Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, who founded the company in 2016 with Kartik Tiwari, said, “We think that sometime towards the end of the year, we could be doing this run without a person behind the wheel.”
And if it’s not his company, it might be Otto, whose truck made headlines last October by driving itself across Colorado to deliver a shipment of beer. Otto is owned by Uber, which also has been testing self-driving taxis in Pennsylvania and Arizona.
But here’s the thing! Once our trucks and taxis drive themselves, what will happen to the people who used to do those jobs? In the U.S., that’s 180,000 taxi drivers, 600,000 Uber drivers, and 3.5 million truck drivers. “We really need to start to think very seriously about this,” said Martin Ford, author of the book “Rise of the Robots” (Basic Books).
Later this year, shoppers in Seattle will be able to walk into the first Amazon Go grocery, take what they want, and walk out again, without ever encountering an employee. Sensors will detect what you take and bill you automatically. “The cashiers are totally gone,” Ford said. “You’re going to end up with the equivalent of a Walmart with a handful of employees. You scale that out, and that’s just extraordinarily disruptive.”
The common wisdom is that robots primarily threaten repetitive, blue-collar jobs. Not so, says Martin Ford: “We’re seeing dramatic advances in the area of computers analyzing tumors, recognizing medical scans, mammograms, and being able to find disease We’re seeing algorithms move into areas like journalism, for example.”
Algorithms are even threatening the Masters of the Universe. Two weeks ago, Black Rock, the world’s largest money manager, announced that it’s laying off dozens of human stock pickers and replacing them with robots. By 2025, across the financial industry, artificial intelligence is expected to replace 230,000 human workers.
“Bring on the disruption that is automation,” said Elisha Wiesel, the chief information officer at Goldman Sachs. The company now hires nearly as many computer engineers as financial workers.
All right, we get it; no job is safe. According to a recent study, 47 percent of American jobs could be lost to automation in the next 20 years. Ford says it’s time to start thinking about what we’re going to live on, in the post-robot economy. One of the best ideas out there, says Ford, is a universal basic income, or a guaranteed minimum income. “This is where everybody gets, let’s say, $10,000 a year just for being alive?” Pogue asked.
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