When everything changes, focus on what doesn’t
I was recently at an alumni panel for a business fraternity I'm a part of.
A question came up on how can students today prepare for the workforce when it seems like AI is completely rewriting the rules of the game.
This is a question everyone is asking themselves from the greenest new grad to the most seasoned professional, unless you're close to retirement (lucky you?).
The most obvious and challenging impacts of this transformation are in places where there's a clear path towards automation.
One such example is long-distance trucking. Without a doubt, we will get to a point where driverless trucks will have a lower accident rate than their human counterparts. By the way, that's all it takes, we don't need AI-driven trucks to not have accidents, we just need them to have less accidents than their human counterparts at scale. When we get to this point a great deal of these jobs will become obsolete to fleshy labor.
There are approximately 3.5 million truck drivers, representing about 3% of the US workforce. That's a sizable number with large political clout.
That's a sizable portion of the population who's well-paying, stable, and traditional jobs may entirely disappear. Even for trucking companies that wish to retain their employees, they will face immense pressure from competitors who go the cheaper and more efficient route.
These autonomous trucks are still a ways away, some of the biggest blockers being:
- Logistics involved for this to work at scale
- Operational headaches to be solved
- Environmental challenges (snow, ice, extreme weather)
- Battery technology for long-haul routes without frequent recharging
Even once all that is solved, the upfront costs will be brutal...
All this to say, there's going to be many jobs where humans need not apply. It's coming soon.
But the question still remains:
The current best answer I've landed on is focus on what's not changing.
A non-exhaustive, somewhat prioritized list:
- Relationships
- Soft skills
- Hard skills (bonus points if your hard skills are AI-related)
- Identifying the minimum set of requirements to solve a real customer problem
- Richly understand the context of your problem space and industry
This answer is as true today as it was during the industrial and agricultural revolution. What is trade but a dance where two parties win, where the pie gets bigger for each of us, where we can both walk away from a transaction with a smile.
Ultimately, I think truckers in the classical sense will go away.
However, the women and men working these industries will fill new roles or take on more modern versions of old roles. Contract negotiations with autonomous truck producers, logistics coordinators, specialized mechanics, auditors, business development reps and more will be needed.
On the other hand, there's nothing to say 3 million trucking jobs in today's world = 3 million trucking jobs in tomorrow's AI world.
Many of us are afraid, skeptical, and wary of what AI is going to bring. We should be when leading scientists in the field are.
But from wheel, to fire, to plow, to printing press, to steam engine, to factory, to internet, and now, to AI, the pie has gotten bigger. And at every turn of the human civilizational march, we've externalized, and put into tools, something we first had to do the hard way.
There are menial jobs that humans can abstract away from to take on new challenges that only we are suited for.
Perhaps there will be a day where no challenge will be suitable for human handling.
Maybe that day will bring on leisurely lives where we can focus on connection, creativity, and life, while our AIs take care of making the world go round. Hopefully they won't forget we're their parents.
My great-grandfather was a trucker in Armenia. Driving through the hills of the Caucasus, he became intimately familiar with his machine. His experience led him to develop an improvement for his employer's entire fleet. He got an underwhelming bonus for it, but he was proud of the work nonetheless.
Later, that same truck killed him.
Whether we innovate or we don't, someone pays a price. The question isn't whether change is coming—it's whether we're prepared to navigate it with our eyes open. The timeless skills that made my great-grandfather valuable—his deep expertise, his problem-solving, his drive to improve things—those remain our best tools.
The technology will change. What matters won't.