Could the Rise of Artificial Intelligence Put Truckers' Jobs in Peril?

Self-driving trucks may have once seemed like a futuristic vision. But in recent years, they've begun taking to the road -- and their implications for the labor market, and long-haul truck drivers in particular, could be enormous. In the above excerpt from the new FRONTLINE documentary In the Age of AI, meet the young CEO of a self-driving truck company whose vehicles are already delivering freight from California to Arizona; an independent trucker and his wife whose livelihood could be threatened by the new tech; and a sociologist and author who's been studying the forces reshaping the trucking industry. Among them: the rise in automation, some forms of which are powered by AI -- including self-driving trucks. "The trucking industry is $740 billion a year … in many of these operations, labor's a third of that cost," Steve Viscelli, author of The Big Rig, tells FRONTLINE in the above excerpt from the film.