RoboTruckers: The Double Threat of AI for Low-Wage Work

This event took place on September 10, 2025.

 

Much attention has been paid to the risk artificial intelligence poses to employment, particularly in low-wage industries. Long-haul truck driving is perceived as a prime target for such displacement, due to the fast-developing technical capabilities of autonomous vehicles, characteristics of trucking labor, and the political economy of the industry. In most of the public rhetoric about the threat of the self-driving truck, the trucker is seen as a displaced party. He is displaced both physically and economically: removed from the cab of the truck, and from his means of economic provision. But the reality is more complicated. The intrusion of automation into the truck cab certainly presents a threat to the trucker, but the threat is not solely or even primarily experienced as displacement. The trucker is still in the cab, doing the work of truck driving-but he is joined there by intelligent systems that monitor his body directly. As more trucking firms integrate such technologies into their safety programs, truckers are not being displaced by intelligent systems so much as they are experiencing the emergence of intelligent systems as a compelled hybridization, a very intimate incursion into their work and bodies. This talk considers the dual, conflicting narratives of job replacement by robots and of bodily integration with robots, to assess the true range of AI's potential effects on low-wage work.

 

 

Karen Levy is an associate professor of information science, an associate member of the faculty at Cornell Law School, and field faculty in sociology, science and technology studies, media studies, and data science.

She researches the legal, organizational, social, and ethical aspects of data-intensive technologies, particularly the impact of data-intensive technologies on work and workers. She is interested in what happens when we use digital technologies to enforce rules and make decisions about people, particularly in contexts marked by conditions of inequality. Levy’s book, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press. She is a New America Fellow and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.