If you are a driver for a living are you worried?

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CommercialAdvisor712@reddit

I am a delivery driver, but had a moment of pure clarity yesterday and do not plan on doing it much longer, The pay is shockingly bad and only benefit is flexibility, which you don't really get as you need to work longer (at least 8 hours a day and 7 days a week) to earn enough to pay the expenses (fuel at 20p per mile driven for less than £1 per mile earned on a delivery, car servicing and tyres and repairs, car insurance at £2000 per year).

The short journeys are starting to be replaced by flying drones and ground based robots in some test areas. The long journeys are not worth doing as they can pay £7 for a 10 mile drive to the middle of nowhere in the countryside, where you would then have an unpaid 8 mile drive back to where all the shops and restaurants are.

The UK tends to backlash things. There is already a backlash in AI Art and Music, but surprisingly not other areas yet. The companies will suffer as people won't have jobs to earn money to buy their products and services in the long run.

It needs government regulation. I read and confirmed as fact in China that "A Chinese court ruled that companies cannot terminate employees just to replace them with artificial intelligence system". At the moment the government seems to be pro AI and pro driverless cars seeming to think it will create more jobs(!?)

Recently articles have stated that AI is costing more than human workers in some countries, but probably not the UK yet due to minimum wage and tax increases putting the country on the brink of recession, despite AI costing electricity and the UK having the highest electricity costs in the world as the prices are still driven by the price of Gas, which is crazy and causing the remaining private energy companies to make mass profits.

To conclude I think there will be public backlash to using them and people will refuse to use services using them. Perhaps it will take a few fatal accidents of driverless vehicles to reach this point, but it will happen. There may also come a point that the costs of running them exceeds the human cost, a sensible government decides to put restrictions in place or the companies themselves realise that mass unemployment by replacing drivers with driverless is a bad thing as it results in no one having money to use their services.

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Theunluckyone7@reddit

Everybody is watching this technology advance and wondering what will happen. Logically, the government can't possibly sit back and watch the entire economy crumble because of mass unemployment. Besides, there will be no need for the taxi's or trucks if people don't have money to spend.

Scotland had a driverless bus for a while that had to close down because nobody used it...

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Atrixia@reddit

This is what they said during the industrial revolution - yet there were jobs.

Advanced economies get advanced jobs and there's no way AI is taking them all. It's not possible, AI is so embryonic at this stage....

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Theunluckyone7@reddit

I'm not a big believer in the AI hype at all but, there just aren't the jobs to move into now. They have automated the life out of everything, you barely see any staff in a supermarket these days .

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The__Pope_@reddit

you barely see any staff in a supermarket these days .

Are you walking around with your eyes closed?

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Theunluckyone7@reddit

Oh so a large amount of checkouts aren't now self serve with one person overseeing it? Maybe it's you who has your eyes closed

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The__Pope_@reddit

Yeah they have self checkouts, and still have loads of staff wandering the aisles doing people's online shopping, or others manning the non self checkouts

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Theunluckyone7@reddit

Maybe my local supermarkets have different staffing levels to you because no, that's not what I find.

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JBEqualizer@reddit

I've been in multiple supermarkets just in the last month, and every single one of them have plenty of staff doing various jobs.

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Repulsive-Year896@reddit

He’s got you there. Pretty sure supermarket employees have gone the last few years

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Bossman-0007@reddit

Oh you should maybe believe the hype.. things are about to get insane, supermarket self checkouts aren’t even built with AI, they were massively before, and like everything they will massively improve, but yeah mass employment is coming anything that can be done and remembered within a job with any form of technology will and can be replaced, however many business will not adopt due to not knowing.. corporations will adopt!

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Theunluckyone7@reddit

AI has been around since the 70's ..... you can believe what you want. I personally find it very unrealistic that this will be allowed to happen. You're forgetting a crucial part in your theory also - mass unemployment means people spend no money so really barely any companies would survive.

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Mean_Actuator130@reddit

I think the issue is the short term disruption - for example , the industrial revolution saw the collapse of the hand loom, as machines could do weaving at a fraction of the cost.

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Mean_Actuator130@reddit

I mean, the Blair gov made huge strides in higher education, which in effect was a massive training programme.

Nowadays, I see no reason why the country can't go through another massive retraining effort - after all, we have massive capacity in the form of tons of struggling universities!

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Disastrous-Place-846@reddit

Whats the point in worrying, plenty of other jobs and ill be dead anyway in 50 years

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UnacceptableUse@reddit

Self driving cars are nowhere near being generally ready, too. The currently existing self driving cars only operate in specific areas that they have been programmed for and even so they behave unpredictably and erratically when faced with slightly unknown situations. They've also admitted to use remote control in some situations, too. To work on any road in any country they need to mature quite a lot

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Glittering_Vast938@reddit

I think the tech will develop really quickly though - look at aeroplanes from the first powered flight in 1903 to bring used in the First World War in 1914.

Plus we have much more advanced technology in AI and computers now.

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UnacceptableUse@reddit

You can't really use past technology advancements as a marker for how fast things will progress in the future because technology isn't something that has a linear difficulty that you can progress through.

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Repulsive-Year896@reddit

When you say they have admitted to using remote control, what do you mean by that ?

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UnacceptableUse@reddit

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2026/02/17/waymo-overseas-human-assist-wasnt-secret-but-is-it-secure/

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karmaismyex123@reddit

Someone is remotely controlling the car from an office somewhere.

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wardyms@reddit

Many people who “drive” for work often have to get out the car and unload stuff from whatever they’re driving.

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HachiTofu@reddit

No. Driving on roads is the easy bit. It’s always the last 1% of manoeuvring obstacles at your destination that probably can’t be automated any time soon. Sure you could have a truck go up and down the M6 all day to a massive warehouse. But show it a tight yard buried halfway down an industrial estate, that is full of pallets, suicidal forklift drivers and random shite lying everywhere, and it will grind to a halt.

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swiftcardine@reddit

Probably safer than careless truck drivers On their phones

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VooDooBooBooBear@reddit

Driverless taxis are barely a thing in the UK and driverless trucks aren't a viable option for all but the easiest of routes and even then, it'll be years and years before they are used at a large scale. It's a fact of life that the kids of tomorrow will be working towards different Industries than the adults of today. Reality is that if you are a driver now, you'll be dead before you are placed.

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Level-Courage6773@reddit

I mean, they barely work and make tons of mistakes on the test tracks (where don't seem to know what children look like), so, nope, not at all.

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Solid_Bodybuilder_89@reddit

Im more interested in the Tax point of view.
If everyone will eventually lose their jobs, due to driverless cars, AI etc. Who or where is the tax money going to come from?

Will they tax companies more? so companies then have to increase their charges, even though no one has income now, as no one is working. Will it be worth having a business, of most of the income goes on taxes?

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Fine-State8014@reddit

Less worried than I would be about ai if I worked in an office.

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Candid-Bike-9165@reddit

They might drive themselves but only in some conditions it will take a while before they can replace me entirely and then they have toave a robot as dynamic as a human anyway as driving is only part of my job

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Crunchie64@reddit

AI might help a truck get to a pub drop, but I cant wait to watch it lower kegs into a damp cellar.

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BarbiePeonies@reddit

Not a driver but I take a lot of taxis

There is no way in hell I’m sitting in a driverless taxi

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