Self-Driving Cars Could Cost America's Professional Drivers Up To 25,000 Jobs a Month (cnbc.com)

The full impact of self-driving cars on society is several decades away -- but when it hits, the job losses will be substantial for American truck drivers, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs. From a report: When autonomous vehicle saturation peaks, U.S. drivers could see job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year, according to a report from Goldman Sachs Economics Research. Truck drivers, more so than bus or taxi drivers, will see the bulk of that job loss, according to the report. That makes sense, given today's employment: In 2014, there were 4 million driver jobs in the U.S., 3.1 million of which were truck drivers, Goldman said. That represents 2 percent of total employment.

Comments

It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[toonces33]

The salaries are poor as there are lots of others willing to do the job as well. The ones I think took it in the shorts are the ones that bought their own rigs.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[DontBeAMoran]

On the other hand, if they can retrofit their own rig to be self-driving, wouldn't that turn their rig into a money-maker?

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

I have my own rig and have made 200k+ for 10 years now. So go fuck yourself you liar.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[elrous0]

As someone who used to drive big rigs for my dad back in college, I can say that anyone who thinks an AI will be able to drive a modern tractor-trailer anytime soon has obviously never driven one. A tractor-trailer is about 100 times more difficult, complicated, and dangerous to drive than a regular car. And we don't even have AI's that can reliably drive cars yet. Shit, they've only just recently developed reliable automatic transmissions for those beasts.

You just show me a AI that can safely and consistently alley-dock a 62-ft trailer down some ancient one-lane road with a turn-in that the trailer can barely even clear, in a city filled with unpredictable traffic and 4-wheel drivers who HATE waiting on tractor-trailers and don't care about traffic laws.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

I don't think anyone thinks they will dock themselves soon, but it would still be a great money saver if they could park themselves at a hub and wait for a couple jockies to drive a foldable scooter out and bring them in. Eventually docks may be designed to accommodate self driven trucks rather than the other way around. I could see Amazon doing something like that.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[istartedi]

I could also see Amazon partnering with one of Musk's companies to build hyperloop for freight. It seems like building a 1-meter or even 30-cm freight pipe would be a heck of a lot easier than transporting people. 1-meter could fit almost everything they sell, and 30cm would still be useful for a lot of products. We'd get an operational test of the hyperloop concept. The train people would really sweat bullets over that one; but I'm not sure where they'd acquire the rights-of-way.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[LifesABeach]

I was thinking along the lines of what the government has been saying to the white collar ones, "go Train to be something else."

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Rick Schumann]

I have a friend whose family ran several trucking companies, and he's been driving trucks his whole life; currently driving gasoline delivery trucks.
Do these people really think it's ever going to be a good idea to have 18,000 gallons of gasoline (or any other highly flammable or explosive liquid!) driving down the road with nothing but some half-assed computer operating it? I think not.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[saloomy]

Exactly. Automating trucking (and other transportation) would be a huge boon to our economy, not a drag on it. Suppose for a moment that in one day, every truck was capable of moving itself around automatically, sans person. What do you think will happen to the cost of shipping goods? What will happen to the volume of goods moved? What does that do to the volume produced / consumed? There may be 3,000,000 truckers, but there are 300,000,000 consumers, and everyone of them benefits.

These stories are very one sided and usually portray the losing side. Just like crying for the buggy whip manufacturers when buggies got petrol-powered engines.

Food will cost less. More people can therefore afford to eat. This is a good thing.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

It depends. People keep telling me computers are far safer because they can process information faster than anyone can. I can't say I believe it is remotely that simple.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen the hastefully recruited idiots here in the oilfields that drive double-trailer crude tankers.
-I'm looking forward to the computers.

Re: It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with this. The idea has been born, but it will take a great deal of time before it fully matures or is ready for widescale implementation. I wouldn't be too worried about it for awhile, it isn't as though we are going to wake up one day and suddenly everything will be automated overnight, in spite of what the pundits say (remember that they are looking at their bank accounts, not the situation before them). It will be a process, and likely a long one with plenty of time for transition.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Rick Schumann]

'Processing information' incorrectly or inadequately hundreds of times faster than a human being can is still incorrectly processed information. The difference here is that instead of just a few people getting injured or killed (in the case of a passenger vehicle), or some sheet metal getting crumpled, dozens or maybe hundreds of people could DIE when 18000 gallons of flammable liquid is spilled all over the place and ignited.

When it comes right down to it, this whole damned subject is supposed to be about safety of human beings, and it CANNOT be about anything else. I have said for as long as this whole 'self driving car' subject has been around, that if a 'self driving' vehicle of ANY KIND cannot be AT LEAST as flawless and safe as a human vehicle operator, then it has no business operating a vehicle at all. So far all I'm seeing is this entire technology being rushed to market as fast as they possibly can, and, apparently, to hell with who might get hurt in the process. Apparently, human lives are cheap, compared to the profit to be made from this.

Re: It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

I hear you. It's almost as if I posted this. The problem is, money tends to justify things.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

So... train platforms. Probably even RORO*.

Why not just use trains? You may say "cost", but tracks last longer than roads and can carry heavier freight, so that can't be it.

(*) It stands for "roll-on, roll-off" and means that trains don't back out of the station like they would in a "terminus" station.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[wagnerrp]

I'm honestly surprised they don't dock themselves right now, at least in a secured yard at a large facility. Counter to the above example, there is no unpredictable traffic, and there's plenty of room. The math to calculate a docking maneuver isn't tough, especially at a known, mapped facility, where you can trench guide wire or broadcast local navigation.

Have the driver drop the trailer off at a gate, and a cabless electric tug picks it up and takes it to storage or a door. The biggest complication is coming up with some mechanism to manage the brake lines.

Re: It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Rick Schumann]

money tends to justify things

It absolutely, positively cannot be allowed to be about profit.

Re: It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

If it's about profit, at least don't pretend it is about saving lives.

Re: It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[ralphsiegler]

That is not the kind of place where most trucks dock. Only need to take care of the 80%

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[drinkypoo]

You just show me a AI that can safely and consistently alley-dock a 62-ft trailer down some ancient one-lane road with a turn-in that the trailer can barely even clear, in a city filled with unpredictable traffic and 4-wheel drivers who HATE waiting on tractor-trailers and don't care about traffic laws.

Hopefully they'll just ban 62' trailers from city centers and solve that problem the sensible way. Nobody should have to wait on a vehicle which is not suited to the environment just because someone found it convenient to make everyone else wait for them, and cheaper than getting multiple smaller deliveries.

Nonetheless, parking a trailer is an easy job for a computer. It's easier for the computer than it is for a human, in fact, if its sensors are worth one tenth of one crap, because it will better know where it is than you do. Indeed, automakers are starting to put a goodly portion of the necessary logic for backing a trailer into light pickups.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Snotnose]

You naive jackass. The trucks don't have to be safe. They just need to generate enough money to bribe\h\h\h\h donate money to our elected assholes\h\h\h\h\h politicians to keep them on the streets.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Dare nMc]

> cannot be AT LEAST as flawless and safe as a human vehicle operator, then it has no business operating a vehicle at all.

Leaves lots of room for computers. Doesn't have to beat the best driver in their best condition, just has to beat the average driver, the sleepy drugged up ones, the vindictive ones...

Their are many things autonomy beats your average driver at today, and getting that on the road will be a big advantage. That is obviously step one (same as light vehicles today) Get it to save sleepy drivers from leaving their lanes, get it to slow down rigs driven past their safe limits, get it to warn of hazardous drivers and conditions... Then it will be take over the low hanging jobs like clearing railway and shipping terminals. Take over long haul interstate, so one driver can can handle more miles safely. Like oil and coal power, Trucking is likely not sustainable (at least at current levels.) So it does need re worked anyway, so they will figure out what can be automated and what can be optimized, and eliminated that a computer may not be able to handle as well. Since computers can control many more variables more precisely likely that will result in trucks and docks, and containers optimized for those conditions, and removing those hard for automation.

Autonomy is already controlling bigger rigs with more precision than 90% of truck drivers today can. (3500HP mining trucks going over 50 mph with a million pounds carrying thousands of gallons maintaining 3" precision in backing, also railways, steel mills, ships.) So yes the software and hardware is not complete today for OTR, but 20 years ago most people said internet banking would never happen also.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[rwa2]

Yes, I think there will certainly still be a longtime need for driver-assist AI trucks.

Before truckers, the secretary was the most common job in almost all 50 states. Computers and word processors knocked those secretaries off their seat... just a bit.
http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...

AI should make trucking more pleasant. But it won't go away completely anytime soon... maybe just on the backhaul "trunk" networks.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear your kind of counter arguments against automated vehicles all the time. I would agree that an automated semi-truck could very well be 30 years off, if that. The problem with your thinking is that you are stuck trying to think of it in terms of 1-to-1. You are assuming that it has to be a semi-truck that gets automated, and it doesn't have to. It seems to me part of the reason why we have semi-trucks in the US is because of efficiency and the supply of truck drivers (there aren't enough).

With automated vehicles, a freighting company could reduce the size of their trucks to be a 1/3 of the size of a semi and just buy 3x that many automated vehicles. This is probably way more doable with upcoming automation than trying to automate a semi. There will probably still be some types of loads that need a semi to move it and those will be done by humans for the time being, but if companies can do the 1/3 size automation, I suspect it will eat a substantial portion of the freighting industry. Advances aren't done in leaps and bounds, they come in incremental chunks.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

Tractors are already set up to plant seed and plow fields getting with an accuracy of inches using local gis broadcasts. The only reason docking trucks isn't automated is that there is an operator already available to do it.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a very low bar. Tens of thousands of people are already killed each year by human driver error. An automated system would be easily safer.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[currently_awake]

High speed transport is only used for people, the freight takes the slow boat because cost matters more than speed.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[currently_awake]

The transport companies won't BUY automated trucks if the accident cost is higher than the labour cost it replaces. Economics is everything in business.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

If you only beat the average driver than you are creating accidents and injuries for half the people out there. If I buy an automated car, it had better be better than me. And for all you know I am the best driver in North America.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

I think the point of the OP was, human drivers don't tend to drive into a construction site with a gasoline truck because they missed a detour sign because it was splashed with mud. Obviously this would be a bad scenario with a potential for many casualties and there hasn't been much evidence so far that we can trust self-driving to that extent.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Cipheron]

Delivering gasoline in big trucks itself might become less of a thing however. *electric* self-driving cars/trucks, after all. I doubt you're going to see fleets of gasoline powered robot cars.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Cipheron]

Who' going to need so much gasoline if all the cars become electric robot cars? The whole gasoline-delivery sector would basically vanish. You didn't think that far ahead.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Cipheron]

But you're preventing more accidents that you cause. If an average driver is "50% safe", a "51% safe" AI car would prevent 1% of accidents on balance. You have to add and subtract.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Waffle Iron]

You just show me a AI that can safely and consistently alley-dock a 62-ft trailer down some ancient one-lane road with a turn-in that the trailer can barely even clear

I wouldn't use that as an example. The biggest current success story today for automated driving is parallel parking assist, available today in many high-end cars. Many if not most human drivers find parallel parking to be "really hard" compared to ordinary driving, but apparently it's a snap for a computer. Calculating turn radiuses and clearances at a crawling pace should be much easier to automate than identifying road hazards at freeway speeds.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Dare nMc]

I personally don't disagree. I prefer to be in control of my fate, even if the odds are not entirely in my favor. I do suspect the bottom half of drivers likely cause most accidents though. Also as autonomy cars become more common, they will work together more, getting safer along the way. Since the cars will follow the laws, they will not be at legal fault for the accidents that occur, and the accidents they do encounter will almost certainly be less lethal. So if they are less at fault, fewer deadly accidents, it will be better for society; even if they can't avoid some accidents that the better drivers could.

Many if's, and many more years to get their.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

Food will cost less. More people - except for former drivers - can therefore afford to eat.

FTFY

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[goose-incarnated]

On the other hand, if they can retrofit their own rig to be self-driving, wouldn't that turn their rig into a money-maker?

If the rig is self-driving, why would a company hire a person to own the truck that drives itself?

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're not employing people, it's much easier to mandate trucks are off the road between 7:30am and 9am. Your driver-less truck just pulls to some designated siding (maybe some recharging station in a few years when electric trucks are a thing). The cost to the delivery business is low (no wasted wages), and the benefit to society is high (freer moving traffic at rush hour). All automatic, no person sat idle waiting for the time to tick on.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[SuperDre]

Don't count on anything getting cheaper, lower costs only means higher profits.
With the current rate of automisation due to robotics and AI we really need to look for another way of life, this 'work for money to be able to live' just isn't sustainable anymore in 1 or 2 decades.
We are actually already too late and a lot of people will suffer due to our unwillingness to look forward and deal with this problem.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[silentcoder]

And don't forget - if you choose NOT to freeze to death, Jeff Sessions believes that's grounds for firing you !

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[silentcoder]

How many of them do you think *own* the rigs they drive ? Because it's incredibly few.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[silentcoder]

If you're beating the average driver you're cutting accidents in half.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[lifeisshort]

If lower costs only means higher profits, why today we have available supercomputers in our pockets for less than a keyboard used to sell?

I remember an offer for a computer system in the early 1990s, whereas the keyboard was priced, no kidding, 110 pounds.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Highdude702]

You realize a whole lot more than cars use gasoline for power right? I dont see a Self Driving Dirt bike popping up any time soon.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[SuperDre]

Yes you are right with products like that (even though a real decent keyboard is still quite expensive).. But a bottle of coca cola (or a big mac) has only increased in price during the last 50 years, not decreased, and the productionline for creating those foodproducts have been bettered so it's cheaper for them to create the products..

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll just have to worry about someone hijacking that truck, so they will need security guards instead.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[houghi]

There may be 3,000,000 truckers, but there are 300,000,000 consumers, and everyone of them benefits.

Let us assume that the AI costs nothing and is included in the price of a new truck. Also assume all the other amounts are correct. Now let us do the calculations.
The trucker adds 5 cents to the product. So we remove the trucker. What do you think will happen with those 5 cents? You will not get your goods 5 cents cheaper. If anything you are lucky to get 2.5 cents cheaper stuff. The rest will be taken as profit to pay out the CxO people and shareholders so they can buy a new car.

So the 3.000.000 truckers are out of a job and 100 CEOs get a great bonus.

So what you say is true if we shoot those 3.000.000 people. Otherwise? Not so much.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[conquistadorst]

Yes you are right with products like that (even though a real decent keyboard is still quite expensive).. But a bottle of coca cola (or a big mac) has only increased in price during the last 50 years, not decreased, and the productionline for creating those foodproducts have been bettered so it's cheaper for them to create the products..

I don't know, maybe inflation? Inflation is very destructive to the value of currency over long periods of time, like 50 years. Sure sounds like you're ignoring it in your calculus.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been saying this for a couple of years. Mandatory sleep regulations force trucks to be idle for a large chunk of the day. The only alternative is to use team drivers which basically doubles your personnel cost.
A good part of the driving is on the interstates, one of the easiest environments to drive in, since there are no pedestrians or bicycles. Trucking is one of the industries that is most likely to replace humans with robots first.
On the gripping hand the Teamsters Union is one of the most powerful unions in the U.S. and will do everything in their power to ensure that self-driving trucks don't happen, or if they do that a human, read that as union member, safety monitor is in the truck at all times. They may not be able to get the law to require a conscious safety driver, which would leave the status quo in place even with autonomous trucks, but I'm betting they'll try. They may even get DOT to buy off on the human safety monitor for a couple of decades to hold unemployment of their members (and reduction of their power) up for awhile.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[BadTuna]

Horse shit. The average cost of moving freight via truck averages between $1.60 - $2.10 per mile. An excellent driver with ten plus years experience will make maybe .45 per mile. The majority of drivers make less than 35.
  I work in a specialized part of this industry where an average move is $5K. Of that the driver makes around $1K.
  Do the math. ‘Trickle-Down-Economics’ has never worked in the real world. The consumer will never see that cost savings. Marketing bullshit from companies that pretend to care about you, notwithstanding.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[conquistadorst]

'Processing information' incorrectly or inadequately hundreds of times faster than a human being can is still incorrectly processed information. The difference here is that instead of just a few people getting injured or killed (in the case of a passenger vehicle), or some sheet metal getting crumpled, dozens or maybe hundreds of people could DIE when 18000 gallons of flammable liquid is spilled all over the place and ignited. When it comes right down to it, this whole damned subject is supposed to be about safety of human beings, and it CANNOT be about anything else. I have said for as long as this whole 'self driving car' subject has been around, that if a 'self driving' vehicle of ANY KIND cannot be AT LEAST as flawless and safe as a human vehicle operator, then it has no business operating a vehicle at all. So far all I'm seeing is this entire technology being rushed to market as fast as they possibly can, and, apparently, to hell with who might get hurt in the process. Apparently, human lives are cheap, compared to the profit to be made from this.

I completely agree, and most people do too. Even the ones pushing this technology make that a primary theme in many of their pitches. It's a selling point. The problem today is quite the opposite though, humans really aren't that great at driving: "Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44." (asirt.org) AI technology for self driving cars is not quite there yet but it *WILL* happen. Goldman Sachs says it's still several decades away which seems like a fairly conservative estimate compared to those who think it's 5 years away.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[conquistadorst]

That is a very low bar. Tens of thousands of people are already killed each year by human driver error. An automated system would be easily safer.

Tens of thousands??? You're way off sir: "Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44." (asirt.org)

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

Sure that's all well and good if you only have to save lives, but you also have to make a viable product that makes sense for anyone to use.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't start with dock-to-dock AI driving. Human drivers will move loaded box trailers to a pickup area, then the AI will drive it to a dock near it's final destination where another human will pick it up and do the final delivery. Long-haul will be the first thing to go while they hone in on dock-to-dock.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

We had a system in place for this in the past in the US. It was called "railroads", and we even did final-mile delivery via pneumatic tube in some places.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, It will all begin as trucks moving on their own on highways, queuing in line for a truck drivers to drive the last 10miles locally

A truck will be able to go from the east coast to the west coast, on its own, drivers will stay around their homes.

Promising, but also terryfing !

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[DontBeAMoran]

I don't know, but I was replying to toonces33 who said:

The salaries are poor as there are lots of others willing to do the job as well. The ones I think took it in the shorts are the ones that bought their own rigs.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[stoatwblr]

The benefits:

1: Fewer crashes, better fuel economy (both due to human factors such as tiredness and time between stops no longer being as critical (driver hours and fatigue both come into it)

2: It's an industry which has had a hard time recruiting enough drivers for years. It may be that a human stays with the rig for a few years as loadmaster and for final positioning, etc (or joins the rig at a waystation when it enters its destination zone), but that depends on whether a rig is doing haulage or drayage.

The "costs"

Fewer drivers - obviously - but also fewer things supporting them -roadhouses, fuel stops positioned for driver hour requirements, motels, etc. Think of all those "ghosts" along the old route 66, etc - this is as big a change as the coming of the interstates.

it's been estimated that there are about 400 million people who will be affected worldwide but it's also been estimated that white collar jobs will go before driving ones do (it's easier to automate desk jobs). Time will tell.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[stoatwblr]

"I could also see Amazon partnering with one of Musk's companies to build hyperloop for freight."

So can I. The only way to make hyperloop economic is to carry freight on it.

"It seems like building a 1-meter or even 30-cm freight pipe would be a heck of a lot easier than transporting people. "

If you have automated podule control then they should be interspersible, but the big costs in freighting revolve around repacking. Rail only became economic "again" after containerisation allowed containerwise shipping instead of mixed wagonloads.

Any transportation system which requires repacking from one type of container into another is likely doomed to economic failure from the outset. Whilst it's possible that hyperloop _could_ be based around something like LD3/4 aircraft containers it would make more sense if its loading gauge was large enough from the outset to carry outsize intermodal containers (ie, 15 foot high, 60 foot long shipping containers, not just "standard" 12 foot by 20 foot ones.)

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[stoatwblr]

Once you have the high speed system, if it's idle it costs money - and the primary cost driver - friction(*) - is mostly removed in hyperloop so the marginal cost of freight should be quite low.

Lest you think this is just a hyperloop thing, european high speed lines are being opened up for high speed freight (160km/h minimum speed) for the same reasons.

(*) For high speed trains, the vast majority of friction isn't the nose or undercarriage vs air, or even wheel vs track, it's air-skin friction on the sides, even with the highly streamlined shapes in use, but what really limits speeds turns out to be the pantograph connection (contact pressures used in the TGV speed attempts damaged the overhead lines) Pointy noses are primarily for looks and secondarily to keep the front on the ground at extreme speeds.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[stoatwblr]

"I'm honestly surprised they don't dock themselves right now, at least in a secured yard at a large facility"

There are several types of freighting, but they can be broadly broken into haulage (point to point between depots) and drayage (distribution from depots to local destinations).

The difficult places mentioned are all typical of drayage operation, not haulage - and drayage tends to be a "clock in at the depot, run deliveries, return to depot, clock out", vs haulage drivers spending days away from home at a time.

It's haulage which will see driver replacement first, but AI augmentation will make difficult drayage operations a lot easier, particularly with regard to being able to visualise obstacles and traffic in tight situations.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

But you're not taking into account the fact that some people will never get into an accident. Why would they want a car that will get them into an average amount of accidents?

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

I an appreciate the fact that there will be a point of critical mass where 98% of all cars will be able to talk to each other (security issues aside) and that they will be safer when that happens, but that will be very long in the future. By that time we might have real AI in cars any way and they may be safer individually.

Re: It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Type44Q]

Gorsuch.

Re: It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[silentcoder]

Crap. Yeah. You're right. The asswipes all look the same to me.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Whorhay]

I'm pretty sure being the best driver in America would have more to do with luck than with any kind of skill. Most drivers are average, and even those that are better than average statistically are only better as a result of having the good fortune to not have caused an accident while doing something stupid.

These days I actively try to be a safe driver. I don't use a cellphone or anything more complicated than my radio while driving. I obey speed limits generally, only speeding by 5mph on the interstates. I signal lane changes and turns well before actually taking that action. Ten years ago though I was a much more reckless driver, though you wouldn't know it by my driving record. Sure I had a few tickets, but I never caused any accidents. I chalk that up purely to luck though as there were innumerable times when disaster could have struck, even today with my much safer proclivities it would just take some bad luck to turn a second of inattention into disaster.

And that is the point of autonomous cars/vehicles. They don't rely on luck for safety, as they are on point every minuscule fraction of a second. An autonomous system can recognize a dangerous situation and start reacting long before a human driver can. They will be safer than the best human drivers by virtue of actually all following the same rules, but also by virtue of simply being faster to react.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[lsatenstein]

When you are an experienced cross-country driver, with a 53 foot (25m) trailer or two, I have my doubts that automation can replace the human brain. I do accept that on a clear road, it could supplement the human brain. Because, while the cameras and computers are looking forward, it is also scanning the motor sensors.

The automated system would have to know that truck A travelling at 105km/hr, is able to pass a truck in the right lane, travelling at 104 km/hr. Or should it. as the highway will be blocked for minutes during the passing exercise.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it has to beat the average trained long-haul driver, who will be considerably more skilled than the average driver.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

I see it the opposite way. A good driver will anticipate correctly when there is a dangerous situation and slow down to a speed that is appropriate for that situation. Good driving records don't come from luck, they come from cautious driving. By putting someone in an automated car you are removing their ability to be cautious and putting that in the hands of an automated car. Then it truly does become luck, because this car is trying to make sense of bent signs, and turned signs, and the sum total is that it is only as cautious as the average driver. So this driver is making a sacrifice. I sure hope the driver doesn't have insurance premiums go up for it, or get injured, or die.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[tehcyder]

Just like crying for the buggy whip manufacturers when buggies got petrol-powered engines.

Yep, came here for the buggy whip comment. It's amazing what a high proportion of employment in the US was apparently based on the buggy whip industry. Truly a lesson for the ages.

Re: It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

A trucker that isnt moving. Isnt being paid.

Most OTR drivers are only paid by mile driven.

So to the trans conpany there is no labor cost to an idle truck

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[pnutjam]

Until Uber trucking comes along and bribes the state lobbyists to create a law circumventing and banning all local regulations so they can "streamline" their policies and deliver in an optimal path system.

Re: It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

The drivers wage is the most trivial part og transportation costs.

Most OTR truckers , working as company drivers make between $.30 and $.50 per mile driven.
The driver often costs less than the fuel per mile.

The benefit of a driver less truck are, the saving of that $.30-$.50 per mile, sure. But more important to us as a trucking conpany, we can run an automated truck for longer streches of time. We would not have DOT down time. We also dont have health insurance to pay ( truckers are not a healthy bunch) , benefits, time off or workers comp.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[pnutjam]

Yeah, eventually, probably take as long as it took for all those Disney house of the future features to become standard... oh, wait...

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[LunaticTippy]

In certain sectors, sure. Retail, especially grocers, have very narrow margins. Shipping is a large fraction of the overhead. If shipping costs much less what it used to we can confidently expect retail prices and groceries to drop by a significant amount.

Any retailer that tried to keep prices high will quickly go under.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Khashishi]

Are you arguing that some people are perfect drivers, or that some people think that they are perfect drivers? Because the first category doesn't exist.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

Former trucker. I fully expect it to be a case where humans pick up trailers at a central depot on the outskirts of town, handle the local stuff, while AI handles the long haul aspect.
Face it, if we can turn a semi over to someone who has only spent a month learning to handle it, it really isn't that difficult. Multiple times I was driving along and thinking "Who thought I was ready to drive 30 tons of vehicle at 70mph, driving 1000 miles to places I've never even heard of before?" ... admittedly, it was normally between 3-6am, when the big black dogs are jumping over the road, but I can't take the time for a 15 minute nap on the side of the road if I am gonna make my destination on time.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[dywolf]

what do you think happens to the economy when the current 3.5 million people employed as trucks drivers are suddenly obsolete?

its a real problem and you cannot just handwave it away.
buggy whip makers did not represent 1% of the population.
truckers do.

current unemployment is hovering around 4.7%, which is 7.5 million people.
but at that number, that's mostly fluid labor, as people move around from job to job. aka, "maximum effective employment".
dumping another 3.5 million people into that pool is a potential catastrophe for the economy, as these are not fluid labor that can easily shuffle around, as their entire industry category goes away completely. 3,5 million people with an average salary of 73k, gone from the economy. that is a fuckton of lost economic activity.

besides, "buggy whip makers" is a bullshit canard anyway: they were craftsmen who made more than just buggy whips, and they simply sold more of their other products.

and the trucks already move at near peak capacity. the gains from being autonomous will almost entirely be in the saved labor costs, not from additional efficiency. the additional road time will amount to between 4-6 hours daily, as truckers already skirt/push/ignore the limits of what is legal.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Cipheron]

If you have a car that is 51% good, then sell it to half the drivers - the worst half. Not everyone needs to switch at the same time, nor are robot cars going to replace drivers purely at random. As robot cars become better, just watch, they'll start making the driver's license test more difficult to encourage worse drivers to go robotic.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Cipheron]

A dirt bike doesn't have to be "self driving" to go electric. That's a separate argument.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Cipheron]

*Electric* motorcycles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Highdude702]

Ahh yes I've seen them featured in popular mechanics. But to this date I have never seen one in the wild. I can't wait until I do. But that will make a bad dirt bike. What do you do if you get stranded in the middle of nowhere. One of the main things people do when that happens is burn some of the oil mixed gas to give a black plume so they have a chance at being helped.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Whorhay]

I don't know that interpreting road signs is going to enter in to the equation of automated cars, on a regular basis and at high speed. They will very likely rely mainly on electronic maps and GPS, with some kind of lane keeping scanning to ensure they stay on the roadway when the map is off or the GPS signal is interrupted. The only case where reading signs might be important would be for road construction or special events where the site is new and hasn't been entered into the systems that the cars get updates from. I expect that road crews will use some kind of new signage that uses radio signalling or something so that the car doesn't need to visually identify and interpret a sign.

Like I said the car has the capability to be just as or more cautious as a human driver, with a much higher reliability of maintaining that caution because it doesn't run out of patience, and on top of all that it can detect and react to a dangerous situation faster than a human can even recognize the danger. There was an article some time ago about a google car having trouble with a four way stop sign intersection. The car was basically waiting forever to take its turn to go because the human drivers at the intersection kept violating the rules of the road by either doing a rolling stop or going out of turn.

Caution is the way to avoid accidents but no human driver is capable of the level of cautiousness that a computer is. We glance at mirrors, instrument panels, and roadside distractions. We get tired and lost in our thoughts. Provided that the car doesn't BSOD it should easily outclass any human driver in safety.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[fluffernutter]

Yes but when I see a solution to how you keep this massive GPS map accurate in real time with all municipalities reporting in not just in the same month that they make changes to a sign, but at the same minute; then that will be something. Right now there is nothing.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[ArmoredDragon]

Yes, of course.

Like how switchboard operators never worked again and starved to death.
Like how computer operators never worked again and starved to death.

Obviously, the unemployment rate goes down because the people who used to work these jobs have starved to death, and of course the drivers will starve to death too, so it's not a problem.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Anonymous Coward]

I love cunts like you who start pulling out the buggy whip manufacturer analogy, but who shit bricks when indians come and take their jobs. I'm on the side of the indians if it wipes your smug arse into destitution.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[Whorhay]

So long as the car is capable of recognizing that the road conditions aren't safe for it to proceed then the worst that will happen is a line of stopped cars. At which point they should turn control over to manual or plot an alternate route. I've been using a cheapo tom-tom for around 7 years now and haven't been able to update its maps successfully for most of that time. Thus far I've never had that GPS try to route me down a road that no longer exists or has moved. I suppose speed limits could be an issue but again my tom tom usually has the speed limit identified for whatever road I'm on and I've noticed it being incorrect, and in a future where cars automatically drive at whatever speed is appropriate for conditions road side signs indicating speed limits could rapidly become obsolete. I'm sure we'll see some panic from governments which obtain significant amounts of money from traffic violations as their revenue from speed traps and such dry up.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[q4Fry]

Unless you meant to post that "More than half of all road traffic deaths for people between 15 and 44 are young adults," I question that your last sentence is remarkable. A 44 year-old is hardly a "young adult," and if the quote actually means that >50% of deaths are 15-44 year olds, I think the more surprising fact would be that anywhere near 50% of fatalities are people outside 15 and 44 years of age.

The rest of your post makes sense and is saddening.

Re:It was a hard way to make a living as it was..

[conquistadorst]

I agree the "more than half" is pretty ambiguous and leaves you craving for more information. As for 44 being a young adult, depends who you ask I guess lol. It was a direct quote though, pulled it from here: http://asirt.org/initiatives/i...

Tons of info out there on this stuff though, break it down by country, age, etc. United States does fair much better than most countries. But yeah, like you said, it still makes sense gets the point across. People often fail to remember just how dangerous cars really are. Everyone thinks they're a better than average driver. It'll never happen to me or a loved one, etc, etc, etc...

That assumes what?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would require the building of 25,000 vehicles a month.
That is a very quick ramp up.

And yet Planes and trains still require a pilot?

Re:That assumes what?

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course firing..I mean restructuring 25000 people a month. I believe it when I see The Transporter N: The Autonomous Menace coming to theaters with the cars doing kung-fu at the beach boulevards of Riviera. Wait, that was too soon.. but so will the firing be.

Re:That assumes what?

[gweihir]

For both there are options to do without. They are not cost-effective at the moment, because in both trains and planes the engineer/pilot is a lot less of a cost factor than in a car or truck.

Re:That assumes what?

[bluefoxlucid]

It's harder to fly a plane or helicopter. There are a lot of things to hit on the ground, a lot of information feeds, and a lot of decisions to make; the air is nice and clear, except for invisible turbulence, stalls, and other situations requiring massive processing of information in ways not well-documented.

To get planes to self-fly reliably, you have to make them not drop out of the sky in a stall. Pilots do that by experience, which is just knowledge and an interpretation of feedback. Since we don't have a way to explain the generalized algorithm and information set pilots use, we could, at best, use complex flight recorders and bayesian analysis to generate statistical models which attempt to use only the specific situations encountered plus a limited degree of extrapolation on variables we've identified as relevant. None of the indicators are visual; we can only pull values from temperature sensors (which are slow to react to temperature changes), accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, and stress sensors (i.e. power meters) attached to the movable parts of the plane to work out the situation. That means we have to either hope for a simple correlation between these variables or find a transformation algorithm to match them to what the pilot senses.

Cars can sense wheel rotation speed and identify when individual wheels are slipping. Accelerometers, gyroscopes, cameras, LiDAR, and prescriptive data feeds (e.g. maps, GPS) give you a pretty good sense of how the car is moving. You can tack on things like stress sensors on suspension components to model vehicular forces, and current models don't even do that--it might not even be necessary. Vehicle dynamics are pretty easy to work out from the way the car is moving now and the amount of wheel slippage; aerodynamics are negligible, so invisible forces aren't going to send your car spinning out of control or cause it to slide along the road due to a loss of traction.

As for the replacement rate, 25,000 per month isn't a lot. There are 192,000 freight trucks sold per year, or 16,000 per month. That leaves 9,000 taxi cabs or other such things.

It's not a big deal at that rate, anyway. The job turn-over is actually pretty high, and this gives a lot of recovery time. It's only 0.0166% of the workforce per month, and the adjustment rate for new contracts to push down shipping costs should pick up as soon as someone can scratch into a market--which means a freight company could even start expanding to weaken a competitor by deploying more trucks than the drivers it's eliminating and cutting its shipping pricing to attract more business. The added volume, even with the margins the same, will grow that company's cash flows and make them more capable of taking actions to gain market traction--while the competitors will have to lay off workers who they don't replace with self-driving cars.

In other words: we should see some job replacement in 2-3 months due to a slight reduction in shipping costs putting a control on consumer prices (i.e. prices rise slower than consumer wages; they'll slow their rise just a tiny bit more), but it's not going to stop the growth of unemployment at that level. It could be 6-12 months before the competition in the market really starts driving prices down, and those input costs start leading downstream businesses to price competition. We may see a full swing of 0.1%-0.2% unemployment at peak with a transition rate of 25,000.

Once that replacement rate kicks in, the rate of transition onto autonomous cars will pick up as a market imperative. It's two-fold: slightly-lower costs mean consumers can buy slightly-more, and part of that goes into increased shipping demand, which means labor on operational support, mechanics, fuel (electricity), and so forth. In total, it's still less labor in shipping, and less labor per unit shipped. Anything shipped must be sold (retail), as well, so some of the labor goes there. Even then, you've got slac

Re:That assumes what?

[BarbaraHudson]

Way less than 25,00 vehicles a month need to be built. Self-driving rigs don't have to take mandatory down time after x number of hours, can run almost 24x7x365, and easily replace 2 human-controlled rigs in terms of time efficiency. And they'll never be pulled over for drunk driving or be involved in an accident where the driver fell asleep at the wheel. So say 12,500 per month maximum.

PACCAR (DAF. Kenworth, Leyland, Peterbilt, various PACCAR country brands, Dynacraft) by itself currently produces 90% of that. Production won't be the problem.

Re:That assumes what?

[BarbaraHudson]

If it weren't for the on-board computer keeping your toy drone stable, you'd never be able to fly it. Already, computers are doing a better job of flying than humans.

Re:That assumes what?

[sycodon]

To get planes to self-fly reliably, you have to make them not drop out of the sky in a stall. Pilots do that by experience, which is just knowledge and an interpretation of feedback. Since we don't have a way to explain the generalized algorithm and information set pilots use, we could, at best, use complex flight recorders and bayesian analysis to generate statistical models which attempt to use only the specific situations encountered plus a limited degree of extrapolation on variables we've identified as relevant. None of the indicators are visual; we can only pull values from temperature sensors (which are slow to react to temperature changes), accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, and stress sensors (i.e. power meters) attached to the movable parts of the plane to work out the situation. That means we have to either hope for a simple correlation between these variables or find a transformation algorithm to match them to what the pilot senses.

I've never read so much fucking bullshit about aircraft as this train wreck of a comment. Seriously, the fucking bullshit is piled so high in that one paragraph you will never be able to dig yourself out.

Do yourself a favor and read up on the Airbus aircraft or the Boeing 777s.

Holy Fucking Shit! you are stupid. Are you for real???

The correct Face Palm for this garbage would put your hand right through the back of your head.

This is one guy who had the doctor beat him with the Stupid Stick when he came out.

Re:That assumes what?

[Leslie43]

Not 25k trucks per month, there are 3-4 shifts per day, so divide that by 3 or 4 and don't forget, these will work weekends as well and don't take vacations, so it's probably closer to 5 or 6 drivers per truck sold. I would expect closer to 5 or 6k trucks per month.

And it's only crazy until you see the math behind it. If you figure each driver at a low $40k per year (they can make more) means 120-240k per year savings, so even if the truck costs an extra 200k (which is the increased estimated cost last I saw), it's not going to take long to pay off and start saving them a LOT of money. Also automated drivers are not as hard on the trucks, meaning less maintenance and less fuel (a 1/3rd mpg increase is significant), both of which also cost a fortune on these. Now consider those cost savings over a 10 year period...

As soon as they are proven, it's a no-brainer for companies to invest in these trucks as soon as possible, which is exactly why it's a rush to be the first on the road with them.

Re:That assumes what?

[Anonymous Coward]

bluefoxlucid has a rich history of confabulating mountains of incoherent bullshit, it's quite impressive in its own right.

Re:That assumes what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I especially liked this right at the start
"the air is nice and clear, except for invisible turbulence, stalls,"

Did he say "stalls" are part of the fucking AIR?

"and other situations requiring massive processing of information in ways not well-documented."

What does this incoherent word salad even mean? The ways to process the information are not well documented (why he put a hyphen there is anyone's guess) ...in AIRCRAFT!??

An industry that uses 300 pages to document the type of pin in a connector???

There must be some sort of massive car accident or gunshot to the head in his past.

Re:That assumes what?

[Cipheron]

An AI truck can work 24 hours a day, and doesn't need to take breaks. Plus, they're going to be better at automatic routing and avoiding speed up/slow down scenarios, and fleets of such vehicles can split loads / plan routes better and with less overhead than a fleet of human-driver trucks. So probably divide that truck figure by 3-4.

Re:That assumes what?

[beckett]

. Since we don't have a way to explain the generalized algorithm and information set pilots use, we could, at best, use complex flight recorders and bayesian analysis to generate statistical models which attempt to use only the specific situations encountered plus a limited degree of extrapolation on variables we've identified as relevant.

The autonomous US Air Force X-37B is an autonomous space plane designed to spend up to 270 days in orbit at a time. It has completed four missions including autonomous landings for 225 days, 469 days, 674 days, and 718 days. Stop buying into your own hype.

Re:That assumes what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're fooling yourself if you think that planes and trains will be any different.
For some reason the meme is to point out people are better because they handle the unexpected. In real life the goal of transportation is to avoid the unexpected, and since the unexpected is rare and most accidents are caused not by an unexpected external source, but by human error, if you avoid the human error the total number of accidents go down.
Planes already are highly automated. Airliners fly primarily using an autopilot. Landing airliners using an automatic system is so common that the only reason pilots still land manually is because they are require to make so many landings per month to maintain their qualifications. If not for that it's likely almost all landings would be done using automation. If takeoffs aren't yet automated they easily could be. They are simpler than landing.
There are light rail systems that are already automated and run without an engineer. Under most circumstances heavy trains already operate beyond the capability of the engineer to see obstacles. They run the train based on signals. Green/red go/stop not because they can stop if they see something on the tracks. In most cases by the time they see it it will already take longer to stop the train than it takes to reach the obstacle. Computers could use sensors to see farther.
Human superiority is a myth, made to make humans feel better. In all but a slight minority of cases the computer is better. In the slight minority of cases the average human will still chose wrong about half of the time. But since humans also almost always overestimate their skill in doing anything most people will claim that they are the superior driver/pilot/engineer who will do better than the average slub who will crash the car/plane/train when the unexpected happens.

Re:That assumes what?

[bluefoxlucid]

Orbit is not atmosphere; and a UAV with a 14-foot wingspan isn't a passenger jet with a 196-foot wingspan.

Next would you like to claim that a goose is pretty fat and can fly, so an ostrich should obviously have no trouble getting airborne?

Re:That assumes what?

[bluefoxlucid]

Stalls aren't part of air; stalls are an event experienced due to interaction with air. Use your fucking brain.

Re:That assumes what?

[bluefoxlucid]

A toy drone doesn't have a 196-foot wingspan and isn't traveling at 700mph at 10,000-30,000 foot atmosphere.

Re:That assumes what?

[vtcodger]

"That would require the building of 25,000 vehicles a month."

Probably more like building 3000 vehicles a month and installing 22000 conversion kits.

I suspect trucking companies will replace tractors when, and only when, it costs more to keep an old tractor on the road than to replace it.

Re:That assumes what?

[sycodon]

Just kill yourself.

Re:That assumes what?

[bluefoxlucid]

Says the guy who rants about how he doesn't like the facts put in front of him but doesn't offer any explanation. Your entire counter-argument has been "you're an idiot"; to the audience, I've explained things, and you've thrown a tantrum.

Re:That assumes what?

[BarbaraHudson]

Neither is your helicopter - unless it's already exploded.

Re:That assumes what?

[bluefoxlucid]

A helicopter is a different machine with different aerodynamics due to its sheer size, mass, and altitude, too.

Your argument implies that being able to fly an RC quadcopter drone implies capability to fly a helicopter. Do you know what flying a helicopter entails?

they may as well gum the works up hell if they go

[Joe_Dragon]

they may as well gum the works up hell if they go jail as at least the will get room and board as trump wants to cut food stamps.

CIRLEJERK

[Anonymous Coward]

b..b...but Slashdot said that 95% of trips will be in self-driving cars in 5 years!!! 90% of the workforce automated in 10. Something something UBI.

trains?

[dyeazel]

We wouldn't need the thousands of self-driving trucks if the rail freight system could compete with trucking, but the deck is stacked against them.

Rail companies maintain their own "roads" and rights of way. Trucking companies buy trucks, hire drivers as cheap as possible, then turn it all loose on roads built with your tax dollars. One of my Civil Engineering prof's told us that one truck does the damage of 10,000 cars. As a highway engineer, I saw that first-hand. Then trucking companies have the gall to put stickers on the back of the trucks that say, "This truck pays an average of $5,123 dollars per year in over the road taxes." Yet they probably do 50 times that in damage.

It's time we cut off the trucking company fat cats and charged them to use the interstate roads. That would bring the rail companies up to parity. Trucking companies would just service the last few (or dozen) miles from the rail hub to the source/destination. And we all get lower taxes and less highway construction.

Re:trains?

[pak9rabid]

One of my Civil Engineering prof's told us that one truck does the damage of 10,000 cars

I second this. In south Texas a recently discovered shale formation (the Eagle Ford Shale formation) created an oil boom. This caused tons of oil-carrying trucks to just completely ruin southern portions of highway 183 to the point where it's damn near unsafe to even go the speed limit anymore.

Re:trains?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and that does not even account for the amount of damage these huge vehicles do when they crash. I think that "professional drivers" are some of the worst drivers on the road.

Re:trains?

[Tjp($)pjT]

I third this. Some studies of highways built to Interstate Highway standards in the US show cars can't wear out the main road and would take over a century to wear out bridges and other connectors. Trucks are what break roads. And in this amazing fact based world, we subsidize long haul trucking, and we are systematically dismantling over a century of right-of-way building destroying critical infrastructure. Even the military mothballs vehicles just in case... In the Seattle area, by way of example, on the east side of Lake Washington, the right-of-way for rails owned by various regional agencies have systematically, deliberately, and with no thought to the future dismantled the railbed that could be used by the current light rail effort. This will increase the cost of light rail dramatically. (not to mention that light rail is not a good economic fit for the region, they spend billions and more billions of a project doomed to eternal subsidy.) The rail system could also act as a "backup" for the tracks through Seattle to allow for needed reformation there.

No planning just money grubbing and empire building. Can't very well build an empire if someone else owns the infrastructure!

Re:trains?

[GameboyRMH]

This. It's one of the nasty little secrets of most (or maybe even all?) societies that the public subsidizes the hell out of the trucking industry. Also note that the fossil fuels sold at gas stations get shipped via truck.

Re:trains?

[Ichijo]

And some stores would locate themselves along rail spurs as they did a century ago so they wouldn't even need a truck, just a forklift.

Re:trains?

[dargaud]

Road damage goes up with the 4th power of the weight by axle. It's in civil engineering textbooks.

Re:trains?

[SlaveToTheGrind]

It's time we cut off the trucking company fat cats and charged them to use the interstate roads.

I can't believe I'm reading this on Slashdot. Only ignoramuses and greedy capitalist pigs are opposed to road neutrality....

Re:trains?

[q4Fry]

GP has a legitimate gripe, but offers a punitive tax on an already-regulated industry and does not even mention the Last Mile problem.

Re:trains?

[dyeazel]

The "punitive tax" you mention is simply charging commercial operators according to the damage that they do to public facilities. If an over-height truck hits a bridge, the trucking company is liable for the damage. We can charge by axle-weight to recoup damages to the roadway. Any regulations they currently face (max driving hours per day, max weight, etc.) are for public safety.

"Trucking companies would just service the last few (or dozen) miles from the rail hub to the source/destination." about covers the Last Mile problem.

Re:trains?

[q4Fry]

Okay, you got me. I missed the last line of your post.

I still doubt the switch to rail freight would be as beneficial as you claim, though. Trains would have to stop more often for loading and unloading, driving down their efficiency, and container routing would be a nontrivial problem. To top it off, there would still be lorries running back and forth between distribution nodes and container termini, even if total miles driven were reduced. I suspect (though I am no highway engineer) that those are the roads most people spend the most time on.

Having a highway system is a public good, and I think an argument can be made that decentralized freight is a great big part of that good. I fully accept that lorries deteriorate the roads more quickly than passenger vehicles, but I still disagree with your "trucking company fat cat" tax.

Rest stop parking full, try the next one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Will robots have to stop every 500 miles and sleep at the rest stops?

Re: Rest stop parking full, try the next one.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Nor will they be blamed for any accidents they are involved in. Your self driving vehicle will have more rights than a human who used to drive a truck. People are superfluous and carry disease and might have bad thoughts. What matters are systems. Bueacracy, spread sheets and alogorithms are the natural successor to humanity. Now get back to work. Big data is showing that you are slacking off

Re: Rest stop parking full, try the next one.

[Cipheron]

Back to work doing what exactly? That won't be a good use of big data.

Horrors!

[MrLogic17]

The advent of horseless carriages will cost the jobs of thousand of stable boys and blacksmiths!
The end of the economy is nigh, and this time it's different!

Re:Horrors!

[bluefoxlucid]

I know nobody likes to read 90-paragraph essays and would rather do knee-jerk reactions either forwards or (as you did) in satire, but I still prefer to do a full accounting to justify the current position.

The tl;dr is that a rapid technological deployment will cause a terrible recession due to unemploying several percentage points of the workforce and driving the remainder to tighten their wallets, creating further unemployment; while a slow technological deployment will cause hardly a whimper, and just drive up consumer wealth.

25,000 jobs exchanged per month is a slow, gradual, easy deployment. We probably won't even notice. We'll notice so little that we'll get a few percentage points richer and still complain that we're poorer and the rich are taking all the money, even as we buy more junk, buy bigger houses, get better healthcare, and generally push up the living conditions of the middle- and lower-classes.

(Seriously, nobody cares about the explosive growth of middle- and lower-class wealth in the past 30 years; whenever I've backed someone into a corner pointing out all the things we buy now and the sheer quantity of consumption on which we live, they defect to an argument that material purchasing power isn't wealth in a conversation about the rich supposedly taking all the material purchasing power. I'm too stubborn to accept that complex, abstract concepts are hard to argue because people can't be forced to look directly at broad effects; if you can't hold up a rock and a grape and drop both to show the rock doesn't fall faster than the grape, they'll just ignore what you're saying and substitute their own imaginative fantasy for facts.)

Re:Horrors!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, 25K jobs a month is actually quite high. Not fatally so, but "won't even notice" is an overstatement.

More practically, there are few jobs that are going to be new ones created. Unlike cars replacing horses, there is no network of auto repair and service stations and everything else that will fill in the gaps. Even places like Auto body shops will take a hit (fewer accidents), etc. There is just nothing out there that's going to suck up three million unemployed people, and it's going to happen fast (trucking is low margin, and anybody who doesn't quickly go autonomous is going out of business).

Automation is already in the slow process of replacing many jobs, which goes a long way to explaining the persistent employment issues that we have, even if they aren't a big deal from a macro perspective. But throwing three million more people into the unemployment line with little hope of new options?

I'm not saying the sky is falling, but I'd suggest not dismissing it.

Re:Horrors!

[Cipheron]

We're not the stable boys, we're the horses.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Another category of deplorables about to be obsoleted out of existence. The triumph of the Beautiful People is at hand at last. Soon Utopia will be a reality.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Your delusions will never become reality. Force it, and they'll have your head on a pike.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with all of the gloom and doom when it comes to robotics taking over human jobs? Is it a fetish? Are there people reading this shit and masturbating?

Re:Why?

[bluefoxlucid]

It's a complex economical issue that demonstrates that common sense is a logical fallacy, especially when dealing with large and complex systems. As such, it gets stupid people screaming for protection from something they think will hurt them.

Slashdot, like everywhere else, is full of self-indulgent idiots. Even rednecks have complex skills and knowledge other people don't; those of us with more-refined careers, better education, and all kinds of justifications about how smart we are like to forget that anyone without our particular technical skill has some other difficult skill (accounting, etc.). All sides think the others are full of morons and that their own ideals are perfect; we all then proceed to mindlessly throw out baseless and damaged opinions about things we don't understand.

I like economics because it's complex. Economics isn't about having read a book on economic systems; it's about thinking, analyzing, and conjecturing. Generally, in all non-economist circles, economics becomes a political topic where people grab a few choice axioms to demonstrate their position--or just shoot from the hip.

Look at the two opposing arguments. If you replace a man with a machine, then you've eliminated the man's job (forever). Alternately, if you replace a man with a machine, then you've created jobs for people to make machines. Neither is correct.

If you replace a man with a machine, then you've replaced a set of labor-hours to produce a thing with a set of fewer labor-hours to produce the same things. You get fewer machinists and machine operators than people replaced by the machines. The jobs lost to this re-distribute, typically such that you get some machinists, more machines producing more of the things for a lower cost (and price) than before, and jobs doing other things entirely.

That's also complex, takes time to fully render (there aren't and can't be replacement jobs the day jobs are eliminated by new technology because the full of downstream economic effects have to cut through all pressures holding them back), and can happen in a bunch of different ways. Slow technological replacement causes negligible unemployment increases before job replacement kicks in and puts us back on stable footing; rapid replacement causes rapid unemployment build-up and recessions.

Nobody cares. What they care about is the group of people on their side--the luddites and the technophiles. They care that a bunch of people agree with whichever wrong-headed, overly-simplistic ideal they're clinging to.

As a media outlet, if you can scare people, you can get them to come back to you for more news. The ability to see threats is the ability to avoid threats. News outlets that frighten you with terrifying news are perceived as protecting you from harm. They're your look-outs. Bad analysis and sloppy reporting to imply a threat gets you more viewers and more ad revenue.

Re:Why?

[BarbaraHudson]

What's with all of the gloom and doom when it comes to robotics taking over human jobs? Is it a fetish? Are there people reading this shit and masturbating?

Yes, they're the acolytes of Ayn Rand. This is a libertarian wet dream.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the basement dwellers think this will be the thing that finally causes the middle class to awaken to class consciousness, and flip the economy to Karl Marx's fantasy.

Re:Why?

[__aaclcg7560]

When I was a kid it was acid rain, population explosion and nuclear annihilation.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

" those of us with more-refined careers, better education, "

Speaking of which, care to explain your ... interesting... use of hyphens? This isn't the first time you joined words that didn't need joining, care to explain?

Re:Why?

[silentcoder]

And the ONLY reason ALL THREE did NOT kill you is because of the warnings of the threats they hold - those warnings lead to interventions (some technological, some regulatory, some a combination of both) which changed the conditions and prevented them from happening.

When a scientist says "If X then Y" and you change X and Y doesn't happen - it makes the scientist RIGHT not wrong.

You can ONLY claim he was wrong if Y fails to happen after NOBODY DID ANYTHING ABOUT X.

Nobody just said "Acid rain will destroy all our crops" - they said "Acid rain is caused by polutants (and here follows a list of the biggest problems), and if we don't reduce or end those polutants then acid rain will cause severe damage"
So we reduced those polutants - and acid rain was largely averted.

Scientists warned that CFCs were harming the Ozone layer which could have serious negative effects on human health, laws were made to ban CFCs, new technologies developed to replace them - and the problem was averted and eventually solved.

Scientists discovered a problem with the long habit in many computer designs of storing the century as a 2-digit number, a problem that would hit peak-damage as we moved into a new century. They warned. Huge numbers of technologists from engineers to sysadmins spent years working long hours to implement ways to avert the problem - by replacing hardware with models that did store 4-digit centuries, and upgrading software with 4-digit modifications. It paid off - the Y2K problem was almost entirely solved - among the worst of what did happened was one 102-year old lady who had to go to court to get permission to vote because the voting machines thought she was 2 years old.

These successes PROVE the validity of the 'doomsday' predictions. Those predictions aren't made out of schadenfreude. The people making them do not WANT those scenarios to happen. They aren't making them to scare you. They are making scientific predictions: if X then Y and asking that we change X so that Y does not happen.
This history VALIDATES their approach - it proves that, given such warning, people ARE in fact capable of changing X and preventing Y and we've done it numerous times.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're trying to explain something to creimer? His brain is a doughnut!

Re:Why?

[__aaclcg7560]

You're trying to explain something to creimer?

I understood the explanation well enough, especially since I lived through those times.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

So did Terri Schiavo... You serial lying self-aggrandizing loser.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you understand the explanation in the title of the page you're on? News for Nerds, not News from the Short Bus?

Just triple your price

[jwhyche]

Just triple your price and call yourself a "luxury" service.

I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbery

[ZorinLynx]

I'm sure a lot of criminals who don't have the gall to assault a regular truck may be able to justify going after a self-driving truck, since there are no people onboard to leave behind as witnesses.

A driverless truck carrying millions of dollars worth of goods out on a lonely desert road? It'll be like a sitting (well, rolling) duck. They're going to have to have some clever defensive mechanisms installed to prevent an all out field day for thieves.

Good thing it'll never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

At least not in our lifetimes.

Re:Good thing it'll never happen

[Spy Handler]

It could happen in my lifetime (I'm assuming i'll live another 40 years). But not with the roads that we currently have.

The Nissan CEO saying it will happen by 2019 was just fantasy. AI is nowhere near good enough to handle rainy roads, icy roads, construction debris, pedestrians, basketballs rolling from the playground, etc. etc. etc. Hell, it can't even handle a gigantic 18 wheeler blocking the road because it was painted WHITE and some dude got his head decapitated in a Tesla.

In fact I don't think AI will *ever* be good enough to handle current roads. However autonomous cars taking over can still happen if the laws change and roads are retrofitted with sensors and rebuilt to exact dimensions and uniform markings, everywhere.

Maybe by the time I die of old age.

Re:Good thing it'll never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

If we manage to create machine intelligence in your lifetime, there is a whole other set of assumptions that need to happen in order for the magic of self driving vehicles to become true. First, what kind of resources will it take? Everyone foolishly assumes that machine intelligence will be able to run on a laptop, when the earliest computers occupied entire buildings. Why do we assume that one intelligent machine will result in unlimited copies of intelligent machines? And why would we want to dedicate such an amazing technological feat to the mundane task of driving a truck?

Of course it is good that you realize self driving vehicles will require intelligence of some kind, it isn't a merely a problem of having quality software, in order to drive you have to some comprehension of the world that you are in. But then we use it to drive cars?

Re:Good thing it'll never happen

[Dr_Barnowl]

They've already trialled automated truck platoons - multiple trucks in a virtual train, slipstreaming to save fuel - on the M6 motorway in the UK.

Even if the trucks can only cope on freeways / motorways with their simplicity... that eliminates the vast majority of hours required to get cargo from A to B. There are already firms starting up "last mile" drone-truck remote-piloting services, where the truck driver sits on his ass in a gaming rig and drives the truck from a staging depot just off the freeway to it's destination.

Even if they can't get the tech for THAT right - they'll just have drivers sat at the depot, maybe with a folding moped in a bag. Drive the truck to it's drop off, then to any local pickup, back to the depot where the robot takes over.

Turns trucker into a gig economy job instead of a steady middle class occupation.

Re:Good thing it'll never happen

[Dr_Barnowl]

Everyone foolishly assumes that machine intelligence will be able to run on a laptop, when the earliest computers occupied entire buildings.

nvidia just released a single-card GPU geared specifically to deep learning computing loads with 21 billion transistors in it.

The first computer I used made do with about 6,500 but still fit in a case the size of a hardback book. And that wasn't even one of the earliest ones.

George Hotz - one guy working along - hacked together a passable self-driving car with less powerful hardware. Logically speaking, the computing hardware in the Google self-drivers must.. fit in a car.

Re:Good thing it'll never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans are considered intelligent and they operate with 0 transistors. So why do you make a connection between a graphics card with 21 billion transistors and machine intelligence? If the problem of intelligence was simply one where we have a little intelligence in our transistors and we just need more of them, well then the problem was solved 20 years ago, or perhaps in the late 60's, the last time everyone thought artificial intelligence was about to be solved.

Long-haul trucking... WHY???

[knorthern knight]

Rather than have some guy spend days driving a truckload cross-country, howsabout...

* short-haul trailer from factory/port to nearest railroad yard
* have the train take the loaded trailer cross-country to the nearest railyard to final destination
* short-haul from railroad yard to warehouse or store

Re:Long-haul trucking... WHY???

[pr0fessor]

This is already an option that is in use...

Re:Long-haul trucking... WHY???

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than have some guy spend days driving a truckload cross-country, howsabout...

* short-haul trailer from factory/port to nearest railroad yard
* have the train take the loaded trailer cross-country to the nearest railyard to final destination
* short-haul from railroad yard to warehouse or store

Guys are already doing those things. You won't get (many) new jobs there. Indeed, you'll have a sudden extra bunch of applicants that's likely to force wages down.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[Anonymous Coward]

there are no people onboard to leave behind as witnesses.

Cameras make better witnesses than people and these will be loaded with cameras.

Much faster than that

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is one of those rare technologies that is going to happen faster than expected. The advantages of driverless vehicles are so enormous that, once they are available, there will be a tidal wave of implementations. In a couple decades, we will be approaching a purely driverless system. That will depend on how soon the regulatory environment changes from favoring human drivers to favoring driverless vehicles.

What went wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

In the 1950s when evil white slave owners were in charge there was optimism, and people thought machines would create a 3 hour work day. Now that we live in more modern egalitarian times, we realize that the job of people is really not important, so people need to work harder than ever to make ends meet.

It is great to live in a civilized time when women are not forced to stay at home, cook and take care of kids. Instead they get to work two minimum wage jobs to afford to send their kids to subsidized day care and feed their kids precooked food. All hail progress

Not Likely To compete with Big Boys.

[Anonymous Coward]

Current owner operators essentially buy themselves a job when they buy their truck. They almost all work for freight companies that find the customers that need something hauled. They may still be able to lease their truck to those companies, but that isn't going to pay their bills.

Re: Not Likely To compete with Big Boys.

[ralphsiegler]

A trucker has to sleep. A self driving truck owned by a trucker can work all the time between servicing

Re: Not Likely To compete with Big Boys.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which means that there will be little if any competition for trucks unless the amount of goods shipped increases. The shipping companies will not only need fewer drivers, but fewer trucks as well.

Re: Not Likely To compete with Big Boys.

[goose-incarnated]

A trucker has to sleep. A self driving truck owned by a trucker can work all the time between servicing

Why would it be owned by the trucker? Why would a business outsource their trucking when the trucks drive themselves?

Re: Not Likely To compete with Big Boys.

[Anonymous Coward]

For the same reason they do now. Because it's cheaper for them to do it this way.

Re: Not Likely To compete with Big Boys.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do trucking companies outsource today? I actually don't know the answer. While the big shipping companies, FedEx, UPS etc. generally own the trucks, and just employ drivers, many companies still rely on the owner/operator model. I don't see how changing the driver from a human to a robot would force some kind of change to this system. If the "little guy" is facing too much pressure, it could be an opportunity for an Uber-like company/network to employ trucks on an as-needed basis.

Economics 101

[mi]

The purpose of a taxi (or Uber, for that matter), or a delivery truck, is not to provide the driver with employment. The purpose is for the passenger(s) and/or cargo to get there. If that purpose can be achieved without a human driver for less money, than so be it.

Imagine, for a second, some wonderful pill being invented, that eliminated all disease. Would we seriously consider unemployment of doctors and nurses as a downside to the pill's wide adoption?

Re:Economics 101

[BarbaraHudson]

Eliminating all diseases won't eliminate the need for doctors and nurses. A hockey puck to the face will still be a disaster that needs medical attention. As will getting hit by a self-driving vehicle. Domestic and other violence. Wars. Overdoses. Transplants as knees, hips, etc. wear out. Eliminate all diseases and people who live longer will end up needing even more attention as they get older and become less capable. What are you going to do with grandpa when he's 200 years old and can't die of natural causes?

Re:Economics 101

[mi]

Eliminating all diseases won't eliminate the need for doctors and nurses.

Nor will self-driving cars eliminate all drivers. Your response is meaningless.

Re:Economics 101

[iggymanz]

It would eliminate most of them, and it would be good.

Human's can't live to be 200, by the way. The limit is less than 125 years.

Re:Economics 101

[currently_awake]

Robotic doctors and nurses will. And do a better job. Everyone could have a home robot (butler, cook, cleaner, childcare, doctor).

Re:Economics 101

[BarbaraHudson]

You'd need the same number of doctors and nurses in the long run, so it's your response that's meaningless. People not dying of diseases will end up needing a lot more medical support over their greatly extended lives. We're already seeing that with aging populations putting large demands on health care, where only 3% manage to live past 100. What happens if you eliminate diseases and this becomes commonplace? Live long enough, you'll probably need a few hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery, and treatment for everything from accidents to intentional violence, plus accidental and intentional poisoning, burns, replacement of amputated limbs lost to trauma, fire, frostbite, fractured skulls, backs, arms, legs from falls, etc.

Re:Economics 101

[BarbaraHudson]

Animals raised in disease-free environments live twice their normal lifespan, so when you posit the elimination of diseases, then a limit of 250 years is reasonable.

Re:Economics 101

[mi]

You'd need the same number of doctors and nurses in the long run

Yep, and some number of human drivers will also be needed. Heck, we still employ some horse-baggy drivers too. But we'd need drastically fewer doctors — trauma patients represent less than 5% of US care-seekers today, for example — than we have now, which is why my analogy is valid while your responses — meaningless.

Re:Economics 101

[BarbaraHudson]

You completely ignored the fact that people tend to deteriorate physically as they get older, so they need more care, and more attention from doctors and nurses. Since people should be the same as animals (they live 2x as long in disease-free environments), the concept of being disease free is not going to help reduce the demand for care.

You ignored it because you can't defeat it, which is why you concentrated on trauma.

Re:Economics 101

[iggymanz]

False, Animals might live to their maximum natural lifespan under such conditions, and some do it without being in such an environment. For example, a cow can live to almost 50 years and some have when well cared for, but there has never been a 100 year old cow, in or out of a disease free environment. Nor is it possible to have a 100 year old cow. Humans might live to near 125 year if no fatal or damaging disease contracted, but systems in the body wear out and fail anyway.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[Kjella]

I'm sure a lot of criminals who don't have the gall to assault a regular truck may be able to justify going after a self-driving truck, since there are no people onboard to leave behind as witnesses.

Well there's also nobody to intimidate. Nobody with any keys or codes to give you access to or control over the truck. My first thoughts apart from the constant cell phone/GPS tracking to alert police would be to just kill the engine, lock the brakes, give a little light and siren show and if you can't draw anyone's attention and they're really determined to break in by force before the police get there, just set off a few dye packs/stink bombs. Sure it'll ruin the cargo but zero payoff will make the highway robberies stop pretty quick.

They'll do more than take driving jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Self driving cars will do the exact opposite of what they claim they'll do: They won't make people more free, they'll make them PRISONERS who have no control over where or when they're going anywhere. The government, law enforcement, corporations, and criminal hackers will be in control of that.

Need a Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Make the vehicle and software manufactures strictly liable for mistakes made by said software.

I mean sue them into oblivion, jail them, then execute them for good measure.

Re:Need a Law

[Highdude702]

And were back at not having self driving cars/trucks then.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure a lot of criminals who don't have the gall to assault a regular truck may be able to justify going after a self-driving truck, since there are no people onboard to leave behind as witnesses.

Well there's also nobody to intimidate. Nobody with any keys or codes to give you access to or control over the truck. My first thoughts apart from the constant cell phone/GPS tracking to alert police would be to just kill the engine, lock the brakes, give a little light and siren show and if you can't draw anyone's attention and they're really determined to break in by force before the police get there, just set off a few dye packs/stink bombs. Sure it'll ruin the cargo but zero payoff will make the highway robberies stop pretty quick.

Using that logic, we should have eliminated bank robberies by now. There were 4,030 bank robberies in 2015. 4,091 if you want to include bank-related burglaries and larceny.

I don't see how this could be practical

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in an office that ships and receives a lot of goods and I don't see how autonomous trucks could be practical. People think it is easy, load up a truck with goods, send it to its destination and unload it. But a lot of paperwork goes along with that. More if it is a food product or security product as federal agencies start getting involved adding their own layers of paperwork.

At its simplest the BOL (Bill of Lading) must be signed by the truck driver. By signing, his signature guarantees that every item on the BOL has been counted and was loaded in good condition. The same is true at the receiving end, the warehouse personnel sign the driver's copy of the BOL stating that all product is present, accounted for, and in good condition. There is no real way of automating this process, the paperwork must be maintained as there are still plenty of places where the dock workers will pilfer items off of a load. We have had instances at out own facility of stuff "disappearing". We usually catch the guy doing it, but sometimes it takes a while. Now start compounding this paperwork with USDA, FDA, Homeland Security, EPA, and Hazmat organizations so full of themselves their heads can barely get in the front door. If there is no driver aboard to deal with the paperwork, shipping will grind to a stop.

Also a live driver can usually tell if the guy trying to break into his rig at a truck stop is drunk and mistaken, or actually trying to jack the load.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[rwa2]

Easy, just pay a dude to sit in the truck and provide "security". Also to take over if the AI encounters some kind of weather / construction / traffic condition that the computer can't navigate.

I sort of want to write a sci-fi about the future of mining drones. There's nothing to prevent corporations from using drones to "fight" over mineral-rich asteroids... what's to stop two different companies from sending drones to harvest from the same asteroid? Is it an act of war if one company's drone hijacks (well, "salvages") another drone's cargo? No one is out there to enforce this.

I envision a future where people are sent out to "lay claim" to asteroids and other resources. If they're alive, in only the loosest sense of the word (say cryogenically frozen) then it's clearly an act of war for a drone to come and disturb them from their slumber, which could be legally enforceable back on Earth.

Anyway, that, except for long-distance trucker drones.

Wrong Target.

[Sir Holo]

Why even talk about autonomous semi-trucks? It's stupid. Really.

Self-driving semi-trucks would still use-up our paved interstates. They would have loads of only 18 tons each. If they screw up, people get smashed into goo and their families sue.

The sensible solution is AI for TRAINS, which can haul hundreds of tons at one time. Forget about truck-drivers losing their jobs... it should be train engineers worried about losing their jobs that consist of just standing in the cabin, hitting an "I am at attention" button every couple of minutes, and occasionally confirming to destination controllers that they know which track their train has been set to stop on.

It was a tragedy to deregulate the rail-transport industry. We ended up with federally subsidized interstate highways, which are a major source of carbon-burning and plastic-microparticle emissions that harm the fabric of the natural world around us. Go back to rail! As a bonus, it is a far-easier AI problem to solve than to try and have a semi navigate congested freeways.

Oh, who cares? AI developers are not interested in the achievable. No. Oh, no. The final solution has to always be just out of reach...

so...

[JustNiz]

Maybe they should join the elevator attendants union.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[Cipheron]

Bank robberies also involve threatening humans as their main tactic, so it's not a good model for ai-truck robberies.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[Cipheron]

Note that you have there 4030 bank robberies where they accosted *people*, and you "bank-related burglaries and larceny" only adds up to another 61 cases. e.g. bank robberies are far far more effective when there are humans you can force to do it for you.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Except there are TODAY truck robberies where the perpetrators jump onto the back of a human-driven truck, smash the lock, chuck some cargo out and move on.

Self-driving trucks only have to be better than human-driven trucks, and that is not a real high bar to jump over.

(To be fair to truckers, some of what they do is highly technical, and out on the freeway I'd much rather be in with a bunch of truckers than ordinary car drivers. Truckers drive like their job depends upon it (which it does) while cars drive like they're trying to apply makeup, send text messages, and masturbate, all at the same time).

AC

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[beckett]

it doesn't matter how many cameras you put on it: that Dominos Pizza delivery robot is still going to get kicked on a daily basis.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[geekymachoman]

Not if you stop it by hacking into it, and you disable all that you mentioned.
If people are hacking cars and stealing them, why not trucks.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[Aristos Mazer]

Who says the truck will be alone? It can be accompanied by self-driving armed escort, complete with arial drone cover support (using the other self-driving vehicles like aircraft carriers). And humans may be able to log in remotely to command those defenses as needed. The future possibilities are boundless... in all vectors.

All wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

We're fixing the wrong problem. It's a hell of a lot easier to automate trains than trucks, and that moves the autonomous freight vehicles away from the human-driven commuters and travelers. If we did it right you could route freight cars across an automated rail system the same way we route packets on the internet.

Instead we're going to try to save the jobs of truck drivers, who won't be needed, and create automated trucks which are more complicated because we refuse to publicly fund rail but we'll fund roads which the trucks consume.

Re:I wonder if there will be a rise in truck robbe

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody will touch that Domino's delivery robot since it is a disgrace to call their shit-products pizza

Maybe the quality is better on the other side of the pond but here in Belgium they put really disgusting tasting cheese on it

Smokey and the Bandit Remake..

[neoRUR]

I'm sensing a Smokey and the Bandit remake, only this time with an Automated Truck...!!!!

Truck drivers dilemma?

[PlaynBass]

Perhaps a truck driver should invest in self-driving software & technology that would allow one driver to supervise a train of semi-trucks on special interstate lanes x-country & in "delivery/service" lanes in urban areas: more trucking and specialized delivery services, smaller trucks, drone delivery vehicles. Human supervisors to handle customer events...