There are a lot of unknowns here. The factors putting downward pressure on trucker salaries are:

- Remote operation of trucks is an easier lifestyle, so more people would be willing to take the job, driving down salaries

- Fewer human truckers are needed per truck on the road, so for a given level of trucking activity, fewer jobs exist

Some potential countervailing factors:

- Price of trucking plummets, potentially jacking up demand (Jevons Paradox) depending on price elasticity of truck transportation

- Managing multiple vehicles may end up being more cognitively challenging than driving a single truck, reducing the pool of available workers and driving up salaries

The values of these parameters (and how they change over time) will be crucial to determining the net impact to trucker salaries and employment numbers. My intuition is that salaries will go down dramatically, employment numbers will go down modestly, and overall trucking activity will expand.

> Managing multiple vehicles may end up being more cognitively challenging than driving a single truck, reducing the pool of available workers and driving up salaries

Tangential to this point: If this mode of truck operation becomes prevalent, I could potentially see a path where warehouses/loading docks get employees certified (a la forklift truck certifications) to operate the truck on premises to handle the "last mile" (i.e. on-site) operations. Now you've completely decimated the number of trucker jobs.

I think you're drastically underestimating the difficulty involved in manuevering an eighteen wheeler around the premises of a typical business. There's no way it would be cost effective to train people for that so that they can spend most of their time doing something else.

The wages aren't "lost", the "saved" money will still be paid to somebody to do something.

They're lost to those who would have earned them.

Typically the gains would be shared through lower prices to customers and higher profits. Lower costs might also increase demand for services and goods, growing the industry and increasing employment elsewhere in companies, though that latter is likely to be a relatively small effect.

Its not about lower costs or growing the industry.

If we save $1 billion dollars in automating one industry, we are just going to spend that $1 billion dollars elsewhere, growing some other industry.

That's right, it frees up $1bn for other uses. This is why automation, ever since the industrial revolution, hasn't lead to persistent mass unemployment. The capital freed up by more efficient industry was used to create new industries and jobs that didn't even exist before. There have been some painful adjustments, but the more flexible an economy is the more rapidly it adjusts. Historically this has been a US strength.

Profits kept by shareholders.

and spent by them as well.

Rich people spend much less of their money on stuff than poor people do. Another thousand to a millionaire goes on the pile. Another thousand to a single mom goes on kids' shoes and car repairs.

Shareholders aren’t all ‘rich people’ - pension funds, insurance funds, and regular old retiremt funds all hold a lot of stock.

People who have no hope of ever retiring from their low wage job that they live in fear of losing to automation might count anyone with a pension plan/retirement fund access (and even insurance) as rich.

Nobody throws their money into a pile.

Rich people predominantly invest their money which is still paying people to perform work, just like repairing shoes and cars.

Yes. They invest it. Not spend it as you claimed above.

And while both keep money moving, they have very different effects on the spender/investor.

Yes, "spent" was the wrong word.

All I'm saying is that the money will be moving, and still providing employment.

Maybe. Depends on tax law at the time. Going to need social safety net money, we might as well tax automation.

Our tax code needs reform, but taxing gains in productivity is a perverse incentive.

> but taxing gains in productivity is a perverse incentive.

Not at all. The end goal should not be productivity onto itself. If those gains are being scooped up by a sliver of the population, we change the rules to benefit all. One person, one vote.

As automation automates away more jobs, the cohort of people without jobs grows, forcing regulations (through democracy) to change to move towards a citizen's dividend funded by a tax on automation. The system will reach equilibrium, or there will be a revolution.

If you don't want your automation lifting the tide of all boats, someone else will come along and build it.

That mindset only works without the reality of globalization.

Events like Brexit and Donald Trump are only the start. If economic conditions gets worse for the disadvantaged, it gets worse for everyone.

Clearly, democracy can override your usual globalization proponents (see: "Okay, The Trans Pacific Partnership Is Dead. What was it?" | https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/2...)

Spent by them in other countries, where they patriotically only spend it locally.

That’s the problem of the modern globalized world, all the profits end up spent in the US.