A few months ago I wrote a post arguing that “AI and automation may not steal your job — but they’ll probably make it suck.”

This is a new way I’ve recently been thinking about the age-old question of how tech affects labor. People (including me) used to worry that automation and AI would only replace workers. More automation == less jobs.

But as I put it in that previous post, if you look at a few industries that have been heavily affected by automation and AI — such as transcription, food delivery, ride-hail, and warehouse-shipping jobs — you find the picture’s a bit different. Employment in those sectors has gone up. More labor has been needed, year over year.

But the jobs themselves are crappier than before, because AI and automation introduced ruthless efficiencies that put the humans on a miserable hamster-wheel.

I recently ran across more evidence of this grim trend, in this New York Times piece by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein: “How Life as a Trucker Devolved Into a Dystopian Nightmare”.

“Many associate trucking with freedom,” as Kaiser-Schatzlein notes. That may have been more true in previous decades. But these days, truckers are “hemmed in by low wages, long hours and an unbelievable level of automation and surveillance.”

For example …

Once, when his truck’s cabin heater broke, Mr. Knope was forced to sleep in freezing temperatures for several days while traveling across northern Ohio and New York because an automated system made sure his engine was turned off at night. The company told him there was no way to override the system.

Lovely. Truckers also have “electronic logging devices” that monitor precisely when they’re driving, because truckers generally aren’t paid by the hour, they’re paid by how many miles they’ve driven. Truckers are divided about those devices. About half don’t mind them (or appreciate the fact that the devices automatically record their mileage, a task that used to be done by hand), while many of the rest find the tracking annoying, and feel it limits their own control over how they work.

But the ELDs are just the tip of the tech iceberg. These days, trucks might also have cameras that point at their faces and microphones recording audio inside the truck. Some of these cameras have AI to detect if the drivers are getting drowsy. There’s also a growing industry in wearable tech — like headbands — to additionally check if a driver is falling asleep.

The trucks are rolling panopticons.

On the one hand, these might sound like useful safety mechanisms, right? Drowsy truckers cause horrific accidents. Isn’t it good to have tech that helps detect if a driver is falling asleep?

Except that these safety mechanisms are just band-aids that try to cover up deteriorating work conditions. They throw to the real question here: Exactly why are so many truckers getting drowsy on the job?

It’s because over the last few decades, truck-driving jobs have become far more demanding. This is in part a deregulation story: Up to the end of the 1970s, trucking was unionized and had better job security and work conditions. But under deregulation that began with President Carter in 1980, unregulated drivers grew rapidly, and wages and work conditions began to compete downwards.

These days, the median trucker income is $48,710. That’s higher than the national median of $41,535, so it might not seem so bad. Except as Kaiser-Schatzlein notes, because truckers are generally paid by the mile — not by the hour — they can wind up having many, many unpaid hours at work. If they’re waiting for someone to unload their truck, they’re often not paid for that. This means they can easily wind up working 60-hour weeks to produce that $48K income; some truckers will clock as many as 100 hours a week. The effective hourly rate for their labor plunges downwards.

As Kaiser-Schatzlein writes …

So if Mr. Knope were to show up to, say, a pet food warehouse, exhausted from a day of driving, looking to unload quickly, find something to eat and catch some sleep, the warehouse staff might tell him there wasn’t anyone available to unload his truck for six hours, and he would be forced to wait, lonely in his truck, paid for only part of the time he spent waiting. (Other trucking companies might not compensate their drivers at all.)

So this is whythere are so many drowsy drivers, right? And such a growing pile of invasive tech in their trucks. It’s a cycle, which goes like this:

1. Paid mostly by the mile, truckers are required to use tech that logs whether their truck is moving, and that dings them whenever they’re forced (for reasons out of their control) to sit parked and waiting.
2. To cope with this situation, truckers wind up working crazily long hours — which increases the risk of becoming drowsy at the wheel. And so …
3. … the trucking firms respond by requiring the vehicles to bristle with surveillance, either to warn the truckers if they’re about to fall asleep or to provide the employer info for liability purposes if there is, tragically, an accident.

Technology, AI, and automation are thus both symptoms of, and causes of, increasingly lousy work conditions for truckers.

“While we often think of automation and A.I. as developments that will eventually replace workers,” Kaiser-Schatzlein writes, “those tools are already in heavy use in the workplace. And they haven’t replaced workers; they’ve simply been brought in to manage declining working conditions.” (Emphasis here is mine.)

It’s no wonder trucker turnover is huge: It was 92% in the last quarter of 2020.

Automation isn’t killing or reducing the number of trucker jobs. Quite the opposite: The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts they’ll grow by 6% between 2020 and 2030. It’s possible that self-driving trucks will become a thing, but I don’t think it’ll be anytime soon — and I’d bet that even then, humans will be needed in the cab for a good long while.

So here again is the trend: Automation and AI don’t reduce the number of jobs in an industry. In fact, there are more jobs than ever.

But they’re crappier jobs, with humans run ragged to keep pace with ruthlessly optimized high-tech systems.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a problem created by the technology. It’s created by terrible business models. You could certainly improve the lives of truck drivers with some simple policy changes. For starters, you could pay them by the hour, instead of by the mile. That wouldn’t fix everything, but it’d help reduce the most pernicious dynamics propelling those brutal and unsafe 60-hour weeks on the road.

Until that sort of serious reform happens, trucking will continue to be a wretched example of surveillance and efficiency technology gone off the rails — and the decline of a once-vibrant job.