Rolling east on I-40 through New Mexico, that stretch where God ran out of ideas and just painted everything the color of old bones, this Freightliner Cascadia passes us looking like it caught a digital disease.
Sensors everywhere. Cameras sprouting from the mirrors like metal eyes. Some kind of spinning array on the roof, probably worth more than our entire rig. Cables running along the chassis like electronic veins feeding a heart that's learning to beat without a human pulse.
Two guys in the cab, young -- the kind of young that still believes technology solves more problems than it creates. The passenger has a laptop open, fingers moving across keys, probably watching data streams that translate road into numbers, reality into code.
The driver's hands hover over the wheel like he's afraid to touch it. Like maybe the truck knows something he doesn't.
"What the bloody hell is that thing?" Kalen asks in his Queensland drawl, squinting through the windshield like he's trying to decode alien spacecraft.
"That," I tell him, "is progress. Teaching trucks to drive themselves."
He lights a Marlboro and shakes his head.
"You Americans," says the Australian, blowing smoke against the glass. "Always in such a bloody hurry to replace what works perfectly fine with something complicated and expensive."
There it is. The truth from someone who sees from the outside, who doesn't carry our national obsession with fixing things that aren't necessarily broken. With automating away every human task because we can, not because we should.
"Forty years I've been driving in Australia," he continues, watching the AI truck disappear ahead of us, probably holding exactly 70 mph because that's what the algorithm says is optimal. "Never once thought, 'You know what this job needs? No humans.' But you lot can't stand the idea that something might work fine without a computer running it."
The irony hits me like a load shift on a mountain grade. I spent 30 years in IT helping birth the digital revolution. I wrote code, built systems, created solutions to problems that hadn't fully announced themselves yet.
I was part of the machine that made my own profession obsolete. Helped architect the AI systems that ate that career.
Too broke to attend a conference honoring that work: that’s how I ended up here -- in a cab with an Australian, hauling freight across New Mexico at 65 mph.
[Related: Small Fleet Champ: Last month to enter! And: Meet Mike Singleton, chronicling life OTR]
"In Australia," Kalen says, "if trucking works, we leave it alone. Fix the roads, sure. Improve the trucks, absolutely. But replace the drivers? Why? Because some tech guy in Silicon Valley thinks he can do it better?"
Pulling into a truck stop in Tucumcari, we end up across a table from Danny, pushing 70 years old, driving an ELD-exempt Peterbilt he maintains through sheer stubborn love.
"Forty years I've been doing this," Danny says, stirring sugar into coffee that tastes like burnt disappointment. "Now some computer thinks it can do what I do?"
Kalen looks at him with something close to confusion. "But why would they want to? You're good at your job. You get the freight there safely, on time?"
"Hell yes I do."
"Then what's the bloody point?"
The question cuts through all the corporate language about efficiency, safety, optimization.
What's the point of replacing something that works with something that might work, eventually, if you throw enough money at it?
"Progress," I say, but the word tastes like ash.
"B.S.," Kalen says, not unkindly. "Progress would be paying drivers better, fixing the infrastructure, treating the people who keep your economy moving with some respect. This isn't progress. This is just Americans being Americans, convinced that if it's not digital, it's not legitimate."
Danny nods like Kalen just read from scripture. "Never seen a computer that could back a trailer into a tight dock in Chicago in the snow while some jackass in a four-wheeler is trying to squeeze between you and the building."
"Or talk a suicidal driver down from a bridge over the CB," Kalen says. "Or help change a tire in a blizzard because it's what drivers do for each other. When something breaks, I can fix it on the side of the road with a wrench and some common sense. Don't need a laptop to tell me what I already know."
[Related: Trucker to Congress: Keep drivers in autonomous trucks]
I sit listening to the men, one who's made his living on American highways for 40 years, the other who crossed an ocean to see what the fuss was about. I think about those young engineers in the truck. Solving genuinely interesting technical problems without asking whether the problems needed solving in the first place.
That's always been the blind spot. This faith that technology equals progress, that automation equals improvement, that removing the human element makes things better rather than just more profitable for whoever owns the algorithm.
"You know what I don't understand about you Americans?" Kalen says as we head back to the truck. "You've got the best drivers in the world. Guys who can haul anything, anywhere, in any weather. And your response is to get rid of them."
He settles into the passenger seat and watches the highway unfold ahead of us.
"In Australia, we call that cutting off your nose to spite your bloody face."
I fire up the engine. Feel the familiar rumble of diesel and steel, three million miles of accumulated knowledge vibrating up through the frame. Think about the difference between progress and change. Between innovation and improvement. Between what we can do, and what we should.
Out there somewhere, those AI trucks are rolling through the night, learning to simulate what Danny and Kalen spent decades mastering.
The CB crackles. A driver warning about construction at the 285 junction. Another one asking about weather ahead. Voices in the dark, still human enough to need each other.
We roll a little faster, because we can.
[Related: You've backed the rig into tighter spots, right?]
The author of this story, Mike Singleton, told the story of his longest career in information technology, before he went out trucking, in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio. Listen via this link, below, wherever you get podcasts.
