What happens to professional drivers? A quick review of our recent history offers some fairly concerning lessons when we talk about replacing people with machines. The tractor, for instance, has had a devastating effect on rural life, as shown in this mini-documentary on the “most unequal place in America.”

While a whole village was once needed for harvest, today very few people are necessary. With no work to do, that population has been displaced to our nation’s cities, forever impacting the rural life that was once the heart of our nation. Could driverless cars have a similar impact on urban life? If so, where would those displaced workers go? In the words of Wendell Berry in his essay “Money vs. Goods”,

“As the original Luddites saw clearly and rightly, the purpose of industrialism from the first has been to replace human workers with machines. This has been justified and made unquestionable by the axiom that machines, according to standards strictly mechanical, work more efficiently and cheaply than people. … But to replace people by machines is to raise a difficult, and I would say an urgent, question: What are the replaced people to do? Or since this is a question not all replaced people have been able to answer satisfactorily for themselves, What is to be done with or for them? This question has never received an honest answer from either liberals or conservatives, communists or capitalists.”

Considering 84% of taxi drivers in New York City are immigrants, it stands to reason that such advancement in technology will have a disproportionate impact on certain socio-economic demographics. And so it’s not a stretch to think that a technology that eliminates jobs that currently provide an economic pathway for so many people would just further the gap between rich and poor in this country.