Trucking is a fascinating industry—most of us don’t think about truckers all that much in our daily lives, but we’re unbelievably dependent on them. I don’t think most people realize just how hard these people work, under all kinds of strenuous and dangerous conditions, and for very low pay. They’re a group of workers who really prize their freedom and autonomy, but increasingly they’re under many watchful eyes—from the government, from the companies they work for, and from third parties. I got interested in trucking in 2011 when I heard that the Department of Transportation was proposing required electronic monitoring of drivers to ensure they didn’t drive beyond their legal time limits. I heard a story about it on the radio, and went to a truck stop that afternoon to see what it’d be like to try to talk to truckers about their work and lives. It was a lot of fun, and from there I was in it for the long haul.

It’s really tricky! This is sometimes referred to as the “pacing problem”—technology evolves so quickly, while law is relatively slow and reactive. So policymakers always have to balance between making rules that address the challenges raised by particular technologies but will become outdated quickly, versus making more general rules that can apply even when the technology changes. Another way I think law can keep us is by addressing the root causes of the problems that new technologies exacerbate. A lot of what we think of as technology policy problems are really much deeper issues that relate to whether people have access to opportunity or the social and economic support they need to live. So law can do a lot to address those core conditions through things like progressive economic policy, labor rights, and access to justice.

I always find it interesting that we tend to talk about the “future of work” as though it’s something far away. But the fact is that the future of work is not likely to be categorically different from the present day, and in many ways the present day is not so different from the past. Management practices have long been motivated by goals like efficiency and loss prevention, and managers have long increased oversight over workers to try to eke out some extra productivity. But there are new aspects too. For instance, increasingly, new kinds of data are being used for workplace management—including things like biometrics and location tracking—and they’re fueling new kinds of analytics, including more predictive analytics designed to forecast what workers are likely to do in the future. And these are affecting new kinds of workplaces—including mobile workplaces like truck cabs, which were previously immune to this kind of oversight.