The Lorryist
Graham Brown
Working HGV driver. Builder of AI tools for the road. Writing about what automation actually means for transport.
The Lorryist
Working HGV driver. Builder of AI tools for the road. Writing about what automation actually means for transport.
On the road
I'm a truck driver based in the UK. I've spent the last several years thinking carefully about what AI and mobile technology mean for the people at the sharp end of road freight.
I've been writing on Substack as The Lorryist since 2022 — 153 articles working out the Merchant Trucker thesis from first principles. I also build tools to help me do and analyse the job.
I have over 120 hours of field recordings from real driving conditions. That's not market research. That's the job.
Mobile AI is reversing a 50-year trend. Tasks moved from cab to office when that's where the technology had to be. Now they can move back. The Merchant Trucker — full-stack trader, like the Silk Road merchants — is being rebuilt in the cab.
The truck cannot be removed. The office can. In logistics, the office is the derived demand — it exists to serve the vehicle. AI collapses that coordination layer, and the person at the point of the load captures what the office used to extract.
Level 4 autonomy means a paid person sitting idle during autonomous stretches. Economic pressure fills that idle time with higher-value tasks. AI doesn't replace the driver — it gives the driver the back office they never had.
The office exists because that's where the information was. Mobile AI doesn't just move tasks — it dissolves the information problem that required the office in the first place. GPS didn't improve paper maps; it made navigation-by-paper a category error.
The Cantillon Effect explains why drivers are underpaid for their labour. They're also not yet paid at all for their information — ground-truth operational data from the point of the load that no office can replicate. That's the real asset.
Voice-first, eyes-free AI assistant built for HGV drivers. Real-time AI in the cab — not a consumer app bolted onto a phone, but a tool designed from first principles around what a working driver actually needs. Tested in 120+ hours of real driving conditions.
Real telemetry from real driving — GPS, speed, accelerometer, gyroscope, and audio, rendered into a live HUD overlay. Built and tested on the road.
Datalogger HUD render — A30 morning run. Speed, g-force, GPS track, audio spectrum. Watch on YouTube →
Writing on Substack since 2022 — 153 articles covering the Merchant Trucker thesis, the economics of the driver shortage (Cantillon Effect applied to logistics), why AI pushes oversight toward the point of the load, and the philosophy of what the third great age of human artifice means for people who work with their hands.
Not think-tank paper. Written from inside the cab, from inside the job.