The gleaming Tesla truck pulled into the parking lot, where it was eyed warily by the other drivers sitting in their rigs. After the Tesla perfectly parked itself its human monitor stepped out. It was time for a rest break. The monitor did a walk around, entered some data on a pad, then uploaded it to headquarters.
Afterwards, a cup of Joe in the driver's lounge.
A driver from Montana sidled up to the Tesla rep, who was sitting all alone at the counter, the rest of the drivers steering clear as if she were radioactive. But the Montana driver was curious.
"Howdy. Name's John. Big John. You're the 'driver' for that Tesla rig over there, right? Saw it come in, and have seen a few of 'em on the road lately. You people are thinkin' about taking over for us human drivers, right?"
"Hi. Coleen. Good to meet you" came her attempt at an enthusiastic proper greeting, it at the same time conveying little empathy. "About us taking over, yes sir, that's partially right. This rig is a prototype and soon as we get this equipment to near 100% reliability, you long haul drivers will be looking for other jobs"
"Just like that" Big John mumbled.
"Yes, just like that" Coleen replied. "We are going to make a ton of money replacing human drivers. This Tesla rig, well, without a human behind the wheel, it doesn't know the word 'truck stop' unless it needs fuel."
"No downtime, no driver's logs, no switching drivers, no vacations, or retirement......" Big John filled in a few of the blanks. There were lots more.
"A Tesla rig will gladly work weekends, all night long, and it will drive until it’s low on fuel, breaks down, or arrives at a terminal. Inner city driving is the work that will be performed by human drivers. The open road is closing for you guys, I'm afraid".
"Inner city driving is gonna be all that's left?" Big John about spat into his cup. "That's the worst driving job out there!"
"Yes, we agree. Too many decisions carrying too many contingencies have to be made for us to program all that into our computers. The risk/reward factor is too high. The task contains far too many variables. Investors don’t like that sort of meager potential Return On Investment".
"Leave the shit work to the human drivers, the ones that are left"
"Exactly" Coleen mused. "But at least you'll still have a job for a while longer before we eventually figure city driving out. Meanwhile, my department's goals encompass replacing all the railroad engineers, followed by the package delivery guys, once we incorporate A.I. home delivery robots within that system. Driving jobs and even flying jobs will soon be a thing of the past"
"Anybody after your job, Coleen?"
"Nope!” she smugly replied. “I'm highly compensated talent. Companies beg for me to leave Tesla to come work for them. Numerous startups have tried to lure me away"
Coleen finished downing her one mug of Joe, excused herself, then sauntered back to her waiting Tesla rig. Big John watched her go, feeling like he just got put in his place by a snotty twenty five year old.
The least stylized and romanticized picture of an ordinary TRUCK that I could find on…
(Rodrigo Abreu) ….UNSPLASH.com
Yep. Open road jobs are going to be history soon. Behind you on the interstate will be packs of humanless corporate big rigs, rolling at steady speeds between terminals, and it just won't be the same. Used to be the trucks and truckers had character but no more.
No more CB radios, custom trucks, or custom nighttime lighting configurations, no more Convoy, or Smokey and The Bandit, just sensor-laden company trucks rolling along.
Lots of people won't miss the truckers. They'll be glad to be rid of them, thinking that one less menace will be on the road. (An incorrect assumption. Statistically, professional drivers are high up the list as the safest drivers). Truckstops will fade into history, those being replaced by bland fuel terminals, and the open road is gonna seem a lot lonelier 'cuz if you see a truck coming there in all likelihood won't be a person driving it.
Maybe soon cars will be that way too and they'll just be driving themselves, like the trucks. People will be inside but not present, staring deep into their phones, the countryside hardly meriting a glance.
But by then, drone planes will be transporting road tripping tourists to places no car could ever go and that’s gonna be the new 'road trip'. Cars will be seen as old fashioned and limited in the extreme as to their exploratory abilities.
So so long, open road! Roads, some of them, might even start to become abandoned, like the unused rail lines were. Won't be a need for ‘em and there won't be interest in maintaining ‘em. Not if you can fly all over the landscape while having your goods delivered by robotrucks plying the Interstate. Farmers won't need roads so much 'cuz there will be less of those, and small towns might simply cease to be, because they used to be made up of mainly farmers.
Coleen and her kind will be living in the gleaming tech cities, where they'll have the inside track on startups and have throwaway money that they can use to invest in the technologies of the future to make even more dough.
Suddenly a series of bright morning chirps from a nearby and impossibly awake bird broke me from my slumber. I woke with a start, and started to rise, the dreaming I had been doing only seconds before rapidly receeding as present day reality swooshed in to take its place. But still, enough of the dream remained for me to continue to explore its vision of the near term future I had been perusing. I saw Big John continuing his conversation with Coleen, but now they were standing by the side of the road, somewhere in Kansas maybe, or Oklahoma.
"There's a ton of money behind these tech people” ranted Big John, “and a lot of push to get these new technologies up and running. I really dislike the way that they just barge in and take over like they own the place but they don't give a damn. It's like they're on a mission and what's really irritating is that they think they know better. Well, maybe they do and maybe that's what it takes but hey! Where's my piece of the action in all of this?!"
“Capitalist tools, capitalist fools!” Coleen whispered sadly as she slowly backed up, her features steadily diminishing, until she totally disappeared, leaving Big John to hear only the lonesome prairie wind.