That occupation will disappear, save for a few high-end human driver services, IMO.
After the taxis come the trucks. I am quite certain shipping companies will be the quick ditch humans. After all, this means no more travel expenses & salaries, no more breaks, probably automatic unloading too! Goods will get cheaper, although hundreds of thousands of people will be out of work.
Also, I think the shipping cos will do away with their drivers first. Highway traffic is easier to navigate with an algorithm - nearly trivial if you could compel a retrofit of all vehicles with a low power radio broadcasting its position, so that any autonomous vehicles around it can perceive it via its own sensors, any external gps radar, and the cars pings. Even without that, it is easier to juggle the variables of a high way (multiple lanes, moving in a direction, consider merge traffic, maintain safe stop distances, etc) than to try to navigate intersections and pedestrian traffic. Also, 18 wheelers don't need human interfacing, whereas self driving taxis require that licensed, but non-owners, sit in the drivers seat of the taxi since nobody will let self driving cars pilot themselves without someone to take manual control if necessary for a while. Albeit, that remains a problem with the 18 wheeler, but I see letting self driving tractor trailers without pilots come much sooner than self driving taxis without the passenger in the drivers seat.
There might be some jobs created, perhaps not as much.
Consider, what if several shipping companies delegated fuel administration to a company that had manned staff 24/7 at places like Flying J diesel and gas fuel locations?
If you have autonomous trucks coming in, I don't see tons of places upgrading their facilities to support robotic administration. (At least for a few years)
Why have manned gas stations? That's actually pretty easy to automate, since the trucks are stationery and there is already a standard for fuel tank holes. I am 100% sure that 30-40 years from now on, we are going to have automated trucks & gas stations with automated payments done from a system that computes routes based on thousands of variables.
I seriously doubt that truck drivers are going out of business any time soon. First of all, there's a massive fleet of trucks requiring drivers, and replacement trucks are expensive. Second of all, truck drivers also serve as a security guard. Even if we have self-driving trucks, I imagine they'll have a chaperone for a long time yet.
I expect that trucks driven by a human-computer team will be safer than trucks driven by either one alone.
There would certainly be some upfront cost to making tractor-trailers autonomous but they would save an expensive employee per truck, the trucks would arrive faster and more reliably, and they would save in fuel costs (optimal driving).
They would need to setup a way for the trucks to refuel, just an attendant at the truck-stop that would be paid a small amount for refueling them, or maybe a new kind of pump that would automatically fuel the trucks when they pulled up to them.
True, it's expensive to replace new trucks. But if it's a lot cheaper in the long term, it would be a serious incentive to push for the removal of drivers. And yeah, I too think that computers will get gradually implemented. Though I am sure the process will be 100% automated in the end.
The theft part is massive, if you had a truckload full of computer parts travelling down the motorway at 3am when it's dead. What's to stop some gang with tire traps. Bam! vehicle is over and they have 30 mins to loot before an error is realised.
This is possible in the current configuration, too. In fact, it may be easier to compel a human driver to keep quiet than a networked onboard computer relentlessly feeding speed, position, tire pressure and other telemetry to some sort of remote monitoring facility.
I wonder if self-driving will enable electric trucks? If you had an electric truck with (say) 150 mile range, it wouldn't be cost effective because the driver would have to sit around for hours waiting for the truck to recharge. Much less of a problem if the truck is self-driving.
I really hope one of them licenses the Johnny Cab name from total recall, and the likeness of Don Knotts. It'd be really cool to see something from the movies come to life like that and it'd probably end up a great way for other companies to sponsor taxis and get more exposure to people.
