By Matthew Benzmiller

Uber officially started using self-driving cars to transport the public in Pittsburgh last week. This has created panic for those concerned about drivers’ jobs, including the jobs of truck drivers and delivery drivers. Driverless cars even led Jim Conigliaro Jr., who founded the Independent Drivers Guild (representing 35,000 Uber drivers in the New York City area) to say that even though they don’t expect to see driverless cars in New York City soon, “they can expect we would launch an aggressive campaign...to halt such a move.”

However, self-driving cars could possibly save up to 30,000 lives a year, according to recent estimates by McKinsey & Co., which would obviously include the lives of some Uber drivers. Additionally, this saves the economy an estimated $190 billion, based on 2012 roadway crash costs.

Other critics say this is happening all too fast for the market to absorb all the unemployment. Wolf Richter of the Wolf Street blog claims 4.1 million jobs are at risk. This is misleading, because 4.1 million is just a tally that Richter made of all driving-based jobs in the US. The dishonesty stems from the implication that all of these jobs will completely evaporate now that autonomous vehicles are now available to Uber.

This will clearly not be the case, as illustrated by McKinsey & Company:

The projected increase in use of self-driving cars on the road is not as instantaneous as alarmists would have you think. Rather than acting as though 4.1 million jobs are about to be lost to driverless cars, studies should be used to come to a realistic figure at how many people will really lose their jobs and in what time frame.

Reinforcing this fact, Uber still has “safety drivers” in the front seat of the self-driving cars to account for things like bad weather. Harry Campbell, known as The RideShare Guy, echoes this sentiment saying:

Here’s the essence: drivers, especially in urban environments, are making countless split decisions often reacting to unpredictable situations. The human brain can process all this on the fly. But self-driving cars rely on programmers to try to anticipate everything that will happen in advance.

There are plenty of reasons why advances in automation should not be feared. With this in mind, what are good ways for displaced drivers to have a job in the future? Economist Dr. Walter Block, senior fellow at the Mises Institute, says the best way to employ people is for them to have jobs where they produce something of value; a task only fulfilled by the free market, not politicians or bureaucrats.

So, rather than create policies that preserve jobs that employers no longer need, government should stop meddling in the market, and there would be more employment than there currently is. Massive amounts of regulation and taxes make jobs that would otherwise be available, nonexistent because companies can’t afford to hire more employees. This cost also comes in the form of risk. Block says:

Employment protection laws, which mandate that no one can be fired without due process, are supposed to protect employees. However, if the government tells the employer that he must keep the employee no matter what, he will tend not to hire him in the first place. This law, which appears to help workers, instead keeps them from employment. And so do employment taxes and payroll taxes, which increase costs to businesses and discourage them from hiring more workers.

It is incredibly difficult to estimate the number of jobs lost due to government regulation and taxes by the nature of them having not existed. On the other hand, it is easy to see people losing their jobs to automation. Future industries and technologies are hard to predict, and even harder to predict are the jobs that come along with them.

The key to available jobs is fewer taxes and less regulation, not clinging to jobs that make businesses less cost effective.