More than one-third of American adults view social media as harmful to their mental health, according to a new survey from the American Psychiatric Association. Just 5% view social media as being positive for their mental health, the survey found. Another 45% say it has both positive and negative effects.
Two-thirds of the survey’s respondents believe that social media usage is related to social isolation and loneliness. There is a strong body of research linking social media use with depression. Other studies have linked it to envy, lower self-esteem and social anxiety.
As a psychologist who has studied the perils of online interactions and has observed the effects of social media (mis)use on my clients’ lives, I have six suggestions of ways people can reduce the harm social media can do to their mental health.
1. Limit when and where you use social media
Using social media can interrupt and interfere with in-person communications. You’ll connect better with people in your life if you have certain times each day when your social media notifications are off – or your phone is even in airplane mode. Commit to not checking social media during meals with family and friends, and when playing with children or talking with a partner. Make sure social media doesn’t interfere with work, distracting you from demanding projects and conversations with colleagues. In particular, don’t keep your phone or computer in the bedroom – it disrupts your sleep.
2. Have ‘detox’ periods
Schedule regular multi-day breaks from social media. Several studies have shown that even a five-day or week-long break from Facebook can lead to lower stress and higher life satisfaction. You can also cut back without going cold turkey: Using Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat just 10 minutes a day for three weeks resulted in lower loneliness and depression. It may be difficult at first, but seek help from family and friends by publicly declaring you are on a break. And delete the apps for your favorite social media services.
3. Pay attention to what you do and how you feel
Experiment with using your favorite online platforms at different times of day and for varying lengths of time, to see how you feel during and after each session. You may find that a few short spurts help you feel better than spending 45 minutes exhaustively scrolling through a site’s feed. And if you find that going down a Facebook rabbit hole at midnight routinely leaves you depleted and feeling bad about yourself, eliminate Facebook after 10 p.m. Also note that people who use social media passively, just browsing and consuming others’ posts, feel worse than people who participate actively, posting their own material and engaging with others online. Whenever possible, focus your online interactions on people you also know offline.
4. Approach social media mindfully; ask ‘why?’
If you look at Twitter first thing in the morning, think about whether it’s to get informed about breaking news you’ll have to deal with – or if it’s a mindless habit that serves as an escape from facing the day ahead. Do you notice that you get a craving to look at Instagram whenever you’re confronted with a difficult task at work? Be brave and brutally honest with yourself. Each time you reach for your phone (or computer) to check social media, answer the hard question: Why am I doing this now? Decide whether that’s what you want your life to be about.
5. Prune
Over time, you have likely accumulated many online friends and contacts, as well as people and organizations you follow. Some content is still interesting to you, but much of it might be boring, annoying, infuriating or worse. Now is the time to unfollow, mute or hide contacts; the vast majority won’t notice. And your life will be better for it. A recent study found that information about the lives of Facebook friends affects people more negatively than other content on Facebook. People whose social media included inspirational stories experienced gratitude, vitality and awe. Pruning some “friends” and adding a few motivational or funny sites is likely to decrease the negative effects of social media.
6. Stop social media from replacing real life
Using Facebook to keep abreast of your cousin’s life as a new mother is fine, as long as you don’t neglect to visit as months pass by. Tweeting with a colleague can be engaging and fun, but make sure those interactions don’t become a substitute for talking face to face. When used thoughtfully and deliberately, social media can be a useful addition to your social life, but only a flesh-and-blood person sitting across from you can fulfill the basic human need for connection and belonging. Jelena Kecmanovic, Adjunct Professor of Psychology, Georgetown University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Climbing Mount Everest is on every adrenaline junkie’s wishlist, but Everest summiteer Kami Rita Sherpa has
checked this off his list a record amount of times. Defying all odds,
he climbed the world’s highest peak twice in a week this year – earlier
on 15 May and again on 21 May 2019 – making his number of Everest ascents 24.
Kami Rita Sherpa does it again. Breaking his own
record for most summits on Mt Everest the 49-year-old Sherpa climbed the
world’s highest mountain twice in a week– 24 times in total. Time: 6:38
am. Congratulations!! pic.twitter.com/fvJOEeCz73
24th Ascents of Mt Everest 8848m by Kami Rita Sherpa, HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR SENIOR GUIDE.
This morning 6:30 AM Kami Rita climbed the Mt Everest for 24 times
(2nd Ascents of this season) and broke his own record of 23rd Ascents!
[…]
According to the Tashi Lakpa Sherpa, MD at Seven Summit Treks, this
morning at 6:30 AM Kami Rita climbed the highest peak via South Side
with A TEAM OF INDIAN POLICE. “Guiding a team of Indian Police Mt
Everest Expedition 2019 this morning Kami Rita Sherpa climbed Mt Everest
for 24 times; he made the entire country proud, this is a golden mark
in the history of mountaineering🇳🇵 ” Sherpa added.
Kami Rita belongs to the Sherpa ethnic group native to the most mountainous regions of Nepal and the Himalayas. Many Sherpas are good mountaineers
and experts in their local area and they have long been serving as
professional guides to foreign mountaineers who want to brave the
extreme altitudes.
Kami Rita hails from Thame village in Nepal’s Solukhumbu District, known for its famous climbers. Thame has produced famous climbers including Apa Sherpa (aka Super Sherpa) who held the previous record of most Mount Everest summits and Ang Rita Sherpa who has climbed Everest 10 times without supplemental oxygen that has earned him the sobriquet ‘The Snow Leopard’.
Kami Rita climbed Everest on 13 May 1994 for the first time and has
also climbed K2 and Lhotse one time each, Manaslu twice and Cho Oyu
eight times, totalling 36 ascents of peaks over 8,000m according to
Seven Summit Treks.
After climbing Everest so many times, Kami Rita has seen the visible effects of climate change on Everest. Speaking to BBC Nepali earlier this year, Kami Rita said:
Earlier we had to climb 12-13 ladders [at Kumbu Icefall] but we can do with 3-4 these days. […]
In earlier days Camp 2 used to see a lot of snow. Now there’s only a
glacier. […] Above Balcony there used to be snow up to hips, now you see
only rocks.
Around 300 climbers have died on Everest and only a few dead bodies have been brought down. Now, the melting of ice in Everest is exposing the dead bodies buried in the snow.
Nobuaki Nagashima has Werner syndrome, which causes his body to age at super speed. This condition is teaching us more about what controls our genes, and could eventually help us find a way to slow ageing – or stop it altogether.
Nobuaki Nagashima was in his mid-20s when he began to feel like his
body was breaking down. He was based in Hokkaido, the northernmost
prefecture of Japan, where for 12 years he had been a member of the
military, vigorously practising training drills out in the snow. It
happened bit by bit – cataracts at the age of 25, pains in his hips at
28, skin problems on his leg at 30.
At 33, he was diagnosed with Werner syndrome, a disease that causes
the body to age too fast. Among other things, it shows as wrinkles,
weight loss, greying hair and balding. It’s also known to cause
hardening of the arteries, heart failure, diabetes and cancer.
I meet Nagashima under the white light of a Chiba University Hospital
room, around 25 miles west of Tokyo. A grey newsboy cap covers his
hairless head freckled with liver spots. His eyebrows are thinned to a
few wisps. Black-rimmed glasses help with his failing eyesight, his hip
joints – replaced with artificial ones after arthritis – ache as he
stands to slowly walk across the room. These ailments you might expect
to see in an 80-year-old. But Nagashima is just 43.
He tells me that he has been in and out of hospital ever since his
diagnosis. That his deteriorating health forced him to leave the
military. Nagashima has had five or six surgeries, from his toes to hips
to eyes, to treat ageing-related ailments. He’s lost 15 kilograms since
he was first diagnosed. He needs a walking stick to do a distance over a
few metres, and has a temporary job at the City Hall, going to the
office when his body will allow but working from home when it doesn’t.
He remembers driving home after his diagnosis, crying to himself.
When he told his parents, his mother apologised for not giving birth to a
stronger person. But his father told him that if he could endure this
disease, he was indeed strong, and maybe scientists would learn from
him, gaining knowledge that could help others.
Apart from the X and Y sex chromosomes, we inherit two copies of
every gene in our bodies – one from our mother and one from our father.
Werner syndrome is what’s called an autosomal recessive disorder,
meaning it only shows when a person inherits a mutated version of a gene
called WRN from both parents.
Nagashima’s parents are ageing normally. They each have one
functional copy of WRN, so their bodies don’t show any symptoms of the
disease. But he was unfortunate to have received two mutated copies of
WRN. His grandparents are still alive and as well as one might expect
for a couple in their 90s, and the family are unaware of any other
Werner cases in their family history.
WRN was discovered only in 1996, and since then there have been few
examples of Werner. As of 2008, there were only 1,487 documented cases
worldwide, with 1,128 of them in Japan.
Lest this seem like a uniquely Japanese condition, George Martin,
co-director of the International Registry of Werner Syndrome at the
University of Washington, thinks the number of actual cases globally is
around seven times higher than the numbers recorded today. He says most
cases around the world will not have come to the attention of any
physicians or registries.
The huge imbalance in Japanese cases he puts down to two factors.
First, the mountains and islands of the Japanese landscape and the
isolating effect that’s had on the population through history – people
in more isolated regions in the past were more likely to end up having
children with someone more similar to them genetically. A similar effect
is seen in the Italian island of Sardinia, which also has a cluster of
Werner cases. Second, the startling nature of the condition, and the
higher frequency with which it appears in Japan (affecting an estimated
one in a million people worldwide but one in 100,000 in Japan), means
the Japanese medical system is more aware than most when Werner syndrome
appears.
In Chiba University Hospital, they hold records of 269 clinically
diagnosed patients in total, 116 of whom are still alive. One of them is
Sachi Suga, who can only get around in a wheelchair. Her muscles are so
weak she can no longer climb in and out of the bath, which makes it
difficult to keep up the Japanese practice of ofuro, the ritual of
relaxing each night in a deep tub of steaming hot water. She used to
cook breakfast regularly for herself and her husband, but now she cannot
stand at a stove for more than a minute or two at a time. She’s
resorted to preparing quicker-to-make miso soup the night before, which
he eats before leaving for work at 5.30am.
Waif-like in a short black wig, Suga has tiny wrists as delicate as
glass, and she speaks to me in a hoarse, throaty whisper. She tells me
of the home aid worker who visits three times a week to help wrap her
ulcer-covered legs in bandages. She has terrible back and leg pain. “It
hurt so much, I wanted my legs to be cut off.” Yet on the positive side,
the 64-year-old has long surpassed the average life expectancy of
around 55 for people with Werner syndrome.
Only a handful of people with Werner currently attend Chiba.
Recently, they started a support group. “Once our conversation started, I
forgot about the pain completely,” says Suga. Nagashima says the
meetings often end with the same question: “Why do I have this disease?”
If you were to unravel the 23 pairs of chromosomes in one of your
cells you would end up with about two metres of DNA. That DNA is folded
up into a space about a 10,000th of that distance across – far more
compacted than even the tightest origami design. This compacting happens
with help from proteins called histones.
DNA, and the histones that package it up, can acquire chemical marks.
These don’t change the underlying genes, but they do have the power to
silence or to amplify a gene’s activity. Where the marks are put or what
form they take seems to be influenced by our experiences and
environment – in response to smoking or stress, for instance. Some seem
to be down to random chance, or the result of a mutation, as in cancer.
Scientists call this landscape of markings the epigenome. We do not know
yet exactly why our cells add these epigenetic marks, but some of them
seem to be connected to ageing.
Steve Horvath, professor of human genetics and biostatistics at the
University of California, Los Angeles, has used one type of these,
called methylation marks, to create an “epigenetic clock” that, he says,
looks beyond the external signs of ageing like wrinkles or grey hair,
to more accurately measure how biologically old you are. The marks can
be read from blood, urine, organ or skin tissue samples.
Horvath’s team analysed blood cells from 18 people with Werner
syndrome. It was as if the methylation marking was happening on
fast-forward: the cells had an epigenetic age notably higher than those
from a control group without Werner.
Nagashima’s and Suga’s genetic information is part of a database held
by Chiba University. There is also a Japan-wide database of Werner
syndrome and the International Registry at the University of Washington.
These registries are providing researchers with insights into how our
genes work, how they interact with the epigenome, and how that fits with
ageing as a whole.
Scientists now understand that WRN is key to how the whole cell, how
all our DNA works – in reading, copying, unfolding and repairing.
Disruption to WRN leads to widespread instability throughout the genome.
“The integrity of the DNA is altered, and you get more mutations… more
deletions and aberrations. This is all over the cells,” says George
Martin. “Big pieces are cut out and rearranged.” The abnormalities are
not just in the DNA but in the epigenetic marks around it too.
The million-dollar question is whether these marks are imprints of diseases and ageing or whether the marks cause
diseases and ageing – and ultimately death. And if the latter, could
editing or removing epigenetic marks prevent or reverse any part of
ageing or age-related disease?
Before we can even answer that, the fact is, we know relatively
little about the processes through which epigenetic marks are actually
added and why. Horvath sees methylation marks as like the face of a
clock, not necessarily the underlying mechanism that makes it tick. The
nuts and bolts may be indicated by clues like the WRN gene, and other
researchers have been getting further glimpses beneath the surface.
In 2006 and 2007, Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka published two
studies which found that putting four specific genes – now called
Yamanaka factors – into any adult cell could rewind it to an earlier,
embryonic state, a stem cell, from which it could then be turned into
any other type of cell. This method, which earned Yamanaka the Nobel
Prize, has become a mainspring for stem cell studies. But what made this
all the more interesting was that it completely reset the epigenetic
age of the cells to a prenatal stage, erasing the epigenetic marks.
Researchers replicated Yamanaka’s experiments in mice with a
condition called Hutchinson–Gilford progeria syndrome, which has similar
symptoms to Werner but only affects children (Werner is sometimes
called adult progeria). Remarkably, the mice rejuvenated briefly, but
they died within a couple of days. Totally reprogramming the cells had
also led to cancer and loss of the cells’ ability to function.
Then in 2016, scientists at the Salk Institute in California
engineered a way to partially rewind the cells of mice with progeria
using a lower dose of the Yamanaka factors for a shorter period. The
premature ageing slowed down in these mice. They not only looked
healthier and livelier than progeria mice who hadn’t had the treatment,
but their cells were also found to have fewer epigenetic marks.
Moreover, they lived
30 per cent longer than the untreated mice. When the researchers
applied this same treatment to normally ageing mice, their pancreases
and muscles also rejuvenated.
Separately, the same scientists are also using gene editing
technology on mice to add or subtract other epigenetic marks and see
what happens. They’re also trying to modify the histone proteins to see
if that can alter genes’ activity. Some of these techniques have already
shown results in reversing
diabetes, kidney disease and muscular dystrophy in mice. The team are
now trying similar experiments on rodents to see if they can reduce the
symptoms of arthritis and Parkinson’s disease.
The big question remains: is the disappearance of the epigenetic
marks related to the reversal of cell development – and possibly the
ageing of the cell – or an unrelated side-effect? Scientists are still
trying to understand how changes in epigenetic marks relate to ageing,
and how Yamanaka factors are able to reverse age-related conditions.
Horvath says that, from an epigenetic point of view, there are clear
commonalities in ageing across many regions of the body. Epigenetic
ageing in the brain is similar to that of the liver or the kidney,
showing similar patterns of methylation marks. When you look at it in
terms of these marks, he says, “ageing is actually rather
straightforward, because it’s highly reproducible in different organs”.
There’s a feverishness around the idea of resetting or reprogramming
the epigenetic clock, Horvath tells me. He sees huge potential in all of
it, but says it has the feel of a gold rush. “Everybody has a shovel in
their hand.”
Jamie Hackett, a molecular biologist at the European Molecular
Biology Laboratory in Rome, says the excitement comes from the
suggestion that you can have an influence over your genes. Previously
there was a fatalistic sense of being stuck with what you are given, and
nothing you can do about it.
Back in the Chiba hospital room, Nagashima removes one of his
high-top sneakers, which he has cushioned with insoles to make walking
more bearable.
He tells me about his former girlfriend. They had wanted to marry.
She was understanding after his diagnosis and even took a genetic test
so they could be sure they would not pass the condition on to their
kids. But when her parents discovered his condition, they disapproved.
The relationship ended.
He has a new girlfriend now. He wants to make her his life partner,
he tells me, but to do so he must get up the courage to ask for her
parents’ permission.
Nagashima slips down a brown sock, revealing a white bandage wrapped
around the sole of his swollen foot and ankles. Beneath, his skin is
raw, revealing red ulcers caused by his disease. “Itai,” he says. It
hurts. Then he smiles. “Gambatte,” he says – I will endure.
References:
Steve Horvath and colleagues say that the DNAm GrimAge estimator
(named after the Grim Reaper) is the best epigenetic predictor of
lifespan, time to heart disease, time to cancer and age at menopause.
After childhood, about two-thirds of the world’s human population loses the ability to digest milk. As far as we know, 100% of nonhuman mammals also lose this ability after weaning. The ongoing ability to digest lactose, the main sugar in milk, into adulthood is a biological abnormality.
Lactose cannot be directly absorbed in the intestinal tract and must, instead, be broken down into its two smaller component sugars by an enzyme called lactase. Normally, the activity of the gene that produces lactase, LCT, declines after infancy. New evidence suggests that this decline occurs not because the genetic code is changed, but because the DNA is chemically modified
so that the lactase gene is switched off. Such modifications that affect gene activity while leaving the DNA sequence intact are called epigenetic. The epigenetic modification that turns off the lactase gene does not happen in lactose-tolerant individuals. This new finding gives an important insight into how lactose intolerance develops with age or after trauma to the intestinal tract.
I’m a microbiologist, and I became interested in the causes of lactose intolerance because it afflicts a close friend. He is of Norwegian descent and, like most Norwegians, is genetically lactose tolerant. But, he became permanently lactose intolerant at the age of 45 after a long regimen of antibiotics.
There are other cases of people who should be able digest lactose because of their genetics, but lose that ability late in life, either spontaneously or when the small intestine is damaged by disease or other traumas. In most cases, the lactose intolerance goes away when the underlying cause is treated, but some people become permanently lactose intolerant.
It seems possible, even probable, that such trauma to the digestive tract can trigger the same epigenetic change that normally turns off the lactase gene in childhood. Scientists have found other cases of such environmentally induced epigenetic changes, although more research is needed to establish the persistence and consequences of these alterations.
Lactose intolerance is mostly due to your genes
While the ability to produce the lactase enzyme persists into adulthood in only about 35% of adults worldwide, this proportion varies widely among ethnic groups. In the U.S., the proportion of lactose-tolerant people is about 64%, reflecting the mixture of ethnic groups that populate the country.
The ability of adults to digest lactose appeared in humans relatively recently. Specific genetic changes – known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs – conveying lactase-persistence arose independently in various populations around the same time as their domestication of dairy animals. None of these SNPs are in the lactase gene itself, but instead are in a nearby region of the DNA that control its activity. Scientists have been trying to figure out how these changes exert their influence over this gene’s behavior.
Recently researchers have shown that one of the SNPs changes the level of epigenetic modification of the DNA in the lactase gene control regions. Specifically, the SNP prevents small chemical units, called methyl groups (which consist of one carbon and three hydrogen atoms) from being attached to the DNA. Methyl groups are especially important in regulating gene activity because when they are added to the DNA, they turn off the gene.
These studies imply that after early childhood, the lactase gene is usually shut off by DNA methylation. The SNPs that alter the DNA sequence in the control region, however, prevent this methylation from happening. This, in turn, results in the production of lactase because the gene is kept on.
To date, five different SNPs have been strongly associated with lactase persistence, and another 10 or so have been found in isolated populations. The estimated times of appearance of these SNPs in different cultures range from 3,000 (Tanzania) to 12,000 (Finland) years ago. That the trait persisted and spread in these populations indicates that the ability to digest milk beyond infancy had a significant selective advantage.
The symptoms of lactose intolerance include diarrhea, stomach pain, cramps, bloating and flatulence, all of which result from failure to break down lactose in the small intestine. As undigested lactose moves into the large intestine, water enters to reduce the lactose concentration, producing diarrhea. The lactose is eventually eaten by microorganisms in the large intestine, producing, as byproducts, various gases that cause bloating, cramping and flatulence.
Recent studies have shown that the symptoms of lactose intolerance can be relieved in some people by changing the population of their intestinal microbes, called the microbiome, to encourage lactose-digesting bacteria. Specifically, bacteria, called “lactic acid bacteria,” eat the lactose but produce the byproduct lactic acid instead of gas. While lactic acid has no nutritional value, it does not produce the unpleasant symptoms of lactose intolerance. This adaptation of the intestinal microbiome may be how some ancient pastoral populations with no genetic evidence of lactase persistence tolerated a dairy-rich diet.
That was superb. Foreigner is a first contact novel wrapped in a
thriller, the twist being that, this time, it’s humans that have landed
on an alien planet and having to navigate a completely alien culture.
It had been nearly five centuries since the starship
Phoenix, lost in space and desperately searching for the nearest 5G
star, had encountered the planet of the atevi. On this alien world, law
was kept by the use of registered assassination, alliances were defined
by individual loyalties not geographical borders, and war became
inevitable once humans and one faction of atevi established a working
relationship. It was a war that humans had no chance of winning on
this planet so many light years from home.
Now, nearly two hundred years after that conflict, humanity has
traded its advanced technology for peace and an island refuge that no
atevi will ever visit. Then the sole human the treaty allows into atevi
society is marked for an assassin’s bullet.
The book is split into three parts, the first two of which detail the
arrival of the starship and the first encounter between atevi and
humans. Then we get into the meat of the story, which centres on Bren
Cameron, the one human living in atevi society. Bren is a paidhi,
essentially humanity’s ambassador to the Atevi.
When Bren finds himself targeted by an assassin, he finds himself
shunted from location to location, desperately trying to understand what
is happening and who he can trust.
There are two things that really stand out here, the first of which
is the Atevi themselves. This is a truly alien race in terms of their
attitudes, their instincts and their culture, and this alienness makes
them difficult to comprehend and impossible to fully understand. This
keeps Bren permanently off balance as his human instincts are
consistently wrong.
The other thing to note is CJ Cherryh’s writing style. Once Bren is
introduced, the story is told entirely from Bren’s perspective — what
Bren doesn’t know neither does the reader and if Bren doesn’t understand
the importance of something it won’t be mentioned. This approach
demands some work from the reader in that there is much that is not
explained, but the depth of the story is such that it is well worth the
effort.
With Foreigner CJ Cherryh gives us one of the strongest explorations
of how cultures interact — and conflict — with each other that I have
read in a long time. The novel is complex, detailed and utterly gripping
and will probably bear reading again.
Late last
year, I took a road trip with my partner from our home in New Orleans,
Louisiana to Orlando, Florida and as we drove by town after town, we got
to talking about the potential effects self-driving vehicle technology
would have not only on truckers themselves, but on all the local
economies dependent on trucker salaries. Once one starts wondering about
this kind of one-two punch to America’s gut, one sees the prospects
aren’t pretty.
This is a map of the most common job in each US state in 2014.
It
should be clear at a glance just how dependent the American economy is
on truck drivers. According to the American Trucker Association, there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the US,
and an additional 5.2 million people employed within the truck-driving
industry who don’t drive the trucks. That’s 8.7 million trucking-related
jobs.
We
can’t stop there though, because the incomes received by these 8.2
million people create the jobs of others. Those 3.5 million truck
drivers driving all over the country stop regularly to eat, drink, rest,
and sleep. Entire businesses have been built around serving their wants
and needs. Think restaurants and motels as just two examples. So now
we’re talking about millions more whose employment depends on the
employment of truck drivers. But we still can’t even stop there.
Those
working in these restaurants and motels along truck-driving routes are
also consumers within their own local economies. Think about what a
server spends her paycheck and tips on in her own community, and what a
motel maid spends from her earnings into the same community. That
spending creates other paychecks in turn. So now we’re not only talking
about millions more who depend on those who depend on truck drivers, but
we’re also talking about entire small town communities full of people
who depend on all of the above in more rural areas. With any amount of
reduced consumer spending, these local economies will shrink.
One further important detail to consider is that truck drivers are well-paid. They provide a middle class income of about $40,000 per year. That’s a higher income than just about half
(46%) of all tax filers, including those of married households. They
are also greatly comprised by those without college educations. Truck
driving is just about the last job in the country to provide a solid
middle class salary without requiring a post-secondary degree. Truckers
are essentially the last remnant of an increasingly impoverished
population once gainfully employed in manufacturing before those middle
income jobs were mostly all shipped overseas.
If
we now step back and look at the big national picture, we are
potentially looking at well over 10 million American workers and their
families whose incomes depend entirely or at least partially on the
incomes of truck drivers, all of whom markedly comprise what is left of
the American middle class.
So as long as the outlook for US trucking is rosy, we’re fine, right?
The Short-Term Job Outlook of the American Trucker
The trucking industry expects to see 21% more truck driving jobs by 2020.
They also expect to see an increasing shortfall in drivers, with over
100,000 jobs open and unable to find drivers to fill them. Higher demand
than supply of truckers also points to higher pay, so for at least the
next five years, the future is looking great for truck drivers. The only
thing that could put a damper on this would be if the demand for truck
drivers were to say… drive off a sharp cliff.
That cliff is the self-driving truck.
The
technology already exists to enable trucks to drive themselves. Google
shocked the world when it announced its self-driving car it had already
driven over 100,000 miles without accident. These cars have since driven
over 1.7 million miles and have only been involved in 11 accidents, all caused by humans and not the computers. And this is mostly within metropolitan areas.
“And
as you might expect, we see more accidents per mile driven on city
streets than on freeways; we were hit 8 times in many fewer miles of
city driving.” — Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car program
So according to Google’s experience, the greater danger lies within cities and not freeways, and driving between
cities involves even fewer technological barriers than within them.
Therefore, it’s probably pretty safe to say driverless freeway travel is
even closer to our future horizon of driverless transportation. How
much closer? It has already happened.
On May 6, 2015, the first self-driving truck hit the American road in the state of Nevada.
Self-driving trucks are no longer the future. They are the present. They’re here.
“AU
010.” License plates are rarely an object of attention, but this one’s
special — the funky number is the giveaway. That’s why Daimler bigwig
Wolfgang Bernhard and Nevada governor Brian Sandoval are sharing a
stage, mugging for the phalanx of cameras, together holding the metal
rectangle that will, in just a minute, be slapped onto the world’s first
officially recognized self-driving truck.
According
to Daimler, these trucks will be in a decade-long testing phase,
racking up over a million miles before being deemed fit for adoption,
but the technology isn’t even anything all that new. There’s no
laser-radar or LIDAR like in Google’s self-driving car.
It’s just ordinary radar and cameras. The hardware itself is already
yesterday’s news. They’re just the first ones to throw them into a truck
and allow truckers to sit back and enjoy the ride, while the truck
itself does all the driving.
If
the truck needs help, it’ll alert the driver. If the driver doesn’t
respond, it’ll slowly pull over and wait for further instructions. This
is nothing fancy. This is not a truck version of KITT from Knight Rider.
This is just an example of a company and a state government getting out
of the way of technology and letting it do what it was built to do — enable us to do more with less. In the case of self-driving trucks, one big improvement in particular is fewer accidents.
In
2012 in the US, 330,000 large trucks were involved in crashes that
killed nearly 4,000 people, most of them in passenger cars. About 90
percent of those were caused by driver error.
Robot
trucks will kill far fewer people, if any, because machines don’t get
tired. Machines don’t get distracted. Machines don’t look at phones
instead of the road. Machines don’t drink alcohol or do any kind of
drugs or involve any number of things that somehow contribute to the
total number of accidents every year involving trucks. For this same
reasoning, pilots too are bound to be removed from airplanes.
Humans are dangerous behind the wheel of anything.
Robot
trucks also don’t need salaries — salaries that stand to go up because
fewer and fewer people want to be truckers. A company can buy a fleet of
self-driving trucks and never pay another human salary for driving. The
only costs will be upkeep of the machinery. No more need for health
insurance either. Self-driving trucks will also never need to stop to
rest, for any reason. Routes will take less time to complete.
All
of this means the replacement of truckers is inevitable. It is not a
matter of “if”, it’s only a matter of “when.” So the question then
becomes, how long until millions of truckers are freshly unemployed and
what happens to them and all the rest of us as a result?
The Long-Term Job Outlook of the American Trucker
First, let’s look at the potential time horizons for self-driving cars. Tesla intends to release a software update next month that will turn on “autopilot” mode, immediately allowing all Tesla Model S drivers to be driven between “San Francisco and Seattle without the driver doing anything”,
in Elon Musk’s own words. The cars actually already have the technology
to even drive from “parking lot to parking lot”, but that ability will
remain unactivated by software.
Tesla-driven
humans won’t be able to legally let their cars do all the driving, but
who are we kidding? There will be Teslas driving themselves, saving
lives in the process, and governments will need to catch up to make that
driving legal. This process is already here in 2015. So when will the
process end? When will self-driving cars conquer our roads?
According to Morgan Stanley, complete autonomous capability will be here by 2022, followed by massive market penetration by 2026 and the cars we know and love today then entirely extinct in another 20 years thereafter.
Granted, this is only one estimate of many and it’s all educated guesswork. So here are some other estimates:
Take all of these estimates together, and we’re looking at a window of massive disruption starting somewhere between2020 and 2030.
There
is no turning the wheel in prevention of driving off this cliff either.
Capitalism itself has the wheel now, and what the market wants, the
market gets. Competition will make sure of it. Tesla and Google are not
the only companies looking to develop autonomous vehicles. There are
others.
A company named Veeo Systems is developing vehicles as small as 2-seaters to as large as 70-seat buses, and will be testing them in 30 US cities by the end of 2016.
At
25 to 40 percent cheaper, the cost to ride the driverless public
transit vehicles will be significantly less expensive than traditional
buses and trains… The vehicles are electric, rechargeable and could cost
as low as $1 to $3 to run per day.
The
project is code-named Titan and the vehicle design resembles a minivan,
the Wall Street Journal reported… Apple already has technology that may
lend itself to an electric car and expertise managing a vast supply
chain. The company has long researched battery technology for use in its
iPhones, iPads and Macs. The mapping system it debuted in 2012 can be
used for navigation…
Uber
said it will develop “key long-term technologies that advance Uber’s
mission of bringing safe, reliable transportation to everyone,
everywhere,” including driverless cars, vehicle safety and mapping
services.
It’s
this last one that fully intends to transform the transportation
landscape. Uber is going all-in on self-driving vehicles to the point it
wants to entirely eliminate car ownership as a 20th century relic.
Travis
Kalanick, the CEO and founder of Uber, said at a conference last year
that he’d replace human Uber drivers with a fleet of self-driving cars
in a second. “You’re not just paying for the car — you’re paying for the
other dude in the car,” he said. “When there’s no other dude in the
car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a
vehicle.” That, he said, will “bring the cost below the cost of
ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away.”
That’s the potential of self-driving cars — the outright extinction of car ownership.
And with that, the elimination of entire industries built up around the
existence of car ownership like: mechanics, car washes, parking,
valets, body shops, rental companies, car insurance, car loans, and on
and on. Even hugely expensive and capital intensive mass-transit
infrastructure projects like streetcars and light rail can be dropped in
favor of vastly cheaper on demand robotic “transportation clouds”, and all those construction and maintenance jobs right along with it.
Big
players are already in the game. There are huge savings to be found,
huge profits to be created. Higher quality and safety is assured.
Driverless vehicles are coming, and they are coming fast.
But again, what about trucks specifically?
Any
realistic time horizon for self-driving trucks needs to look at
horizons for cars and shift those even further towards the present.
Trucks only need to be self-driven on highways. They do not need
warehouse-to-store autonomy to be disruptive. City-to-city is
sufficient. At the same time, trucks are almost entirely corporate
driven. There are market forces above and beyond private cars operating
for trucks. If there are savings to be found in eliminating truckers
from drivers seats, which there are, these savings will be sought. It’s actually really easy to find these savings right now.
Wirelessly
linked truck platoons are as simple as having a human driver drive a
truck, with multiple trucks without drivers following closely behind.
This not only saves on gas money (7% for only two trucks together),
but can immediately eliminate half of all truckers if for example
2-truck convoys became the norm. There’s no real technical obstacles to
this option. It’s a very simple use of present technology.
Basically,
the only real barrier to the immediate adoption of self-driven trucks
is purely legal in nature, not technical or economic. With self-driving
vehicles currently only road legal in a few states, many more states
need to follow suit unless autonomous vehicles are made legal at the
national level. And Sergey Brin of Google has estimated this could
happen as soon as 2017. Therefore…
The answer to the big question of “When?” for self-driving trucks is that they can essentially hit our economy at any time.
The Eve of Massive Social and Economic Disruption
Main Street USA has already taken a big hit, and increasingly so,
over the past few decades. Manufacturing has been shipped overseas to
areas where labor is far cheaper because costs of living are far
cheaper. Companies like Walmart have spread everywhere, concentrating a
reduced labor force into one-stop shopping facilities requiring fewer
total workers than what was needed with smaller, more numerous, and more
widely spread Mom & Pop type stores. Companies like Amazon have
even further concentrated this even further reduced labor force into
automated warehouse centers capable of obviating stores entirely and
shipping directly to consumers.
All
of the above means fewer ways of securing employment in fewer places,
while commerce has become more geographically concentrated and access to
money has become increasingly shifted away from the bottom and middle
of the income spectrum towards the top.
This
is what happens when good-paying jobs are eliminated, and that money
not spent on wages and salaries instead stays in the hands of owners of
capital, or is given in smaller amounts to lower-paid employees in
lower-wage jobs. Inequality grows more and more extreme and our land of
opportunity vanishes. Economic growth slows to a crawl.
This is where we’re at and this is what we face as we look towards a quickly approaching horizon of over 3 million unemployed truckersand millions more unemployed service industry workers in small towns all over the country dependent on truckers as consumers of their services.
The
removal of truckers from freeways will have an effect on today’s towns
similar to the effects the freeways themselves had on towns decades ago
that had sprung up around bypassed stretches of early highways. When the
construction of the interstate highway system replaced Route 66, things changed as drivers drove right on past these once thriving towns. The result was ghost towns like Glenrio, Texas.
With
the patience that carved the Grand Canyon over eons, nature reclaims
Glenrio, where the clock stopped with the bypass of Route 66. The
replacement of Route 66 with a four-lane superhighway that allowed
motorists to zip past rather than wander through ultimately allowed
Glenrio to decline.
With
self-driving cars and trucks, here again we face the prospect of town
after town being zipped past by people (if even present) choosing to
instead just sleep in their computer-driven vehicles. Except this time,
there is no new highway being made for businesses to relocate closer to
and new towns to emerge along. This time, as is true of the effect of technology on jobs, it’s different. This time, there’s no need for entire towns to even exist at all.
Just
as our roads a decade from now will be full of machine drivers instead
of human drivers, a 21st century economy shall be driven by human consumers,
not human workers, and these consumers must be freely given their
purchasing power. If we refuse, if we don’t provide ourselves a universal and unconditional basic incomesoon, the future is going to hit us like a truck — a truck driven solely by ourselves.
To
allow this to happen would be truly foolish, for what is the entire
purpose of technology but to free us to pursue all we wish to pursue?
Fearing the loss of jobs shouldn’t be a fear at all. It should be
welcomed. It should be freeing.
No one should be asking what we’re going to do if computers take our jobs.
We should all be asking what we get to do once freed from them.
Scott Santens writes about basic income on his blog. You can also follow him here on Medium, on Twitter, on Facebook, or on Reddit where he is a moderator for the /r/BasicIncome community of over 26,000 subscribers.
This
article was written on a crowdfunded monthly basic income. If you found
value in this article, you can support it along with all my advocacy
for basic income with a monthly patron pledge of $1+.
Special
thanks to Arjun Banker, Topher Hunt, Keith Davis, Albert Wenger, Larry
Cohen, Danielle Texeira, Paul Wicks, Liane Gale, Jan Smole, Joe
Esposito, Robert F. Greene, Martin Jordo, Victor Lau, Shane Gordon,
Paolo Narciso, Johan Grahn, Tony DeStefano, Andrew Henderson, Erhan
Altay, Bryan Herdliska, all my other funders for their support, and my
amazing partner, Katie Smith.
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