Over 3 million Americans work as truck drivers, 94% male, average age 49, average education high school or one year of college. Additionally, there are hundreds of communities and over 7 million workers who provide services to truck drivers, including working at truck stops, loading/unloading freight, and servicing the vehicles.

Self-driving truck technology is rapidly becoming sophisticated enough to replace these drivers. Morgan Stanley has projected that autonomous freight will save $168 billion per year. With this amount of money on the table, firms have a huge incentive to deploy autonomous trucks as soon as possible and displace the millions of Americans who drive trucks or support drivers for a living. Uber alone is going ahead with its plans to hire 2,000 employees into Uber Freight, Uber’s foray into building a national trucking network prime for automation.

As fewer truck drivers are on the road, fewer support workers will be needed, as well. Truck stops will close down as fewer drivers stop along their routes, replaced by self-driving trucks that never have to sleep. The autonomous truck firm Embark raised $70 million in September 2019 to build transit hubs: highway adjacent facilities where robot trucks load and unload cargo. And robot trucks will likely require service less frequently than those driven by human drivers, decreasing the need for work in that area.

The economy is not prepared to absorb the loss of so many jobs.

Some estimates have the mass production of these vehicles as occurring within the decade. This has potential for serious unrest if not handled properly. We need to implement a plan for how to handle this transition, and we have to do it soon.