Address to 10-4 DC

A writer unpracticed at Public Speaking winds up on stage at the National Mall in Washington DC

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to address an assembled crowd of truckers on the National Mall in Washington, DC, as part of 10-4 DC’s 7th annual public information display and concert boogie. They asked me to speak on the looming implementation of autonomous vehicle technology onto our highways.

10-4 DC started out as an impromptu and spontaneous protest against the imposition of the ELD Mandate back in 2017, so I knew these were my people and I was happy to oblige. I met up with friend and collaborator James Year who was also invited to set up a display from his Stealing Fire project, of which many of my readers will be familiar, and we drove down to DC for a day from his new digs in Baltimore.

Although James made a video recording of this speech, it shall remain hidden away for my eyes only as a learning experience; writing and public speaking are two very different talents, and I’m barely competent at the first.

Happy Reading

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On stage at 10-4 DC

Hi. G’day everybody and Happy Friday. My name is Gord Magill, and I am humbled and honored to have been asked to speak here for you by the fine folks at 10-4 DC.


Just to let you know, I’m not much of a public speaker, so please bear with me; our hosts here at 10-4 DC know me from my writings, and as you might well understand, tapping away into my laptop at home is a lot easier to do than to stand before a crowd, much less a crowd in such a place as the National Mall here in DC. I’m still wondering if you are all real, or if I am even here …

Which brings me to the topic that I’ve been asked to speak on, which has a great deal to do with reality, such as the extremely important service that you render to your fellow man, the nation, and the economy; and the unreality, or seemingly unreal propositions about our eventual replacement by technology in the not too distant future.

You may have seen the photos from the project of my colleague James Year, hanging just over there behind Fred Bowerman’s cabover Peterbilt. Go check them out, and you can see them online at StealingFire.tech

Friend and Collaborator James Year

Back in 2019, then Democratic Party presidential candidate Andrew Yang popularized the term ‘fourth industrial revolution’ to describe the changes in technology we are seeing today. Perhaps you heard Mr Yang on the infamous Joe Rogan podcast, where he described his concerns for American workers, and specifically truckers, whom he believes were on a fast track to having our jobs automated away. 

Truckers are not the only workers to be targeted in this revolution as the very brief east and gulf coast port strikes this week shows us, given that one of the demands of the Longshoremen’s Union is that no jobs on the ports be automated at all. When the longshoreman look overseas, especially to China, they see fully automated container ports that work at vastly higher rates of efficiency.

This trend towards automation is not limited to the function of machines in factories, or the equipment which lifts containers from boats to load onto trucks or trains. I’m assuming many of you have social media accounts, and have seen the incredibly realistic looking images that are produced using large language models and other AI technologies. So much for the need for artists and graphic designers, or accountants, or researchers, or photographers like James here, or writers for that matter, like I pretend myself to be.

If you look closely at those tech generated images and other content, its not that hard to tell the fake stuff, especially after you have been exposed to it for awhile. No matter how hard they try to copy legitimate expression of the human spirit, they can’t. The demon haunted machine is no match for the human eye.

There are other deceptions in this world of autonomous technology, though of the more base human variety, and that is why I am here to speak with you today.

Autonomous Truck and vehicle technology manufacturers and their pimps have been heavily promoting the supposed benefits of removing the human trucker from America’s roads, but depending on the audience to whom they are selling this idea, those messages can vary wildly. In fact, if we look at how they advertise their technology, at least three different messages emerge - one for politicians and regulators, some of whom might be in the audience, and another for truckers like many of us here today, and yet a third message for the group most important to these manufacturers at this stage of development for their technology, investors.

There’s only one of those groups of people I just listed to whom it is illegal to lie to, and for which stiff penalties apply to those lies, and its not us truckers or those whom regulate us. With that in mind, the truth about what the AV industry is up to can be found in their investor reports, of which myself and James have read a couple.

This is not to say that all of their dreams are going to come true, but it will give us an indication of what they have planned, and how they are going to sell it.

The most recent of these investor reports comes to us this past July care of Aurora Tech, who have been very prominent in the media as of late with their CEO Chris Urmson appearing on several high profile podcasts, and Aurora making some very bold claims about getting fully driverless trucks on the road by the end of this year.

Aurora is very, very up front about the fact that they want to replace us, despite what is coming out of the other side of their mouth in the messaging aimed at us truckers and our regulators.

Aurora has said that they don’t want to make us unemployed, but just give us different jobs, which they claim will somehow be better.

I guess if you’re happy being a yard jockey, doing nothing but hooking up trailers and performing pre-trip inspections all day, that’s a job - but that’s not why you became a trucker.

Maybe you would be happy being a ‘remote support specialist’, which is Aurora’s term for being a drone operator, except according to their investor reports, they are aiming at having one ‘remote support specialist’ per 100 trucks. Do you think you can safely monitor 100 trucks simultaneously via satellite from an office somewhere? Again, that’s not why you became a trucker.

And that’s about it, unless you find yourself retraining to become something else.

The icing on the cake here is that Aurora, like Waabi or Plus AI and some of these other companies, refer to their systems as drivers; they’re selling them as the Aurora Driver, the Waabi Driver. Maybe we will believe those systems to be drivers when they are issued a citation for violating the endless amounts of regulations we are all subject to, right?

And it gets better! Once you are replaced, those automated systems are going to require a subscription …. So instead of you being paid, Aurora gets a subscription. Sure, they’re still saving whatever company money, but it’s not like a robot truck is purchased and that’s it. Oh no, these systems will require constant updates and maintenance and …. there goes your paycheck, transferred to Aurora or Kodiak or TuSimple, and out of your family budget.

One of Aurora’s primary selling features in their ‘Driver as a Service’ program is a great deal of cost saving - no more driver, no more HR department to harass him about compliance, no more benefits, or pee tests, or training. What these guys are offering the big trucking companies is very, very lucrative. Especially that part about training.

Many of you are well aware that the trucking industry, for the better part of four decades now, has a major driver retention problem. They call it a shortage, but all of us here know what the shortages really are - of money, of respect for our time, of respect in general, right?

Well, every single Autonomous company is selling their platforms using the driver shortage myth, and the investment prospectus for all of these companies reference that same myth, directly from the people who have been propagating it the most - our friends at the American Trucking Association.

As you can see, autonomous trucks are just another in a long line of gimmicks that the industry would rather use to cover up its retention problem. They have tried to subsidize the sweeping of welfare cases off the streets and into trucks, they have allowed foreigners to run indentured servant scams on their own in order to keep rates in the basement, they haven’t bothered to solve detention to try and free up capacity or to make better use of our time, oh no, they have done everything possible to not fix this problem correctly … and now they just might have fixed it for good with these robot trucks, or so they claim.

When are these trucks going to hit the roads, and how long until you feel the effects?

Well, they’re already on the roads in the sunbelt, and they continue to refine the LIDAR systems which guide them to the point that sooner or later they will be able to operate in the more inclement weather of the north.

But that’s just operational - there are other factors to consider, including insurance, cybersecurity, security on the road, and wether or not various other levels of government will embrace this tech as much as the Feds have. It should be noted that the Feds are taking a very light touch towards regulating autonomous technology, unlike the very heavy hand which they use to smack us.

The autonomous companies have also been very clear about what sectors of trucking they’re capable of coming for first, and as is probably very obvious to you, that will be pin to pin interstate linehaul jobs.

What then? Maybe you pull hazmats, maybe you pull oversize, or work in some other niche market. They may be coming for those sooner than we think - there are reports Kodiak Robotics has trucks pulling frack water tankers in the Permian basin out in Texas.

I would expect everyone to start seeing a lot more drivers around a lot less seats, and then basic economics should tell you what effect you will see on wages. Let us not forget that truckers wages, on average and inflation adjusted, are half of what they were in 1980. Are the robots going to kick us while we are down? Aurora claims they will have logged 2 billion driverless miles with their platform by 2028; when you do the math, that would normally require 20,000 drivers.

In late 2022, a book came out which I would recommend all of you read called ‘Data Driven - Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance’ by a sociologist at Cornell named Karen Levy. Dr Levy took a pretty deep examination of the various systems that the state, and our employers, use to harass us and undermine our professionalism and lives on the road. It’s an excellent book, and one of the chapters in it is called ‘The Slope’, in which Dr Levy poses the question of what do our jobs and lives look like between where the trucking industry is now, and what it is going to be in the future when a great deal of the business is employing this autonomous technology.

We can see the slope all around us, with truck manufacturers and regulators imposing their fetish for ever more technological ‘controls’ on to us in the name of ‘safety’, while the regulators, and I hope some of them are here and paying attention, continue to ignore the very human and economic factors which are the prime movers behind the problems they seek to address. No amount of ‘front collision avoidance’ or ‘lane control’ or driver facing cameras can rectify a pay by mile incentive structure that runs against ELDs, or a supply chain whose distribution facilities can never seem to stop wasting our time. None of these tech fixes can do anything about the industry being constantly flooded with low quality people by a CDL Mill complex that is subsidized to the hilt by taxpayers, where no one ever asks why the United States produces 450,000 new CDLs a year. Where do all of these drivers go when they quit, and why do they quit? Deeper questions like this are much easier to ignore when corporatist rent seekers can sell you flashy new technology that doesn’t address the root of the problem.

Are autonomous trucks the answer to all of this? Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but let us be clear eyed about the problems they claim to be solving, which have very human and economic underpinnings. Many people in this town are grossly unaware of the very simple solutions which can and ought to be employed to make truckers lives easier, and make our supply chains less fragile, and also have the bonus of not costing the taxpayer any money. Let us remember that when they claim we ought to be happy about being automated off of the road.

Thank you.

Maybe I’ll see some of you at next year’s 10-4 on DC event.

Until then, and as always - questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail can be sent to me directly - gordilocks@protonmail.com