Introduction
Beneath it all, automation is the unglamorous process by which a society grows rich: it makes time-consuming chores into something that happens in the background without much thought, freeing people to do more with the same number of hours in a day.
Not long ago, an ordinary morning began with labor before any of the day’s real work could even begin. Water did not arrive through an open tap; it was hauled, bucket by bucket, from a well in the yard or down the road. Heat did not turn on; it was chopped and split and stacked in fall so that a winter oven could cook hot enough to bake bread, the process for which was hand grinding. A household spent itself on hundreds of tasks we no longer do—and this toil left little time or energy for anything else.
We have forgotten nearly all of it, and that forgetting is the whole point. The well became a tap. The woodpile became a dial. Each small device was a miracle, and each one handed back to ordinary people the one thing that cannot be chopped or carried: our precious time. This is how a society grows rich—not in a single stroke, or from money being dropped from the sky, but in the quiet retirement of one chore after another, until the hours once governed by the demands of survival can be spent in other ways.
Automation is merely the modern name for an ancient bargain. A necessary task consumes fewer scarce resources, leaving those resources available for another purpose. Freight automation may follow in that history. Its promise is not that trucks become glamorous. It is that moving the things we need takes less of what we have.
This report asks one question: if automation cut the cost of freight transportation by one-fifth, how much less would each good cost—first at the loading dock, and then after the saving works its way back through the supply chain? We find that a 20 percent reduction in freight costs lowers the weighted-average cost of detailed U.S. goods by about 1.04 percent under full pass-through—less for a computer or a gem stone, and much more for a sack of grain or a load of cement.
