The other time I had a discussion with a railway guy who was afraid that in a few years he’d lose his job to driverless vehicles.
This is a big issue. Not the fact that autonomous vehicles are threatening jobs; they aren’t because they won’t happen. The big issue is that when it comes to technology, people sometimes worry about the wrong things.
Part of this is because the press likes a good story. Take a truck out on the road with the driver not touching the controls, call it “driverless”, and the press will be all over it. What if you are a pen-and-paper trucking company and install an ERP? Thousands of companies have done that before, so what’s the big deal?
The vast majority of businesses face much more mundane IT problems and the potential for optimization is often huge. Just concentrate on what improvements your business needs. If you think you can improve the route planning by using some probability-model-based software, by all means investigate—but don’t be confused by the “artificial intelligence” hype.