Greg Manning feels at home rolling over the highway.
"It feels good, just get out a minute and get on the road," said Manning.
He spent close to a decade driving trucks for Texas Freight Services in Twiggs County, but when an opportunity to join the company's leadership team opened, he traded in the open road for a desk.
It's not the only thing he's seen change over his career.
He said in the past, "We had to stop, put a quarter in a in a phone and call somebody and find out where our load was going. You can do all that from the truck now."
More change could be on the horizon.
Companies across the country -- from Elon Musk's Tesla to smaller startups -- are developing technology that one day could automate much of what truckers do.
"The new tech of the driverless trucks is scary and. It's a scary thing and it puts jobs in jeopardy," he said.
Georgia lawmakers seem to be moving in that direction as well.
Last year, Governor Nathan Deal signed a law that allows self-driving cars on public roads.
However, Scott Wheeler – the truck driving program chair at Central Georgia Technical College -- says it might not be time for Georgia's roughly 1,500 truckers to worry just yet.
"Automated can get you from A-to-B, but somebody's got to back that vehicle into the loading dock and unload it and things like that, so there's always going to be the need for drivers," said Wheeler.
Many experts agree that the start and end of journeys, where drivers often must navigate smaller roads, congested traffic, and tricky loading docks, are the hardest parts to automate.
USA TODAY reports Goldman Sachs economists don't predict major trucking industry job loss in the next two decades.
Wheeler says right now many trucking companies face a very different challenge: They're struggling to find enough human drivers to keep their trucks rolling.
"The opportunities are more than they've ever been. There's a 600,000-driver shortage, minimum, right now in the United States," said Wheeler.
The news that major change is still away down the road is welcome for Greg Manning.
In a few decades, however, he says all bets are off.
"Anything's possible, I mean when you were a kid, you watched Star Trek. Now all that technology's for real," said Manning.