And about your Foxconn example: if you look here [1] you will see why they were able to do that. Notice the vast disparity in employee numbers between them and, for example, Samsung. It is likely that Foxconn is far behind the industry when it comes to automation (probably due to access to cheap Chinese labor), and when you're behind, it's easy to make such big leaps.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...
from wikipedia, there were working industrial steam engines in 1712. The railway system in the US was started in about 1827 (over a hundred years later), and completed around 1900, about two hundred years after the technology was introduced it was useable by business owners and passengers.
Edison showed the first working electric light in 1878, it seems most people had electricity of some kind by the 1930's.
We could say personal computers were invented sometime in the 1970s, and maybe by today-ish the majority of people in the US have a computer of some kind (though that may be becoming more smartphones than computers)
I would say theres a pretty distinct trend of technology getting adapted more quickly at scale over time.
Do you honestly think the market capture rate of self driving trucks will be similar to that of steam powered engines and boats?
In 1800, with steam power, the compression rate was enormous. And sudden. The population of humanity was fewer than a billion. It implied massive misery in coal mines and factories, which hasn't disappeared much, and a greater low-to-high income ratio, yes, but it also implied an easier life for a greater part of humanity.
I think people are underestimating how many new jobs could be created. Driverless trucks would give rise companies selling fleet tracking software, integrated inventory management software, and automated vehicle servicing applications. Imagine hundreds of such companies, employing engineers, sales people, marketers, customer success guys and you have a world where you think - "Did we really have humans to do that?"
What you seem to miss is that someone who was working as a truck driver has little chances to successfully transition to being an engineer, sales people, etc.
Industrialization did destroy jobs, but replaced these with jobs that did not require advanced education. So becoming an assembly line worker could be a reasonable goal for someone who had been raised as a farmer, for example (result: lots of people transitioned from farming to industry, while industry was at he same time producing better tools for farmers reducing the need for a human workers in the fields).
If 2 robots can replace 10 people working at garbage collection/disposal, how many of them will become sw developers to improve/mantain the 2 robots?
It will take as much time as factories can produce 100's of millions self-drive retro-fit kits, or alternatively, the average write-off time of a truck, say 5 years? Because 95% of companies that don't start transitioning to self-driving the day after it becomes available on the general market, will not be able to compete within the year or 2 after.
"I think people are underestimating how many new jobs could be created."
A company providing a fully automated solution for all of that is, what, 300-500 people? So let's say there would be 10 of those (which is too many, consolidation and all). Let's say that we round that up (double) to 10000, and then say we're off by a factor of 10. That's 100k, vs 3.5 million jobs now (counting just truckers, and just in the US, so not even counting all 'associated' jobs).
This whole 'but there will be new jobs' thing doesn't stand up to even the tiniest bit of math, even with very generous assumptions. And that's not even considering the nature of those new jobs. Someone who is a truck driver now, isn't going to be a software engineer, or even a sales guy. There are going to be vast portions of the population who will not be qualified to do any of the jobs that the automated ones will generate.
I don't know the solution, and I don't think UBI is it, but what I do know is that the commercial availability of self-driving cars will hit the labor market like a Mack truck (pardon the pun).
Replacing truckers with highly reliable and automated transport, would only increase the size of the industry and volume of goods transported would multiply . Analysing what are the exact jobs that would replace these truckers is flawed. There is so much interdependence in industries and technology is changing at so many points that you have to assume there would different kinds of work that would be created. I can guess that, with more goods transported, there would be more humans needed to transport it to their destination.
Of course, there could be flaw in my argument that there is an upper limit on products we can create that need transportation but I am assuming this won't be a case for a long time.
You just gave a very good example right there of a potential for new jobs but you overlooked it:
Employing former truckers as guards for self-driving truckers to protect them and their cargo from vandals and protesters.
Until self-driving vehicles also become self-defending, humans will still have to sit in the automatic trucks. They'll still need places to grab food from along the way, and so on.
Providing jobs for, literally, hundreds of people!
All those companies exist today and large trucking operations already use software for fleet tracking, routing, inventory management etc. So while these software companies might sell more software and might have to hire a few more people to add the features needed for handling an automated truck fleet, it's not like it's a whole new industry being created.
Yes, fleet tracking software already exists but don't think that it can grow only till we scale it to certain level and add some extra features. There will be myriad of possibilities when this data is easy to access. Currently, it is limited to only those companies who can procure the GPS devices, and install it for their customers which translated to high barrier to entry and CAC costs.
And now the main thing to keep in mind that this will happening across work domains and technologies. A truck driver can't go on and switch career to a factory worker because those jobs are gone too!
In the future more and more of these laboros grunt jobs will become automated. Just a while ago there was news how Foxconn cut 60k jobs at a single factory through automation.
And this is the right way to go. Why should any human or sentient being be forced to work a boring mundane job in some factory when machines can do it? The only goal for the human race as a whole should be the liberation of people from back breaking labor. The only question is now, how will our societies react to this forthcoming change in the system. One way or another this change will come and if we're not prepared it will turn into dystopia everywhere with masses of the people sidelined out of jobs which means without means to support themselves or their families. Crime, poverty and massive slum cities are the only way this can turn out. Not to mention that since the consumer base is gone the whole world economy will simply collapse.