Commentary: Let’s get a truck driver on the OpenAI board

You heard me! It’s time for a truck driver — or anyone in the trades — to help direct how artificial intelligence is implemented. There’s no better place to do that than as a board member of OpenAI, the most important organization in the AI world and, probably, the world period. 

AI famously has the potential to change or destroy everything about human existence. To tackle this massive responsibility, OpenAI was founded in 2015 to be a nonprofit. In 2019, it restructured to also have a for-profit arm that accepts investors. The nonprofit board of directors essentially controls that for-profit organization, and they have no equity in the company. And, investors into OpenAI are capped at 100 times their initial investment.

These safeguards existed so OpenAI could ensure “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” rather than a select group of profiteers. However, as some writers have dourly recorded in the past week, it appears that OpenAI is turning away from this lofty goal.

The recent leadership fracas revealed this shake-up. OpenAI’s board fired CEO Sam Altman on Nov. 17. Reportedly, the board believed Altman’s thirst for expanding AI put the organization’s safety mission at risk. Altman was rehired five days later. Now, OpenAI has wiped the academics from its board (who supported firing Altman) and replaced them with corporate bigwigs (who clearly want Altman around).

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I am delighted to see the former Treasury secretary and the former co-CEO of Salesforce have found places on the OpenAI board. But, amid this reorganization, let’s not forget to add people whose livelihoods are most at risk of vanishing in the case of an AI revolution.

Autonomous truck driving, even in its early stages, will massively change the jobs of 2.2 million people. Depriving all truck drivers of their livelihood — or gutting the job to the point of undesirability, as is more likely in the short term — would decimate the financial stability of a huge chunk of the American populace.

There’s no question this technology is coming. The question is how exactly it will be deployed. For that reason, I’d suggest — with a hefty dose of bias, as someone who reported on the trucking industry for the past six years — it’s time for a truck driver to join the OpenAI board.

Truck drivers are already the petri dish for how we all work

It may seem like the concerns of a truck driver wouldn’t be applicable to the larger labor economy. But, in some cases, truck drivers are the petri dish for the future of work. What truck drivers are experiencing today often becomes the norm for all workers in the decades to follow.

One pertinent example is the digital monitoring of workers. These topics have only just become relevant for office workers, particularly those who work remotely, but surveillance of this variety has been common or federally mandated for drivers for years. Like remote workers, truck drivers have a manager who isn’t right over their shoulder; other tools have developed in the boss’s absence.

“[T]ruckers may be canaries in the coal mine: investigating digital surveillance and rule enforcement in this industry can give us important clues about how these dynamics may function in other contexts, both within and outside the workplace,” Cornell assistant professor Karen Levy wrote in her recent book on trucking surveillance, “Data Driven.”

Since the early 2010s, it’s been common for a big rig to feature cameras facing into and out of the cab, tablets that alert drivers who brake too hard, and a unit that collects thousands of data points a minute for back offices to analyze.

In 2018, the federal government began mandated ELDs in the cabs of all trucks. This law was designed to enforce hours-of-service laws on truck drivers and prevent fatigue-caused crashes. A federal study estimated that the ELD rule would prevent 1,844 crashes and 26 deaths annually.

However, government data has not proved out any safety gains as a result of the mandate. That’s arguably because the ELD mandate was more of a band-aid than a solution. The reason truck drivers are fatigued likely has to do with the structure of their day. Truckers are typically paid per mile, so they’re incentivized to drive as many miles as they can. Constraining the number of hours that they can do this has led to more reckless driving, as one 2019 study showed.

“Technology often fails as a solution because the problems it’s intended to solve aren’t, at their core, technology problems — they’re social, economic, and cultural problems, and they require solutions in the same register,” Levy wrote. “Trying to address these problems via technology often means insufficiently accounting for the world as it is.”

Through this early exposure to government-mandated tracking, the trucking industry has learned that technology alone cannot be the tool to fix issues in an industry. It has to be matched with larger, more systemic changes. This is a perspective that would be useful for the OpenAI board.

We’re not doing away with drivers anytime soon, but the job will be slowly degraded

The trucking industry deserves representation on the OpenAI board, too, because of the monumental change autonomous driving would bring to the industry. (For starters, there’s an estimated annual savings of $300 billion in labor costs.)

Of course, not all 2.2 million truck driver jobs are going away anytime soon, nor would they vanish all at once. Fully driverless semi-trucks are certainly decades away.

Before that, we will see the proliferation of partially automated trucks. These vehicles will speed, brake and steer on their own, though a driver’s hands would be required on the wheel at all times.

A recent study led by Stephen V. Burks of the University of Minnesota Morris suggests even this minor incursion of autonomous technology would likely push drivers out of the industry. According to that analysis, increasing autonomous driving technology would drive down pay and drive up “dispatch intensity.” More newbies would enter the industry. It’s unclear if the potential safety gains from partially automated trucks would offset the loss of safe, experienced drivers.

In a further-off future, truck driving will be a mix of city driving and highway driving. Mostly autonomous trucks would steer freight in highway settings, then have the truck driver take over in the more unpredictable city driving. 

As Levy wrote, this would threaten truck drivers’ pay, even if the driver is still firmly in the cabin. Truck drivers are, as noted, paid per mile. It’s unclear why or whether firms would pay them during long stretches of highway if a robot is already doing the job. Of course, that’s the majority of miles a long-haul driver runs anyway.

People enjoy doing things 

There’s something harder to capture in data or studies that would change with trucking as the art of driving is worn away. Truck drivers enjoy driving on long stretches of empty highway, in the same way that I enjoy writing. Technologists might think of driving as a hassle and seek ways to get rid of it, but, to a trucker, such an aim is sacrilege.

“Though driving is technically a privilege granted by the state, it is assumed and understood by most to be a God-given right,” truck driver Gord Magill recently wrote for Compact magazine. “Learning to drive, for decades one of the signal marks of adulthood, is slowly being taken away or forgotten. There are costs to this loss.”

Programmer James Somers put it another way. In a recent New Yorker article, he considered legendary Go player Lee Sedol, who retired early after a computer program famously trounced Lee in a series of Go matches. Somers, like the truck driver Magill, also senses that his own craft is vanishing.

“Perhaps what pushed Lee Sedol to retire from the game of Go was the sense that the game had been forever cheapened,” Somers wrote. “When I got into programming, it was because computers felt like a form of magic … . Then, one day, it became possible to achieve many of the same ends without the thinking and without the knowledge. Looked at in a certain light, this can make quite a lot of one’s working life seem like a waste of time.”

Let’s hear from normal people

AI will likely change everything about our world. A healthy chunk of the population would probably prefer that this not happen. And, in trucking, we can find millions of people who deserve some sort of voice in how this technology unfolds.

People like OpenAI board members Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, and Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce, are not going to be slammed by AI. Neither will former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was reportedly considered for the board. Unlike the rest of us, they do not need a biweekly paycheck to put food on the table or a roof over their heads. 

Instead, elevating the voices of people whose lives could be significantly gutted by AI is crucial. Truck drivers, who may be the first mass defenestration of the AI era, are a critical population to include.

What do you think about OpenAI and trucking? Email rpremack@freightwaves.com with your thoughts. Don’t forget to subscribe to MODES.

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Editor: Rachel Premack