Many people worry that the development of self-driving technology will put taxi drivers and truck drivers out of work. What often gets missed is that self-driving technology companies are going to create plenty of jobs, too.

Most obviously, high-end jobs will spring up for engineers designing the necessary hardware and software. But there are also going to be jobs for workers further down the income spectrum, doing things like taking customer calls, cleaning and repairing cars, and updating the high-definition maps that cars use to move around.

Take Waymo, for example. The Google spinoff plans to launch a driverless taxi service in the Phoenix area before the end of the year. On Tuesday, the company offered a look inside its operations center in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler.

The center is home to dozens of self-driving cars that are being used to offer rides to participants in Waymo's early rider program. Waymo's blog post described several of the major job categories Waymo has created to staff its service.

Waymo is going to need a lot of workers

In its Tuesday Medium post, Waymo described four jobs that are essential to the operation of its self-driving car service in the Phoenix area.

Waymo is hiring technicians responsible for performing vehicle inspections and repairs. Partly, the technicians will be doing the work of a conventional mechanic, things like "brake systems, oil-change intervals, tire replacement/wear indicators." But they will also need to perform more high-tech tasks like running Linux scripts and troubleshooting Waymo's proprietary lidar sensors.

The company has a team of dispatchers that handles the logistics of making sure there are enough vehicles on the road, in the right places, to meet customer needs. Dispatchers are expected to "work cross-functionally with various teams" to maintain Waymo's fleet, according to a job listing.

Waymo also has a fleet response team that helps guide self-driving cars through tricky situations. "If one of our vehicles detects that a road is blocked up ahead, it may come to a stop and request confirmation from our fleet response team before plotting an alternate route," Waymo writes in its Medium post.

Finally, Waymo has customer service representatives who field calls from passengers. Riders can push a button inside a Waymo vehicle at any time to connect directly to one of these representatives.

We can also expect Waymo's growth to create jobs through its partnership with rental car company Avis, which was announced last year. We don't know exactly how the two companies will divide the work of managing Waymo's fleet, but it's a good guess that Avis will handle routine tasks like cleaning cars and changing their oil. (Yes, if someone pukes in a Waymo, there will be someone back at the depot to clean up the mess.) And Avis will need to hire a bunch of people in the Phoenix area to complete these tasks.

And while Waymo hasn't supplied full details, there's good reason to believe that Waymo has no shortage of people helping its software understand and label the detailed three-dimensional maps Waymo vehicles use to get around. The process of making these maps is labor-intensive—though unlike the other jobs I've discussed so far, many of these jobs may be outsourced to low-wage countries like India and China.

When labor-saving technologies create new jobs

Of course, you might object that these aren't really new jobs. Waymo's technician jobs are largely replacing the work of conventional mechanics. Waymo's dispatchers and fleet response team are doing roughly the same kind of work that traditional taxi dispatchers did. So you could see Waymo as just a new taxi service that has the same jobs that a conventional taxi service has but with no drivers.

What this point of view misses, however, is that the demand for taxi service isn't static. Taxis account for a tiny fraction of vehicle traffic nationwide—even if you include new services like Uber and Lyft. A big reason for this is that they're expensive and—outside of a few urban areas—not very convenient.

But drivers account for the majority of the cost of a taxi fare. So as self-driving technology matures, we can expect it to cost half—or possibly even less—than a conventional taxicab. Self-driving cars also won't mind coming to your house a few minutes early and waiting until you're ready to leave.

In short, by making taxis cheaper and more convenient, companies like Waymo are likely to expand the taxi market significantly. Which means that, even if the amount of labor required per ride goes down substantially, the total number of jobs might go down by much less. If driverless taxi services become popular enough, total employment could even rise.

Something similar has happened in the past. A few years ago, economist James Bessen documented a similar phenomenon following the invention of automatic teller machines. ATMs experienced their most rapid growth during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. During this same period, the number of bank tellers actually increased.

"ATMs did not eliminate tellers," Bessen wrote in 2015. "Instead, because banks could operate branch offices with fewer tellers, they opened more offices and the total number of tellers grew."

It's possible that banks would have hired even more tellers without the invention of ATMs, of course. But anyone who predicted in the 1980s that ATMs would cost most of the nation's bank tellers their jobs would have been wrong.

Autonomous deliveries could create jobs, too

I've focused on self-driving taxis because that's the service Waymo expects to launch first. But the replacement of truck drivers with autonomous trucks would actually be more significant, economically speaking. There are only about 300,000 taxi, limo, and ride-hail drivers in the United States, compared with 1.7 million heavy truck drivers and 900,000 delivery truck drivers.

But here, too, the effects on employment aren't so clear-cut. The rise of self-driving delivery vehicles is likely to give rise to a significant shift from conventional retail stores to delivery services. And while an autonomous delivery service doesn't need drivers, it's likely to need plenty of other people to make it work.

Amazon is already one of the nation's largest employers, with 554,000 employees. That includes engineers as well as workers at Amazon-owned Whole Foods. But a hefty chunk of them are often low-wage jobs in Amazon warehouses, where people pull products off shelves and pack them into boxes for shipment to customers.

"The brick-and-mortar retail swoon has been accompanied by a less headline-grabbing e-commerce boom that has created more jobs in the US than traditional stores have cut," as The Wall Street Journal put it last year.

Even more jobs have been created with the rise of on-demand delivery services in the last few years. The consulting firm AlixPartners told CNBC earlier this year that more than a million people are employed in the on-demand delivery sector.

Of course, many of those jobs are for delivery drivers, so you might expect autonomous vehicles to reverse those job gains. But at the same time, the lower cost and greater convenience of autonomous deliveries is likely to make these services much more popular—creating additional jobs building and maintaining vehicles, loading products into the vehicles, and handling customer calls and returns. With delivery times measured in hours rather than days, it will be far more tempting for people to let a robot deliver stuff to their houses instead of driving to the store.

This year we're starting to see major companies like Kroger begin to offer local, same-day deliveries of groceries and other products using autonomous vehicles. The delivery vehicles won't have drivers (at least after an initial testing period), but someone is going to need to walk through the grocery store and pick out the food the customer ordered. And we're nowhere close to automating that job.

Similarly, while trucks may be able to drive themselves a decade from now, someone is still going to be needed to load and unload trucks at each stop. Right now, this is often considered the job of the truck driver, which means, in the short run, we might see an abundance of self-driving trucks with a human being on board to handle the details of delivery at each stop. Eventually, we're likely to see a shift to business models in which factories, stores, and other delivery sites need to have more people on hand to handle deliveries as they come in from fully automated vehicles.

The overall effect on employment is hard to predict. The fact that bank-teller jobs continued rising during the ATM boom obviously doesn't prove that new technologies never cause net job losses. But history makes clear that major new technologies like self-driving cars create a lot of new jobs even as they destroy a lot of others. And as companies get ready to launch commercial products, we are starting to see what some of those jobs will look like.