Ok, ok, I know.  I’m devoting far too much time on this subject so unless something really big shows up, I’ll leave this topic alone for a while.

But before I do, this link to an article by Sam Tracy regarding which jobs will be lost when self-driving cars (inevitably, in my opinion) become a reality:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-tracy/autonomous-vehicles-will-_b_7556660.html

Part of what fascinates me about the self-driving car thing is that I can see it as being an incredible boon…and an equally incredible job killer, something this article explains quite well.

Without linking on that article, anyone can think of at least a few jobs that will be heavily impacted by self-driving cars.  Taxis?  Gone…at least the models that are driven by people.  Uber?  Also gone.  Truck transportation?  Also gone.  Mail carriers (USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.) may also be impacted.  If you can have driverless cars, what’s to stop you from developing some kind of robotic system to deliver mail and packages, too?

Then you dig a little deeper.  With the rise of the self-driving car, what happens to the auto insurance industry?  It will be impacted, perhaps very hard, and that means more lost jobs.

Going into the article, one can estimate some very hard realities regarding anyone who makes their living driving and using a vehicle.

But there is an upside to all this: By “liberating” (in some cases very much against their will) people from tasks involving driving, it creates a tremendous amount of free time and, it has been noted, it is in this vacuum of free time that people come up with new concepts and, quite possibly, progress.

The pain will come, of that there is no doubt.  Can what comes afterwards be a boon to society in general?

We’ll see.