Volvo recently announced the release of its first autonomous, fully electric truck, and whilst the release was only into a test environment, it nonetheless prompted many to repeat the death knell for the driving profession around the world.

The Volvo test will be undertaken in partnership with shipping firm DFDS, and will see the autonomous truck transport goods from a logistics center to Gothenburg port.  With Volvo planning to expand their fleet of autonomous vehicles, it’s part of a trend in which they believe that driving, especially for short distances, will become a thing of the past.

It’s not a future shared by researchers Maury Gittleman and Kristen Monaco, who argue in a recently published paper that the potential job loss from automation is likely to be much lower than widely predicted.

Job losses

They believe that the predictions of millions of job losses are over-inflated for a number of reasons, including a misunderstanding of the occupational classification of the role in federal statistics, an underestimation of exactly what tasks drivers perform (and the ability of technology to perform these non-driving tasks), and the difficulty of automating certain segments of trucking.

The authors believe the difficulties inherent in automating various parts of the trucking process have especially been glossed over.  While they are in no doubt that vehicles such as Volvo’s will change how goods travel through the logistics system, it’s far from straightforward to automate all aspects of trucking.

For instance, long-haul trucking, which is currently a relative minority of the jobs, will be much easier to automate than short-haul trucking, which is where the bulk of the jobs are.  They also believe that far more attention is needed to the breadth of tasks currently performed by drivers to fully appreciate the nature of their work before proclamations of their demise are repeated.