Nope. Self driving cars are gonna be a huge problem. I don't think many people realize that nearly 9% of the US Employed workforce has no skill other then driving a vehicle.
We'll still need people to evaluate/compare/vote whether any automated process (driving, pricing, placing, whatever) is good or not. This is where the human cannot be replaced.
Possibly big portion of the employable human population would be simply evaluators, high-level instructors, QA, real-life testing conductors, etc. Silly, but no machines can replace that yet.
Nothing except time and money, but that's a lot of people. Even occurring over a decade or more it's going to cause the wages of a lot of those trades to plummet.
The specific instance here was drivers, who in this hypothetical, will be outcompeted by self driving cars, and and naturally find themselves with more time on their hands whether they want it or not.
As to money, there are a number of trades you can learn without spending money. And there are also jobs where you get on-the-job training.
I'm not saying it won't be a problem for these people, but eventually, most if not all will adjust to the new situation and find themselves in a new job.
That's less of a problem than what happens to the spaces those people move into. Fewer jobs for more people will be the mid-range social problem for automation.
In the U.S.? - It was predicted that as jobs became automated, the population would "share the wealth" and we'd become a leisure society. What's really happened is that the economic gains have gone to a relatively small ultra-wealthy class. If things had worked as predicted, we'd have had to reduce our work week already due to a lack of work.
> we'd have had to reduce our work week already due to a lack of work.
This makes no sense.
It assumes some subset of required work. There is no required work. The work that is done is determined by demand for that work and the demand is determined by availability of resources (time, money, etc.).
If we have more resources, such as time, we won't just sit on our asses doing nothing. That makes no sense. We'll develop new desires, which will lead to new types of work. There will always be work and there will always be enough work to go around. It may be very different from the type of work we do now, but it will still be work and it will still be around.
> Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5?
Who said that every job needs to be super-duper-important and that you need to change the world with every breath you take? That's some new-age bullshit right there.
If you're getting paid, it means someone is deriving value from your work. There are no bullshit jobs.