AI's first target - driverless trains

The dockers created their own downfall. From the late 1960s several factors came together that allowed Britain to correct the imbalance of an over-powerful unionised workforce that extracted a punishing toll from the country’s commerce. Heavy duty motor transport – the artic – and a motorway network in construction meant that ports need no longer be sited in the heart of cities; ships were getting bigger and deeper draughts meant deeper water berths were needed at ports, and the world was starting to standardise on a re-usable shipping container. It not only protected goods in transit from accidental damage from handling, but from theft by tribes of rapacious dockworkers.

The final showdown came in the summer of 1970. Another national dock strike had brought the nation to a standstill, and the effects were so serious that the government proclaimed a national State of Emergency, using legislation from 1920. The army were ready to move into the docks. Reggie Maudling was the Home Secretary, at war with the TGWU’s Jack Jones. As meat prices soared in the shops, a generation in whose minds wartime rationing was still fresh had no sympathy with the cushioned stevedores. Few mourned the closure of the docks at the time. 

Train and tube drivers are following the same path of industrial self-destruction as did the dockers. Londoners have noticed that driverless DLR formations are not reduced due to drivers seeking ever greater rents from the travelling public. HM Treasury is keen to make lasting large-scale capital investments in the national infrastructure, AI is advanced to a high degree and advances in autonomous vehicle technology are already putting driverless road vehicles on the streets. You’d think that if ever there was a time for train and tube drivers to keep quiet and buckle down, this would be it. But it seems this sector of the workforce has all the instincts of a family of lemmings.

AI is far better at driving trains and controlling track possession than humans. Driverless trains can run faster and much closer together, meaning cheaper and better quality transport services for the public. And this post-Covid truculence and blackmail is just the thing to precipitate change.

No, the dockworkers didn’t really think that greenfield ports such as Felixstowe and Tilbury could ever eclipse the ports of London and Liverpool either. But they were wrong.