Robocars - Autonomous Drive, Self-driving, Driver-less cars

Yes, that's the greatest unsolved problem of robotisation (apart from all the other unsolved problems).

My main worry is that, while rail is by far and away the best way of transporting freight overland, if even salary costs fall away for driving (which I realise is some way off yet, but still), I think rail is going to be undermined even further.

Yet another nail in the coffin of being a professional driver. What are these people going to do instead?

This has been the general tone of discussion throughout history. When the technological shift did not sync with periods of general prosperity or when a privledged group feels its losses out one sees a backlash-- including riots, revolt and even war. In the wake, for example, of the industrial revolution, there were a large number of bloody revolts. The Luddites, Canut revolts, Swing riots, Weavers revolt,.. Cork makers, porcelain, texile, farmers,.. The continuing microelectronic, IoT and AI revolution won't be any different..

I see this sort of thing getting asked a lot about automation and it makes me think about what I'm doing at the moment.

I'm sat here with six active programmes running in my PC's taskbar. I move information between them on three seperate levels. I write strings of text to tell one application to change one piece of information into another. I press buttons that tell cause messages to pop up on the PC of people I only know by email addresses to pay money to a company. I do this and hundreds of other similar tasks on a daily basis.

Computers were heralded as the death of the office worker and yet I suspect that there are more office workers than there were 40 years ago when the portents of clerical doom were sounded. Even in my own job right now, I've increased automation of systems but don't yet seem to be able to run out of work to do. There's always some kind of clerical and/or administrative tasks that seem essential even since we did away with endless hallways filled with files and ledgers and records and casebooks and...

If we look at the industries that have died, such as coal mining, we can see how they are anachronistic and redundant in modern life. Moving things from A-B? It's an industry as old as civilisation. Ships gave way to ocean liners and the people who would have been sailors aren't out there wondering what to do. Horse and cart gave way to professional motor vehicle drivers but those would be drovers and drivers aren't sat by the side of the road twiddling their thumbs in despair.

Automation has changed virtually every industry in the world. With each additional step, jobs and positions become redundant and yet, there hasn't been a correlative increase in permanent unemployment. Your inability to imagine how both the industry and others around it will change doesn't mean it won't happen. History teaches us it always does.

Of course that doesn't mean there won't be some casualties in this particular bit of progress, there usually are. Hopefully this time we'll use the lessons we've should already have learned from the past to mitigate this. However, if you're alive today and comsuming virtually anything, you've contributed to the devastation of one livelihood or another.

Should we seek to preserve professional driving from the march of change that you've benefited from in so many other ways? Is it such a special industry that it deserves attention not afforded to others? Or should be take this opportunity to get ahead of the game and find ways to prevent people being tossed on some employment scrap heap? Again, the lessons of history are that attempting to preserve a profession against the challenges of automation is a forlorn endeavour that almost always results in failure.