WaPo | Mercedes-Benz wants to develop a driverless
car. Google already has one. This is exceedingly bad news for auto body
shops, ambulance-chasing lawyers and others. Soon, truck drivers might
be replaced by driverless trucks. What then will happen to the nation’s 3.5 million truck drivers, not to mention truck stops, of which there are 276 in Texas alone? (You can Google anything.)
The
conventional answer is retraining. Truck drivers will become something
else, maybe teachers or dental hygienists, which is, of course,
possible. It’s also likely that many of them will sink into the funk
that is the loyal companion of unemployment. Family life will shred, and
possibly an army of former truck drivers will enlist with others of the
digitally ditched and wreak political havoc. Shippers will sing “Happy
Days Are Here Again.” For truckers it will be, “Brother Can You Spare a
Dime?”
It’s clear by now that the fruits of automation, computerization and
outsourcing are being reaped by the top 1 percent — in this case,
shipping companies and not drivers. The old bell curve with the middle
class bloating comfy in the middle is being replaced by what’s called
the power curve, in which something called the 80/20 rule applies: 20
percent of the participants in an online venture get 80 percent of the
rewards. Think Uber. It’s not the drivers who are getting rich.
Something new and possibly awful is happening.
Many books have been written about this phenomenon, and in 2012, the Aspen Institute
convened a meeting on this topic, with the resulting report bearing the
jaunty title of “Power-Curve Society: The Future of Innovation,
Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy.” One
participant was Kim Taipale, a leading thinker in this field. I quote
from the Aspen report on its summary of Taipale’s thesis: “The era of
bell curve distributions that supported a bulging social middle class is
over. . . . Education per se is not going to make up the difference.”
