Retraining low-skilled workers

IMAGINE YOU ARE a 45-year-old long-distance lorry driver. You never enjoyed school and left as soon as you could, with a smattering of qualifications and no great love of learning. The job is tiring and solitary, but it does at least seem to offer decent job security: driver shortages are a perennial complaint in the industry, and the average age of the workforce is high (48 in Britain), so the shortfalls are likely to get worse. America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) says there were 1.8m truckers in 2014 and expects a 5% rise in their number by 2024. “As the economy grows, the demand for goods will increase and more truck drivers will be needed to keep supply chains moving,” predicts the BLS website, chirpily.

But the future might unfold very differently. For all the excitement over self-driving passenger cars, the freight industry is likely to adopt autonomous vehicles even faster. And according to a report in 2014 by Morgan Stanley, a bank, full automation might reduce the pool of American truck drivers by two-thirds. Those projections came hedged with caveats, and rightly so. The pace of adoption may be slowed by regulation. Drivers...