idleprocess
Flashaholic
As I've said before, my sense is that much of what's happening is the employment market tilting towards the employee after being heavily tilted towards the employer for decades. Industries whose value proposition leaned on inflicting misery on their workforce are now facing retention and hiring challenges and will need to adjust.
Curiously, fast food did a pretty spectacularly terrible job of this a decade ago and continues to do a terrible job of it. The kiosks are slow, klugey, prone to failure, and otherwise unsatisfactory to use.Ultimately we'll come out of this better. Seeing that even higher pay isn't attracting enough people, I think many of these jobs will be automated as soon as possible. Fast food is already doing some of that.
I expect at least another decade of development before real 'certification' trials of SAE level 4 OTR trucks are conducted. In the meantime the owner-operator will continue to be squeezed by the markets, intensifying the labor shortage.Truck driving is next on the list.
As badly as "virtual agents" handle problems on websites or 1-800 numbers that fall outside of a very narrow set of conditions, I'm not so confident that the machine learning fairy will magick away a great many service sector jobs outside of the most rote and repetitive in a terrible hurry.Many hospitality positions will likely follow as soon as robots and AI can do these jobs.