The first driverless car fatality has apparently occurred, which is a sad situation that’s received a great deal of press. Certainly autonomous risks should be investigated and discussed, but since that crash there’ve been numerous road deaths in America in standard vehicles that have received scant attention. Those are the kind of accidents we’re used to and seem acceptable because human hands were involved. No one should think driverless cars won’t malfunction, especially in their early days–they’ll hopefully greatly reduce deaths, not eliminate them.

When this technology arrives, it will likely be great for traffic safety but a huge blow to American Labor as drivers of trucks, taxis and delivery vehicles will be made redundant. What will happen to them and all the businesses they support while on the road? In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Baidu’s Andrew Ng suggested a new New Deal might be the answer. An excerpt:

IS IT TIME TO RETHINK YOUR CAREER?
Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese Internet giant Baidu, on how AI will impact what we do for a living

Truck driving is one of the most common occupations in America today: Millions of men and women make their living moving freight from coast to coast. Very soon, however, all those jobs could disappear. Autonomous vehicles will cover those same routes in a faster, safer and more efficient manner. What company, faced with that choice, would choose expensive, error-prone human drivers?

There’s a historical precedent for this kind of labor upheaval. Before the Industrial Revolution, 90% of Americans worked on farms. The rise of steam power and manufacturing left many out of work, but also created new jobs—and entirely new fields that no one at the time could have imagined. This sea change took place over the course of two centuries; America had time to adjust. Farmers tilled their fields until retirement, while their children went off to school and became electricians, factory foremen, real-estate agents and food chemists.

‘We’re about to face labor displacement of a magnitude we haven’t seen since the 1930s.’
Truck drivers won’t be so lucky. Their jobs, along with millions of others, could soon be obsolete. The age of intelligent machines will see huge numbers of individuals unable to work, unable to earn, unable to pay taxes. Those workers will need to be retrained—or risk being left out in the cold. We could face labor displacement of a magnitude we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal provided relief for massive unemployment and helped kick-start the economy. More important, it helped us transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one. Programs like the Public Works Administration improved our transportation infrastructure by hiring the unemployed to build bridges and new highways. These improvements paved the way for broad adoption of what was then exciting new technology: the car.

We need to update the New Deal for the 21st century and establish a trainee program for the new jobs artificial intelligence will create. We need to retrain truck drivers and office assistants to create data analysts, trip optimizers and other professionals we don’t yet know we need. It would have been impossible for an antebellum farmer to imagine his son becoming an electrician, and it’s impossible to say what new jobs AI will create. But it’s clear that drastic measures are necessary if we want to transition from an industrial society to an age of intelligent machines.•