Most driving jobs will go away. What happens next?

Episode 8 - Most Driving Jobs Will Go Away. What Happens Next? [iTunes, Google Play]

Ricky, a 30-year-old Uber and Lyft driver who lives in Sacramento, has been driving for the two ride-sharing platforms for just over two years. Previously a kitchen and bathroom designer at Home Depot, Ricky quit working for the home improvement retailer for a pretty straightforward reason.

“[Driving for Uber and Lyft] is the only way I can make $1,000 in a week,” he told me recently on a ride in downtown San Francisco. “No other company in the world is going to offer me that.”

Ricky is a part of a growing segment of the economy that is using driving as a way to strive into a different income class than they were in before. With the birth of the gig economy and companies like Uber and Lyft, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. have either quit their full-time jobs to drive or are now driving part-time to earn a little extra cash. In total, roughly 5 million people nationwide, or about 3% of the workforce, make their living driving taxis, buses, vans, trucks or their own cars.

“Uber and Lyft [are some] of the best companies to work for,” said Ricky. “I would suggest to every parent, if you think your kid is not that bright, if he's not gonna make it up in school, don't take a $15,000 student loan just for the sake of going to school. Buy him a $5,000 dollar car and put him at work. He'll learn a lot of things on the street.”

Driving is an attractive profession for workers like Ricky because it doesn’t require a college degree and you can set your own hours. It can also be a buffer job in between other full-time gigs. But with some autonomous driving companies predicting that their technology could be on the open road as early as 2020, droves of drivers like Ricky could potentially be out of work in less than three years.

On the latest episode of Work In Progress, Linkedin’s podcast on the future of the state of work, Managing Editor Chip Cutter and I explore what this reality could mean for the future of the economy. To do this, we spent several days talking to dozens of Uber, Lyft and taxi drivers in San Francisco, New York and Charlotte, North Carolina to get a sense for how they are thinking about their career prospects in a potentially driverless future. We also interviewed Padmasree Warrior, the CEO of autonomous driving startup NIO, to get the perspective from one of the leaders driving this tech to market. 

After countless interviews and miles driven, what we discovered is that drivers aren’t thinking very much about what they would do if the income they are currently earning driving went away. We also learned that executives like Warrior are starting to think critically about what role both the private and public sector must play to get the current generation of drivers prepared and trained for what’s to come. Check out an excerpt from our conversation with Warrior below, and listen to the full episode above. As always, let us know your take on this discussion in the comments below.

Edited excerpts:

Caroline Fairchild: For those of us who don't know what NIO is, give us a little background on the company and what you're doing here.

Padma Warrior: We are working on self-driving cars. But more importantly, we are thinking about how, when the car of the future becomes your living space, how it become a space for you to work, for you to be peaceful, and for you to discover new things.

CF: And thinking about self-driving cars and your car becoming your living room, like you said, it's still a really out-of-reach concept for most people. Yet NIO plans on getting self-driving cars to market by 2020, which is just around the corner. How are we really there with this technology right now? Unpack that a little bit.

PW: Yeah, so I think it's going to be an evolution. If you look at cars today, right, it's going to change fundamentally from just me being a mode of conveyance to a personal space. And if you look at your smartphone, today most of us can't live without that device. It didn't start out that way. I was actually from that industry. I was at Motorola before Cisco. Many companies back then thought that the cell phone would just become a communication device. Instead, it really has become a personalization device with the smartphone.

The car will go through a similar transition, where it is not just a mode of conveyance taking you from point A to point B anymore. You leave your things in your car. You put your car seat in your car for your children. You don't want to be taking it back, and out, and putting back in. It's sort of like an extension of your space, and we want to design it that way. I think the full-autonomous vehicles, which is a car without a steering, without pedals is probably still way out in the future, like you say. We think of it as more as an evolution, whereas you say, a fundamental revolution in terms of how human beings will adjust to that.

Chip Cutter: As you know, millions of Americans are employed as professional drivers or are in related industries that could become obsolete or, at least, significantly changed [00:17:00] once autonomous vehicles are on the road. What would you say to those Americans who are thinking, now, about their jobs potentially becoming obsolete?

PW: Automation and artificial intelligence are two big trends that are going to affect all our lives. And so I think this is a topic that we're all looking at. I think there will be certain jobs that'll change. I don't think it's just a question of job elimination. Some jobs will become actually safer to do, I think, because the technology will augment you, if you deploy drones, for instance. People that are working in mining and other areas where there's a lot of safety issues today, where technology can be much more helpful. It will actually save human beings from putting themselves in stressful situations or unsafe situations, where machines could be much more effective at doing that. In the particular example of cab drivers, yeah, those jobs will probably change. So perhaps, in sort of being a car mechanic today who works on an engine, in the future, you will be a sensor mechanic replacing sensors and cameras. You still need people to do those kind of things.

CF: Absolutely. And what you're talking about is something that we hear from tech leaders a lot. Do you agree that this is overblown? Are you confident that the jobs will shift in a way that it's not going to be a lot of people are left behind?

PW: I think sometimes I'm not. I'm not complacent or arrogant enough to say it won't affect jobs. It will. I think it's affecting our jobs. It's affecting my job. So I definitely have empathy. And I definitely acknowledge that there will be a shift, and there will be a transition necessary. I don't think the answer is, "Let's go back to the past." I do not agree with that. I think that approach will set us way back. If you look, it's a competitive, global platform nowadays. What I do believe in, yes, it'll impact jobs. The jobs will shift. We do need to acknowledge that. And we need to make the right kind of investments to retool our country and our workforce.

Like what you hear or have your own take? Subscribe on iTunes or Google Play and join the conversation by sharing your thoughts on this topic on LinkedIn in a status update or an article using #WorkInProgress