The debate over job-killing automation is raging in a number of sectors, but it made headlines in automotive circles this week after a top VC downplayed the effects of autonomous vehicles on jobs.
Large-scale unemployment forecasts due to vehicle automation is "a fallacy," Marc Andreessen said at this week's Code conference. "It's a recurring panic. This happens every 25 or 50 years. People get all amped up about 'machines are going to take all the jobs' and it never happens."
But Andreessen's comments come as the International Transport Forum, an industry think tank, predicts enormous job losses in the trucking industry due to self-driving technology. "Automated trucks could reduce the demand for drivers by 50-70 percent in the US and Europe by 2030," it warned in a report this week.
Autonomous Vehicles = More Jobs
Andreessen contends that autonomous vehicle technology will not only create more jobs, but generate entire complementary industries.
To support his case, he pointed to the last major shift in personal transportation. When automobiles replaced horses a century ago, jobs from blacksmithing to buggy-whip-making were virtually wiped out. But Andreessen argues that at the time no one could have predicted that the car industry would become a giant economic and jobs engine.
"The car created not only a lot of jobs creating cars," but new adjacent business such as roadside motels, fast-food restaurants, street paving and maintenance, and more, he says. "The jobs that were created by the automobile on the second-, third-, and fourth-order effects were 100 times, 1,000 times the number of jobs that blacksmiths had."
But he ignores the fact that in 2017—unlike in 1917—automation has already eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs. Andreessen's projections also don't take into consideration the larger issue of how to retrain truck drivers and other displaced blue-collar workers for a world where their jobs are done by robots.
"If automation does steal jobs, that's not the main problem," contends John Suh, vice president of Hyundai Venture. The real issue is "the relative shift in jobs that pay a living wage and the tasks within jobs that are subject to automation."
A recent Atlantic article that focused on the effect automation will have on truck driving jobs noted that "as America's experience with manufacturing taught us, the country has not been particularly good at anticipating and responding to the changes wrought by automation."
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While the article concedes that automation "doesn't just get rid of jobs" but "creates new jobs as well," it adds that "often the jobs that disappear are low-paid, repetitive work and … those new jobs are not ones that those low-skilled workers can easily fill."
It also notes that "millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the past two decades to automation, and yet few of the workers who lost these jobs have been equipped to move to a new field or to a new region of the country where new jobs are being created. It does not appear that trucking will turn out any better."
Unlike Andreessen, Suh believes that "most if not all current jobs have some potential to be replaced by automation." So it's crucial to train people for jobs that are "hopefully in the future difficult to automate," he adds. That includes the work of venture capitalists. "I wonder if Marc Andreessen would feel the same if AI replaced top-tier VCs?" Suh quips.