Will ‘Spreadsheet Brain’ Ruin Trucking?
One Canadian trucker takes on the automated vehicle industry.
End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, by Gord Magill. Creed & Culture, 312 pages
Gord Magill is angry. The veteran trucker followed in the occupational footsteps of his father and grandfather, but they would barely recognize the trucking of today. Technologies like electronic logging devices and automatic transmissions have “castrated” truckers (his word, not mine); in some states, commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) are handed out like candy to poorly trained drivers; emission mandates have created endless hassle for drivers and bean-counters alike. Yet Magill is most angry about the people who have died in preventable truck crashes, a number of whom were killed by truck drivers imported from countries like India and Serbia who could barely read English road signs.
The truck driver is no longer viewed as a skilled worker, and that’s a problem for everyone on the road, Magill (an occasional American Conservative contributor) writes in his debut book, End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, published by brand-new indie outfit Creed & Culture. Part memoir, part investigation, End of the Road busts myths around industry regulations that Magill claims were created by bureaucrats with little to no understanding of what truckers do day to day. “Whether you blame Wall Street, the value-scrapers of private equity, the government, or corporate America in general, it sure seems like the goal is to replace us [truckers]—first with the indentured, and then with robots,” he writes. Magill supplements his experiences with interviews with numerous truckers as well as with industry-watchers like the trucker-turned-econ-professor Michael Belzer and the “online sleuth” Danielle Chaffin.
When most Americans picture a trucker, they picture a figure not unlike Burt Reynolds’s character in Smokey and the Bandit—maybe a little homelier, but a patriotic American, a plain talker, and a hard worker. Smokey and the Bandit was released in 1977, just three years before the industry was deregulated by the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. In Magill’s estimation, everything’s been downhill ever since: The act “fundamentally rearranged the economics of the business in such a way as to be an underlying cause of nearly every other problem seen since.”
The first of those problems is the way drivers are trained and certified. Magill blasts the “back-asswards” U.S. system that is reliant on CDL mills, which often exist not to create competent drivers but to make money off of up-front fees, in-house financing, and government subsidies. He’s driven in his native Canada, the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia, and says the States could learn from the latter two countries. “The driver-licensing regimes of Australia and New Zealand have a quasi-apprenticeship system built into them. The aspiring driver must graduate through levels of accrued experience on progressively larger equipment,” he writes. Magill cites the research of author Steve Viscelli, who concludes that many CDL training programs waste students’ time and taxpayers’ money by “throwing newbies off the deep end into long-haul trucking” (Magill’s paraphrase), causing them to leave the industry. In the industry’s view, it’s okay if only a small percentage of a driving class stays in trucking—there are always more jobseekers to sign on for the next round of classes.
Another problem is the industry’s constant refrain that the U.S. has a shortage of truck drivers. If that’s true, then it’s only because the industry has driven them out, Magill claims. The cost of living has gone up everywhere, but truck drivers’ wages have stayed stagnant. The industry has decimated its own pipeline of talent while begging for foreign workers and government money. “The more libertarian-minded and free market-oriented among us might suggest that freedom of contract and direct negotiations would achieve better rates, but why would Amazon bother if it has easy access to a pool of labor the size of the entire planet?” Magill writes. And even if well-trained truckers who are American citizens find good jobs, they sometimes realize their work has a hidden purpose: training machines to replace them.
Magill interviews an anonymous trucker working in the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry who warns that “the motoring public aren’t seen as individuals with families to protect; they’re seen as actors in the experiment.” Magill also interviews Paulette Nobles, a former driver at Hirschbach Transportation. The company added AI technology to its driver-facing cameras in 2024, Nobles says. Nobles learned that Hirschbach was partnering with AV company Aurora after she took the job.
If technological progress (i.e. autonomous vehicles) will make truck drivers obsolete, why should we care about the nitty-gritty of human driver training or most drivers’ lack of overtime pay? Citing technology researchers like the former Navy fighter pilot Missy Cummings (now an engineer and professor), Magill questions whether autonomous trucks can ever perform as well as human drivers. They’re not the future—or at least, they won’t be for a long, long time.
Magill views the current administration as a mixed bag. He praises Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for reining in non-domiciled CDLs. He appreciates that Vice President J.D. Vance pushes for reindustrialization but dings the vice president for being “hoodwinked by ad copy” from the AV industry. In a 2025 interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Vance said that he foresees AI technology moving truck drivers from long-haul to last-mile jobs. Interestingly, Magill appeals to the psychology of a truck driver to show why this solution is far from perfect: “Almost everyone who gets into trucking will tell you that part of the reason was to get away from being watched or micromanaged…. The autonomous-vehicle industry gives away how little it understands its targets by insinuating that being in a yard or office all day is a trucker’s dream job.”
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Magill competently presents statistics and anecdotes and only occasionally falls into hyperbole (he complains of personally wasting “centuries of unpaid time” waiting at loading docks). He doesn’t try to hide his strong emotions when discussing issues in trucking but sometimes veers into vitriol. Magill threatens that “maybe—just maybe—[AV companies] will find themselves spending a ton of money repairing trucks that have been subject to a twenty-first-century version of the Luddites’ smashing of the looms.” The bottom line is Magill doesn’t want the trucking industry he grew up in to change more than it already has. The more technocratic among us may find his quest quixotic, but his deep emotions around trucking serve not to negate his observations but to complement them. Magill is at his best when waxing poetic about the trucking culture of yesteryear; one longs for an entire book on the now-closed truck stops like Country Bob’s in Binghamton, New York.
The past is gone. The trucking industry will continue evolving. But Magill is right that truckers deserve a say in that evolution. As Tucker Carlson pointed out during a discussion with Ben Shapiro in 2018, being a trucker is one of the top jobs for men without college degrees. Those jobs don’t just represent a solid paycheck for one man; they represent the building blocks of a society where young people form families and contribute to their communities. But as trucking becomes less and less lucrative, young people are less likely to sign on, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that gives the AV industry all the talking points it needs.
A December 2025 Reason story titled “The Teamsters Want To Keep Transportation Costs Higher” praises the “stellar safety record” of automated vehicles. The tagline of the article is: “The union isn’t pro-growth or pro-consumer. It’s a lobby for workers.” But is the concept of a “lobby for workers” really so bad, as Reason implies? It’s thanks to worker collectives that Magill has hope for the future of trucking. He praises the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and American Truckers United as opposed to industry mouthpiece American Trucking Associations. The former represents real life; the latter represents “spreadsheet brain,” an epithet Magill employs on at least two separate occasions in End of the Road. The more we all resist total “spreadsheet brain” takeover, the better off we’ll be. As Tucker Carlson told Shapiro: “We are not servants of our economic system. We are not here to serve as shareholders. We’re human beings.”
