't just fix the labor problem, they'll make trucking safer—semis were involved in crashes that killed 4,000 people in the US in 2012—and more efficient—these things guzzle more than 25 percent of the fuel burned each year.

But when robotic trucks do take to American highways, they'll almost certainly still have humans behind the wheel. That's partly because the technology needed to let vehicles handle any situation without human help isn't ready yet, but also because it's easy to imagine the public freaking out over the idea of 40-ton robots rolling past them at highway speeds. The likeliest setup is a human driver who starts the truck, drives it onto the highway, then lets the computer do its thing.

“We don’t want to get rid of drivers,” Sven Ennerst, Daimler Trucks’ head of development said last year. “We want to make their lives more efficient and more easy.” More efficient, sure. Easier, probably. But more pleasant? Maybe not.

Since humans drivers will one day go hours without touching the wheel or pedals, Daimler says they could handle things like paperwork, scheduling, and routing while on the road. But that work can't possibly fill up all their newly free time.

Drivers could find themselves handling customer service calls for Postmates, transcribing depositions, or Mechanical Turk-ing for Amazon.

The question, then, is what drivers can do when their hands and minds aren't needed for driving. “Automation reduces the opportunity costs for drivers and their companies by allowing them to legally and more consistently multi-task,” says Dan Siciliano, a law professor specializing in corporate governance and robotics at Stanford University.

“In-cab time could be dedicated to higher skill activities, as opposed to just driving,” Siciliano says. You can see the traditionally blue collar truck driver "ultimately having more of a back office white collar profile." Depending on how trucking companies monetize (or allow employees to monetize) that look-Ma-no-hands time, autonomous trucking could demand a new kind of driver: someone who can back up a big rig and wield a keyboard.

In 10 years, the next great American novel might be written behind the wheel of a robo-truck. Or, more likely, drivers could find themselves handling customer service calls for Postmates, transcribing depositions, or Mechanical Turk-ing for Amazon.

Today's truckers, though, don't seem too concerned. Teamsters spokesperson Galen Munroe says that for now, concerns around self-driving trucks and labor “are just too far in the future to speculate.” He notes that, even if the technology is there, both the regulatory issues and the infrastructure upgrades required for semi-autonomous rigs to actually be implemented in the US won't be figured out anytime soon.

He's likely right, but even so, brushing up on some coding skills to go with that commercial driver's license is probably a good idea.