The North Carolina Highway Patrol has three rotating artificial intelligence devices to help track down distracted commercial vehicles. North Carolina Highway Patrol reports that it has seen an uptick in distracted truck drivers, and now the agency is using artificial intelligence devices to help crack down on the safety hazard. Distracted driving killed over 3,500 people in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. A mom who's made safe driving her passion has felt the pain from a distracted driver two separate times. "At a stop light you look around, every single person is on their phone," said Jennifer Smith, whose mother was killed by a distracted driver.

Trucking can be dangerous job – long, often tedious hours behind the wheel, the unpredictability of the weather and of course, other drivers. And yet, trucking is an essential part of supply chain. Most of those holiday gifts you might be enjoying right now got to you on a truck. So truck drivers are an essential part of our economy. The companies that hire and manage those drivers have started bringing a lot more technology into big rigs, including artificial intelligence and sometimes automation.

Economists and policymakers are becoming increasingly concerned about the effects of automation and artificial intelligence on employment--including whether some kinds of jobs will cease to exist at all. Trucking is often thought to be one of the first industries at substantial risk. The work is difficult, unsafe, and often deadly and high rates of driver turnover are a constant problem in the industry. As a result, autonomous trucks have become a site of tremendous technical innovation and investment--and some forecasters project that truck driving will be one of the first major industries to be targeted by AI-driven automation. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.

The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new era of workplace surveillance that will extend well beyond our current crisis. Companies are increasingly monitoring employees who work from home, citing worries about security concerns or the need to boost employee productivity. In Amazon warehouses and UPS delivery trucks, surveillance technologies are being built into workplace infrastructure to monitor workers' every move. In many industries, employers can easily access phone calls, texts, browser histories, emails, and even GPS locations with very little effort. These exploitative surveillance practices are rooted in a historical mistrust of workers, especially low-wage workers, that can arguably be traced back to slavery and the exploitative "scientific management" practices that emerged from it, as bosses became obsessed with tracking workers' every move to maximize productivity and profit. Earlier forms of surveillance, like in the 19th century when companies hired Pinkerton private detectives to spy on workers, required a lot of labor. But modern technological advancements mean that the cost of surveillance today is very low.

Political and tech pundits love the idea that artificial intelligence will put hundreds of thousands of truck drivers out of a job, and it's even been a centerpiece of presidential campaigns, but recent developments on the cutting edge of tech look set to deliver some exquisite poetic justice on that matter. You see, artificial intelligence is more likely to take my job, writing articles online, than yours driving trucks. That's thanks to Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), which is "an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text." Recently, GPT-3's makers have allowed people to play around with the tech, giving it writing prompts and getting back in return some pretty serviceable, though often-enough hilarious, text. After some time with GPT-3, Joe Weisenthal, host of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast and a popular markets commentators, jokingly concluded that the tech news elites speculating about the demise of manned trucking are probably in for a rude awakening.

Many Americans might not realize that driverless tractor-trailers are currently navigating the nation's highways, hitting the open road with absolutely nobody behind the wheel. Many of us have ridden in a smaller car -- like a Tesla -- that has a driverless feature, but to be in a large freight truck that is maneuvering through cities and highways is a completely different ballgame. It's the future of the industry, but the future is already here. Autonomous driving technology company TuSimple was founded in San Diego in 2015 with a mission to improve the safety and efficiency of the trucking industry. TuSimple is a developer of heavy-duty, self-driving trucks and the autonomous startup has already created a freight network along the Sun Belt from Phoenix to Houston.

Two years ago, MIT launched the Task Force on the Work of the Future, an "institute-wide" effort to study the evolution of jobs during what the college characterizes as an "age of innovation." The faculty and student research team of more than 20 members, as well as an external advisory board, published its latest brief today, focusing on the development of autonomous vehicles. It suggests fully driverless systems will take at least a decade to deploy over large areas and that expansion will happen region-by-region in specific transportation categories, resulting in variations in availability across the country. Truly autonomous vehicles require complex sensors and computers whose production volume is lower compared with even advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). And teleoperation, in which humans monitor autonomous vehicles for safety, is likely to be a "non-negligible" cost in light of research raising concerns about business models.

Lidia Yan is Co-Founder and CEO at NEXT, overseeing its vision and growth. The COVID-19 pandemic is unlike anything the logistics sector has seen. While the industry is old enough that it's been through epidemics, the global nature of today's supply chain coupled with a laser-like focus on efficiency (often "just-in-time" shipping) has created a unique set of challenges. Thus far, many of the approaches ensuring essential goods make it into the hands of those that need them have relied on the sheer willpower of the truckers, warehouse packers and port workers who are willing to brave the environment. However, behind the scenes and out of the public eye, artificial intelligence (AI) is powering hundreds of logistics decisions and overcoming thousands of external hurdles.

Day after day, Walter Diaz, an immigrant truck driver from El Salvador, steers his 18-wheeler toward the giant ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Will it take him a half hour to pick up his cargo? Or will it be as long as seven hours? Diaz is paid by the load, so he applauds the arrival of more waterfront robots, which promise to speed turnaround times at a port complex that handles about a third of the nation's imported goods. "I'm for automation," Diaz says.

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 24-year-old 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. Find us on the PBS Video App, where there are more than 250 FRONTLINE documentaries available for you to watch any time: https://to.pbs.org/FLVideoApp Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.