If you think your profession is dying, it could soon be gone

IT IS often easier to see the future coming than to predict how quickly it will arrive. In 1895, Thomas Edison said it was “only a question of time when the carriages and trucks in every larger city will be run with motors”.

The following year, German engineer Gottlieb Daimler made the first motorised lorry. Yet, it would be another 20 years or so until commercial lorries became really widespread across America after World War I.

This raises an interesting question, one relevant to the economic moment in which we find ourselves today.

When it seems as if an occupation or skill is doomed to become obsolete, even though it has not happened yet, how do people respond? Do they adjust proactively, and if so, how do those choices shape the labour market?

In the case of “teamsters” – people who drove teams of horses pulling wagons loaded with goods before motorised lorries took over – the adjustment was made mostly by young people.

One economic paper noted that the average age of the occupation began to creep up between 1900 and 1910, as fewer young people chose to enter, even though only 10,000 lorries were registered nationwide.

Over the following decade – which the paper described as a period of “anticipatory dread” – the occupation’s workforce aged further and began to shrink somewhat.

And between 1920 and 1930, as the number of lorries increased dramatically, the number of “teamsters” fell sharply, with the ranks of younger workers shrinking more than older ones.

As a result, the authors wrote: “Despite the heavy physical demands, driving a team of horses had become an older man’s job.”

Autonomous vehicles and fewer drivers

Do we see any evidence of the same thing happening today?

A recent working paper by PhD candidate Danial Salman at the University of Washington examined whether the supply of lorry drivers is being affected by the anticipation of autonomous vehicles.

The paper found a sharp fall in commercial driver licensing in those zip codes in California in which autonomous cars had been tested or deployed on the roads.

Although robotaxis are not the same as self-driving lorries, perhaps seeing driverless vehicles with your own eyes is enough to make some people see the end of the road.

Meanwhile, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a union with roots in the days of horse-drawn wagons, is fighting for greater regulation of the technology.

A lot can be said for transitions that happen gradually enough that occupations can shrink over time, through a lower supply of people entering. It is certainly a lot less painful for individuals than abrupt changes in demand that eject workers from their jobs.

But problems can emerge, when anticipation runs too far ahead of reality.

In 2017, for example, Financial Times ran a report headlined “Out of road: driverless vehicles are replacing the trucker” in which a 67-year-old American lorry driver gestured at a car park full of 18-wheelers and said: “In 10 or 15 years, these will all be autonomous trucks.”

Almost 10 years later, commercial driverless lorries have barely begun operating on public roads, though more progress has been made in industrial sites such as mines.

Aurora, a market leader, said July that its manufacturing partner was targeting an annual production run-rate of just 1,000 lorries by the end of 2026.

Meanwhile, the International Road Transport Union, which represents transport operators worldwide, said in June that there were 2.9 million unfilled lorry driver positions in 18 markets, and warned that operators were “deeply concerned” by the “worsening driver shortage”.

Lots of reasons exist for the shortage of drivers, particularly younger ones: long and antisocial hours, poor roadside facilities and pressure on pay and conditions.

But it is possible that the anticipation of looming technological obsolescence is worsening the problem.

As Salman wrote, these behaviours can lead to a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in which people choose to not enter a profession, leading to labour shortages or higher costs, “thereby intensifying firms’ incentives to automate”.

Might we start to see this “anticipation factor” begin to shape labour supply in other parts of the economy? Some signs exist in the sorts of degrees that young people are choosing to pursue.

In the UK, the number of applications to study undergraduate computing has dropped in the past two years.

Young people may have absorbed the data – tentative though it is – that suggests artificial intelligence is lowering demand for entry-level software developers.

Nobody knows the future. But in our attempts to anticipate it, we also shape it. FINANCIAL TIMES