10+ years ago, I expected that self-driving trucks would be common on US highways by 2025, and self-driving would be having a large effect on the employment of long-haul truckers.

In reality, self-driving trucks are still in testing on a limited set of highways and driving conditions. The industry still wants to hire more human long-haul truckers, and is officially expected to keep doing so for some time.

I expected that long-distance trucking would have overtaken passenger cars as the "face" of self-driving vehicles; the thing that people argue about when they argue whether self-driving vehicles are safe enough, good or bad for society, etc. This has not happened. When people argue about self-driving vehicles, they argue about whether they want Waymo cars in their city.

I expected that the trucking industry would shed a lot of workers, replacing them with self-driving trucks that don't need sleep, breaks, or drug testing. I expected that this would be an vivid early example of mass job loss to AI; and in turn that this would motivate more political interest in UBI. This, too, has not happened.

(I certainly did not expect that the trucking industry in 2025 would be much more disrupted by anti-immigrant politics than by self-driving technology.)