Driverless Trucks Reach New Milestone
Please consider Automated trucking, a technical milestone that could disrupt hundreds of thousands of jobs, hits the road.
Starsky Robotics, a tech startup, may have been driving in the right lane, but they passed the competition with 35,000 pounds of steel thundering down a busy highway with nobody behind the wheel.
The test was a milestone. Starsky was the first company to put a truck on an open highway without a human on board.
60 Minutes also spoke with Chuck Price, the chief product officer at TuSimple, a privately held, global autonomous trucking outfit valued at more than a billion dollars with operations in the U.S. and China.
Price expects driverless tests with no human backup in 2021.
Veteran Truckers Go for a Ride
Click on the link for a 13-minute video in which 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim went on a test run with veteran drivers.
The truckers, Jeff Widdows, his son Tanner, Linda Allen, Eric Richardson, and Maureen Fitzgerald were all astonished to learn how far the technology has come.
Trucker Linda Allen: I wasn’t aware ’til I ran across one on the Florida Turnpike and that just– it just scares me. I can’t imagine. But I didn’t know anything about it.
Trucker Eric Richardson: I didn’t know that it’d come so far. And I’m thinking, “Wow. It’s here.”
Tu Simple Chuck Price: Our system can see farther than any other autonomous system in the world. We can see forward over a half mile.
60 Minutes Jon Wertheim: You can drive autonomously at night?
Chuck Price: We can. Day, night. And in the rain. And in the rain at night.
Trucker Maureen Fitzgerald: This truck is scanning mirrors, looking 1,000 meters out. It’s processing all the things that my brain could never do and it can react 15 times faster than I could.
Steve Viscelli, sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, an expert in freight transportation and automation: I’ve identified two segments that I think are most at-risk. And that’s– refrigerated and dry van truckload. And those constitute about 200,000 trucking jobs. And then what’s called line haul and they’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 80,000-90,000 jobs there.
Jon Wertheim: What about inspections? Does anyone from the Arizona DOT come by and– and check this stuff out?
Chuck Price: The DOT comes by all the time. We talk with them regularly. It’s not a formal inspection process yet.
Elaine Chao, secretary of the Department of Transportation declined a 60 Minutes interview but offered a statement: “The Department needs to prepare for the transportation systems of the future by engaging with new technologies to address… safety… without hampering innovation.”
Cost vs Savings
- The cost cost of a truck is about $250,000.
- The saving is an annual salary of $45,000
- In addition, a driverless truck can go coast-to-coast in 2 days, not 4.
UPS, Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service ship freight with TuSimple trucks.
Assessment
The 60 Minutes’ assessment is the same as mine for years.
We may focus on the self-driving car, but autonomous trucking is not an if, it’s a when. And the when is coming sooner than you might expect. As we first reported in March, companies have been quietly testing their prototypes on public roads. Right now there’s a high-stakes, high-speed race pitting the usual suspects – Google and Tesla and other global tech firms – against small start-ups smelling opportunity. The driverless semi will convulse the trucking sector and the 2 million American drivers who turn a key and maneuver their big rig every day. And the winners of this derby, they may be poised to make untold billions; they’ll change the U.S. transportation grid; and they will emerge as the new kings of the road.
Hub-to-Hub On the Way
Hub-to-hub highway driving is much simpler than in-city driving.
It’s a no-brainer for cost savings and it will undoubtedly reduce the number of accidents.
Timeline
Drivers will vanish on the interstates within two years of DOT driverless approval. The last mile and in-city driving is another matter as I have stated all along.
My 2022 timeline is still possible. My optimistic schedule of earlier won’t happen.
A year either way doesn’t matter. We will soon enough have a surplus of drivers whose skills will no longer be in demand.
Mish
They had better be perfected, otherwise when fatalities happen, the lawsuit damages will be astronomical…..
This all sounds great and wonderful if it survives the coming collapse . . .
Why waste money on high speed rail projects like China? I am sure that there will be innumerable problems on the way to a driverless truck and car infrastructure, but homo sapiens are lousy drivers. The need for truck drivers in urban area will be strong, and I imagine that semi truck cabs will disappear with a driver operating up to four trailers as a truck train from one control cab. Drivers do a lot more than drive. Tremendous productivity boost for U.S. since we have a completed interstate system that only needs additional investments. Less traffic jams in city. Drivers will find other work. Forget train travel, waste of money.
Emp is a huge threat as well
starsky robotics out of the business
And yet all the relatively safer modes of transportation out there — aircraft, ships, trains — which one would think are perfect for driverless, all have some kind of human operator still in the loop, however much computer assisted. But automobiles? No, these must be completely autonomous for some bizarre reason.
Mike, give it a rest. From the 60 Minutes link you led off with:
Jon Wertheim: Right now we’ve got safety operators in the cab. How far away are we from runs without drivers?
I’ve said this before, here it comes again. The state of the art of autonomous vehicles has not changed in years: test drives with one or more human operators at the ready. Your 60 Minutes article goes on to promise true driverless exercises next year. Every article you have posted on this subject has contained similar claims.
My racket is consumer electronics engineering. From my perspective, this lack of progress after several years spells doom. I admit that I am not an expert in autonomous vehicles, but I’ve seen plenty of blue sky. I have learned to recognize it.
There might have been a human driven van or two or three accompanying these ‘robot’ trucks across the country, just in case.
So no drivers probably was three drivers at least to keep going 24 hours a day.
If you see one of these on the road give them way way way more room. Once the system see something new you have no no no idea what it’s about to do. STAY CLEAR
The big advantage is a steady speed for 24 hours a day on known routes–typically the interstate or large US highways. No need for excess speed, just continuous progress.
They could potentially form trains and draft off each other too, if we can get ourselves organized…
Driverless trucks will finally take over as soon as we build roads to support them. I don’t see it fully adopted until we add specific Automated Driving lanes on the highways to support them, with standardized markings that are well maintained and easily computer readable. It will also assuage fears of intermixing human and computer driven vehicles.
It only takes a faded highway line in the wrong spot to lead to disastrous consequences. Recall the automated driving Tesla fatality on highway 101.
The simple answer is risk tolerance. The NHTSA says 102 people die on American roads daily. If the machines lower that to 30 per day, is that a good thing?
Not to the innumerate, and they are legion.
Come on Zardoz: “Not to the innumerate, and they are innumerable.”
Point to point automated transport seems a given. Although multiple nasty accidents may well hold it back. Deaths by robots will be scarier to the public, despite the current annual toll of 30,000+ US dead with 15% or more involving heavy vehicles.
The other question of course being that maybe heavy vehicles could get dedicated lanes, with automation assisting signaling .. or include guide tracks in the roads.. or if all else fails they could put the trucks on rails.
.. less sarcastically, there are test tracks experimenting with conductive charging of vehicles as they travel. The charging tracks could also work as guideways so the trucks could have back up guidance systems to GPS and 5G.
I definitely see this happening at some point, at least for long-haul trucking. The potential savings are just too tempting… save on salary and benefits and increase utilization of expensive equipment by at least 50%.
For the couple of miles between the highway off-ramp and and shipment hub they can have a human remotely monitor the truck’s cameras just in case.
As of June, the Economist didn’t think too much about the future of self-driving vehicles:
Yes this is why this is totally different this is interstate driving only.
Mish is very patient and brave to keep posting about automated vehicles. It seems the stupid will persist until several years after they are standard and ubiquitous.
I don’t see any/many here denying at SOME point there will be autonomous vehicles in force.
THE question is timing.
IMO (yeah, I know … everyone has one …) Mish is EXTREMELY optimistic on the “when” … put me down for 10 years (or more) before main stream … for a plethora of issues.
RE: “Mish is EXTREMELY optimistic on the “when” .”
Perhaps Mish is invested in one or several of the companies working on the technology.
Some highway routes may very well be designated autonomous freight trucks only. Then they essentially become somewhat inefficient trains … until they start forming truckavans when necessary.
Still waiting on those transporters which render them all moot … ;>)
Again the challenge for governments will be how to keep people busy. I think this all ends badly and not like Star Trek.
Bingo.
Whether driverless trucks ultimately succeed of not, it makes a nice metaphor for the biggest problem we have…..which is what to do with all the people who are going to be disenfranchised (and who have ALREADY been disenfranchised) from our economy…..and will turn to acting out negative group behavior as a result…as we go forward into our future.
I don’t care much about trucking industry, but give me automated translation of spoken language in YouTube movies, so you don’t ask afterwards: what the hell was this all about?
I am looking forward to a time when all trucks drive at speed limit…
PS: Before self-driving trucks, let’s start with simpler pilotless planes. See how that works out.
Up-voted you for concise, well reasoned response. Keep it up!
By now, I expected that we would all be wearing those Star Trek auto translators on our chest. What the hell do engineers do with their time? There are millions of engineers working and yet we hardly see anything new and interesting technology. Instead, all we get are simple extensions of what already exists.
Who’s working on anti-gravity, a space elevator, a “real” space station miles big with a spoke design, auto translators and so much more?
In 2012, I made a prediction that by 2060 it will illegal for humans to drive a vehicle in the USA.
I stand by that prediction.
I really don’t give a crap about click-bait articles in the news.
Everyone should be forbidden to write about this in less than 5 year increments.
I’d be interested in how you reached that prediction and why 2060.
2060 is when every Luddite idiot on this board will have moved on to the great highway in the sky, for eternal bliss behind the wheel of a celestial automobile.
1. Autonomous cars will work well and the resulting death reduction will be compelling.
2. 2060 is a nice round number in the conventional western calendar.
It will happen way before 2060. More like 2030 max.
I disagree. Too much emotional baggage in 2030.
My uncle has a country place
that no one knows about….
the advantages in driverless will be with pairing and linking trucks in convoys. the aerodynamic efficiencies will be huge resulting in fuel savings but saying again there will have to be at least one driver as a fail safe. i see driverless trucks coming on line before driverless cars.
You fatally underestimate the probability of bugs in the software. Even the space shuttle. NASA programs, defence projects like the F-35 which have almost unlimited budgets (for practical purposes) still end up with bugs. Simple financial software for banks with $billions at stake still contain bugs. These are examples with few if any lives at stake. Driving on the roads will expose buggy software to far more lives and I guess humans will win. And we have not even started thinking of upgrades to the software, introducing more bugs and potential for malicious software.
Humans have bugs in their brain and can’t drive perfectly either.
And of course the F35 has bugs. That’s a feature.
As BillinCA mentions below, removing humans as driving will eliminate the annual carnage that we suffer from on the roads to the tune of about 40k people killed and hundreds of thousands injured and maimed for life, each and every year.
So if a few thousand die every year as the AI cars get debugged, it isn’t going to matter when compared against the 40k number.
And from what I gather the driving parameters are not coded like IF THENs, but as trained big data algorithms. They will still have bugs of a sort, but not necessarily a gotcha line of code to be found and fixed.
There will be a big wreck someday and during the court case the “coder” will get on the stand and be asked why the AI vehicle turned like that causing the accident, and he won’t be able to answer — because it was a big data trained algorithm that did the acting, not some imperative commands written by a human.
All the people who think it will be banned after one major incident.
Statistics will prove these rigs have much much better safety records, and outside the popular press, these will inform decision making. Insurance and bonding for human drivers will become a prohibitive competitive factor. Driverless trucks will be driven in trains at night, speed optimized for fuel costs and delivery windows. Patient, attentive, careful, they will prove much better than drivers.
Election machines have all kinds of problems…
Were they banned?
It took 2 decades to replace all the typewriters. 2 decades to put an ATM in every branch. But yeah, in 2 years the entire trucking industry will be replaced, no problem. It will be a long and slow process, if it works at all.
Ok, how about this: Driverless truck gets in accident on Route 80. Police officer arrives on scene and asks truck driver to move truck to a safe area – oh wait, there is no driver. Then officer asks for license and registration – but there is no driver to ask. Officer then wants to issue ticket to truck driver – but there is no driver
The public won’t accept driverless trucks for the same reason they won’t accept a pilotless 737.
Stan88 – you may be very right about that. The public is a fickle bitch.
Yes they will. Because they won’t be asked.
I just drove a minivan with basic automatic cruise control and basic lane keeping ability. As it drifts out of the center of the lane, it will correct back, and do that three times, until it says get your hands back on the wheel. So even with nothing else, these two systems can keep a car in a lane for 1/2-1 mile without driver intervention.
This automation will happen, and is happening faster than anyone can imagine.
It took about 15 minutes for my messing with the ACC to confirm it worked as advertised, and then I just drove with it on all the time. In stop and go traffic it changed what is normally an aggravating experience to fun.
Look at what Uber did to taxi medallions. And driverless taxis will do to Uber the same.
I own a couple that have adaptive cruise control and I trust it implicitly, not that I’d take my hands off the wheel. The increasing levels of driver assist technology will become increasingly important as the population ages. The automatic braking for obstacles has already saved my bacon a couple of times.
Uber already has Uber freight moving cheap freight. Drivers always cancel and try to get someone on phone. I know this is like the marijuana stock hype but nothing happening starsky robotics ran out of funding.
No, driverless taxis will NOT do it to Uber. Because Uber will go driverless.
Wait until one of these trucks malfunctions and crashes into a school bus and kills several children. That will be the end of self driving trucks.
You seem to be cheering for that to happen Stan? Why so bloodthirsty? Don’t human drivers slake your thirst?
And why are YOU cheering for the end to one of the last real freedoms we have? To get behind the wheel and take the hell off without anyone’s permission or any government agency knowing where we go when and with who? So we can end all human error deaths on the roads and make you happy? Even though it will cost us so much in freedom, and not to be pushy about it but if they ever make the technology good enough then you will not be needed for ANYTHING at all.
By the way, traffic fatalities are so far down that barring drunks the death rate per capita per thousand miles driven is almost nill compared to the peak 67 thousand back in the late sixties. Raod infrastructure improvements combined with auto safety features like seat belts and airbags, crumple zones, have made driving almost as safe as chores around the house, because that is the next leading cause of death, accidents in the home. Obviously we still have work to do to end drunk driving. When that gets done car accidents will be below falling off toilets as cause of death.
Driving is living life, being driven is the ultimate nanny state. The ultimate big brother. If I want to chuck it and get in the car and go to Mt. Rushmore tomorrow I can and nobody can stop me. Take away my car or right to use it and that makes me a prisoner of the policies or PRICES none of us will have any control over. So not another word from you about government being too big or corporations being too much in our shit on a daily basis because you want to hand them the crown jewles of privacy and freedom.
I also want to point out that capitalism will not allow for enough spare capacity in their so called self driving fleets to take everyone everywhere they want to go when they want to go there. Meaning there will ALWAYS be a wait. And it will not take much for that to be a LONG wait, a football game, a convention in town, maybe you are in a tourist destination that is seasonal, and half the year there are not enough rides for all that are requested. Just how damned long till ride providers figure out the scarcer the rides (longer people have to wait) the more than can charge some people? I can see it now, get our annual subscription plan at $100 and we guarnatee no wait over an hour. Get our $1,000 subscription plan and no wait over 30 minutes. For $2,500 a year plus $100 per ride more and you get dedicated instant reserved service. Before long rich will ride and you will walk. Well not walk, but be relegated to filthy buses.
I say when you end freedom of transportation you end freedom of movement, ending freedom of movement is a government plot to prevent the population from being able to stand up to government at all. If a city protests and demands redress of grievences as some have this year think about how it will be when you cannot drive. The government can simply flip a switch and shut down all transportation till they have pacified the city. Only the military/police will be able to move.
So people that claim to like second amendment rights are willing to give up the most important right of all, the freedome to move outside their houses.
I have no doubt this will happen because too much has already been misallocated, the only way they can justify that is to misallocate so much more. But, we are all going to regret it. In fact I see in this the seeds of human demise.
The moving finger, having writ, moves on.
There’s no stopping what’s coming, haha maybe QAnon is right.
I’m funny that way Herkie. I honestly could not care less if I ever operate a motor vehicle again in my life. I am just fine with a robot chauffeur. And if 40,000 American lives (and millions worldwide) are spared each year …. well, how exactly does one ignore that benefit? I mean, someday someone YOU love may die in a human-caused wreck.
Agree to disagree Herkie. You’ll eventually subscribe, not that you’ll have much choice.
Absolutely not Mr.P, if the computer driven vehicle takes over our roads I will simply leave for a country that cannot afford and will not sacrifice fundamental rights for the benefit of greedy corporate overlords. Someplace that has coffee and tobacco, two other things I am not going to allow to be taken away from me. So Costa Rica, Nicaragua?
Costa Rica is one of the very few nations with no standing army. Lovely country too.
No thank you, I prefer the benefits of my Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet
There you are comparing human drivers who are also directly subject to the result of their actions, and those who sit in an office while placing a robot on the road and aren’t. It isn’t to do with competition between man and machine, because the machine never loses, because it has nothing to lose. It is about who is responsible, and those who drive remotely simply are not in real terms.
Even if the track record of unpiloted were better, it would not be perfect, and you would be asking for other drivers empirically to pay more for an incident than the person who placed the vehicle there that caused it. You would tell them “It’s just better for everyone else as a whole” without being able to prove that, while the “driver”/owner of the other vehicle will always walk away unscathed (in real terms).
Apart from the fact this tech will not be compatible with the moral of a lot of people, and that we are only really in very initial trials, the idea of creating further system dependence is not a good idea. If you have a world where people don’t know how to drive, if you have system failure occur everyone is in trouble. That means people are vulnerable to that system, and also therefore they must serve it. EMP is an obvious danger, but there are many others that could incapacitate a large connected network, and people would not have the choice of returning to turn of the key self reliance once that side had been erased.
I honestly didn’t read your whole comment. You are fine with humans killing 40,000 other humans in America each year when it can be prevented. That’s all I need to know about you Anda.
Have a nice life, be careful out there on the road. Could be you, could be me, could be tomorrow.
There is danger in any form of activity. When you compare the population, and the number of vehicles on the roads, and the number of miles driven, to the number of people and cars and miles driven today you see that the deaths per capita per mile drived have declined massively. And the stubborn remaining deaths are self inflicted by unstable drunks who will still find a way to kill themselves and others even after you take away their right to free movement.
There is a Wiki page for this, you can see the fatalities per billion vehicle miles driven by year and it has dropped from a peak of 24.09 in 1921 to just about 1 now. I fatality per billion miles driven in the US, one twenty fourth of the peak.
Your computer driven vehicles are NOT going to be fatality free and if you think they will be that great I dare you to strap yourself to the front of one of these rigs. They are going to be deadly because when they will plow into traffic a lot of people are going to be in the way.
But it is not about safety and that is a strawman argument anyway, ultimately private transportation is about freedom and computer driven vehicles will END private transport for 99% of us. So the people on the right who constantly howl about the left trying to take away their guns and other alleged rights abuses have no problem with losing their right to go where and when they choose to with who they choose to. Tying someone to one spot used to have a name, slavery. Once these are reality you will be effectively tied to a single place and only money combined with the approval of others will allow you to leave it.
If you didn’t bother reading my reply, then why bother “replying” to it ?
And it will happen.
Do not be so sure. We are heading into a greater depression where the money, the trillions and trillions of bucks needed to make it happen just will not be there. Another thing I can see stopping it is the inevitable breakup of the US, computer driven taxis in dense urban locations can make some sense, properly regulated, but they make zero sense outside of urban cores, and will not happen there.
Herkie your 100% right it’s just another industry trying to cash in on another industry. These companies need funding so they post the same comments over and over and over. Uber workers are about to become employees. They will go out of business if that happens.
When (not IF) one of these monstrosities, which have only one purpose, to make ever MORE MONEY for company owners, wipes out a family in a major pile up one of two things will happen, either computer driven (they are NOT driverless) vehicles will be banned from human roads, or humans will be banned from Wall Street’s roads.
It is going to happen sooner than later and if I had to bet I would say that human driven vehicles will be the ones to get banned. You will not be permitted to drive on the roads your tax dollars paid for because by then they will already have plowed trillions of malinvested capital into seeing these things take over, but as sure as the wheels of the bus go round and round computer driven vehicles and human driven vehicles ARE NOT COMPATIBLE and people will die.
It will just be collateral damage to develop the technology. And yes, humans will be banned from driving on the public roads. Very few will be capable of driving on the freeways at 200mph, changing lanes and slowing down to exit w/o causing accidents.
So 5G is required for this to work. It is unproven science still hotly debated as to safety. Not to mention just the 5G part of it will cost trillions to make functional and it will only work in cities because at that wavelength the signal will have to be repeated every few hundred meters. Only the federal government has the financial wherewithal to invest that kind of capital, but of course that capital comes in the form of a tax on you, and constitutes a gift to Wall Street.
There is hacking, bad actors are out there and we cannot stop them.
Ever had a dropped call or heard an echo on the line? What happens when the computer driving your 200 mph car on the freeway has that happen? The rigs are NOT autonomous as you seem to think, but are connected and the only way we get a “driverless” society is when AI is controlling all via a network all interconnected. A dropped call for a computer driving you at 200 mph is going to end badly for many people.
A gum wrapper on a stop sign made so called autonomous vehicles to disregard the sign. A bit of reflective tape cause some to believe there was a lane where no lane existed. These things do not have the capacity to make judgements, they only follow programmed rules in a situation (driving) where the road is constantly changing, where the rules might be inadequate.
This is going to turn out to be the most expensive folly in human history.
And for every lazy person that does not want to drive (because let’s face it a lot of drivers really are not up to doing it and represent a danger to others on the road) there are more that LOVE driving as one of the few freedoms we have left. You will be stuck waiting for filthy ride shares in computer driven vomit machines with dubious to zero hygienic care. It will becaome a LOT more expensive to get from point A to point B when you have no other option but the price fixed rideshare services. They will make today’s taxis look cheap, and you will have no choice but to pay it.
The constraints put on the computer driven machines will mean they are slower rather than faster, and that will disrupt traffic and make it slower still.
Urban electric taxis with a 45 mph max governor is fine and you are welcome to them, but most driving is not done in urban centers and I repeat, I will not fly on a pilotless plane, ride in a computer driven vehicle of any kind. They will not ever be able to replicate the human brain as to context, scope, reaction, motivations, nor should they because if they ever could we would be without purpose.
This is so wrong on so many levels it is worthy of a book of it’s own.
Herkie, keep in mind that human drivers of semis are involved in about 13 accidents involving fatalities a day. Computers don’t need to be perfect. Only time will tell how long it will take to improve computer driving algorithms to the point where they are safer than human drivers, but I think that it is inevitable that in time they will be far safer than human drivers.
And as I said, if they can drive better than we can, and it is a special case because driving is extremely unpredictable, and it requires judgement that is learned as well as instinct, you can put rules into a computer algo but you cannot program instinct. If they can drive better than we can then there really will be no need for humans at all. When humans become dependent upon robot and computers then they become the masters and we the servants. People, their minds and bodies, will stagnate. Eventually we will be seen as nothing more than a drain on capital, or as Henry Kissenger put it “useless eaters.” And a minority who simply does not want to drive will force the majority who do like to option to drive to lose that pleasure. I won’t because I will just not remain.
I don’t disagree that programming a computer to drive is a major challenge, yet, of all the forms, the simplest task is to maneuver a rig down the interstate. Just as that is the safest (and most boring) driving for humans, it would be the safest for a computer. The biggest risks are probably weather and drunks.
Air starts acting like a liquid at 200mph and the drag is intense. Automated vehicles will never go that fast. There is no way to make a truck slippery enough to go much past 80mph efficiently.
I guess it’s an old concept, and that’s why it’s very often ignored, but … Scientists/Researchers in any field almost never bother to ask “Should we?” they are only interested in “Can we?” … until, sometimes, it’s too late …
How did the Gain Of Function research at Wuhan that Fauci and others supported and invested in, against significant opposition, turn out? Investigate the furin cleavage site in SARS-COV-2 …
Money quote: “It’s processing all the things that my brain could never do and it can react 15 times faster than I could.”
But hey, let’s have fallible humans who kill 40,000 Americans each year drive because superstition.
Can’t wait until computers replace the “computer can’t replace me” crowd, like some of the coders I’ve worked with. The sooner it happens, the sooner these people will suddenly develop a sense of empathy for the people replaced before them.
Anyone that touches a keyboard can be replaced by a computer. Society is going to have to rethink some things.
AI is sensationalized. Most thinking work cannot be automated with any conceivable application of existing technology, and strong AI is a fantasy.
I am not even talking about actual AI. With enough information even things that seem compulsive are predictable. That’s what most people call today’s AI. The more information these systems get the better they are at interpreting the information and getting the correct solution. Humans are far from perfect and all we really need is close to humans.
And true AI will come. It might be 20-40 years down the road but it will get there at some point. By AI, I mean actual AI and not just predictive algorithms we have today. At that point though population growth becomes a lability more than an asset.
I think the big advantages AI has are speed, volume, and multi-tasking/threadedness of data processing …it’s algorithms are still programmed by human beings. When AI can program its own novel, useful. effective algorithms that might become a different story.
Just Google “human beings lost to AI” and you’ll find all kinds of stories that on one side tell of all of the tasks (including chess) where AI and/or robotics has outclassed human beings and on the other side stories that relate how many AI researchers still hold the human brain in maximum regard and doubt that AI can ever duplicate its abilities. (and most here know of the idea that human beings utilize only a small percentage of the brain’s capability)
Yes there will be driverless trucks. And yes there will be human backup. Old story. Seems 60 minutes got it half right. Don’t they know about litigation and p.r. risk?
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DRIVERLESS VEHICLES! Someone or something is controlling/driving it. God no wonder nobody can see what is coming. These computer driven vehicles and human driven are utterly incompatible. One or the other will win and get the roads, the other will lose and will be barred.
I could see low speed taxis in congested downtown urban areas but not semis going 80 on the freeway. And there is zero point to having a comptr drive the trucks when a driveer still has to be present and paid. The whole point is to not have to pay the drivers. And even if they had “backup” human drivers that will solve nothing in an emergency reaction time type situation because by the time the human realizes that the computer screwed up it will be too late.
The technology for this is many years or even dacades away from being good enough, and maybe never because at 80 miles an hour good enough is NOT good enough, it better be perfect.
By the way, I am not ever going to be a passenger in a computer driven vehicle, I will gladly leave the US before I put my life in the handss of a machine that does not even care if it kills you. And when you consider the only reason for this historic misallocation of capital is so Wall Street can gouge ever more money out of us it just makes me wish that anarchists find as many ways to disrupt this as Wall Street has found to screw all of us.
Of course there are currently and will be more driverless vehicles. I believe there is a taxi service operating in Phoenix AZ area now that does not have any driver in the van at all.
The ride-alongs are only being done now as a the technology gets tested. Makes it easier to keep people calm, especially the civil servants and politicians issuing the licenses to these automated vehicles.
A self-driving truck delivered butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days
Cupertino-based Plus.ai announces what’s believed to be an industry first
PUBLISHED: December 10, 2019
THEY ARE NOT SELF DRIVING! STOP with that. They are driven by computers over a phone network. Or that is how it will have to be done if they are to have vehicular connectivity and there is no other way it can be done.
That truck was not self-driving as they say, there was a “driver” in it, and it broke laws almost every mile of the trip.
I think you might be hopeless
Anyone that can justify turning over all driving to computers and robots when the technology is not yet ready is the hopeless one.
The more computers take over driving for us the less attentive we are when were needed. Driving takes focus. Sitting there waiting to take the wheel does not. So in that split second a human decision is needed it may be to late. Remember the guy who hit the barrier in the tesla. He was playing on his phone.
Will be interesting to see how thoses trucks handle different conditions say black ice/ wet ice/ high cross winds. Etc
You forgot rollerskating grandmas.
Yeah there is a skill in winter driving. not sure a computer can deal with. The sound of cinder in the wheel wells/ how the snow melts on the wind shield / many small clues about driving in bad conditions. Knowing when to call it and stop. Plus can the computer put chains on. Guess you could do insta chains. Whats gonna happen when kids realize they can screw with the truck. Ie cut them off drift close while passing.
The answer is generally yes, yes, yes, and yes (winter driving, ice, wind, grandmas-on-rollerskates, etc).
The question rather becomes “do they have all relevant parameters and scenarios learnt before an accident occurs” (as these Machine Learning algos will continue to “learn” from all driverless and driver’ed vehicles… you can think of it like learning to drive, but gaining the aggregate experience of multiple vehicles simultaneously during your lessons rather than just your own).
Might need to put a little tax on them to retrain workers towards something else. Don’t just toss to the wind.
You haven’t even touched on how the 3D printing construction Industry is right behind as well. No one is talking about this. Huge homes built for 1/3 to 1/4 the current price. In 24-48 hours. Fences. Garages. Many construction jobs and home prices will take a hit. Tech is truly deflationary. AI and cloud computing is about to upend capitalism. There will be no incentive for capitalist CEO’s to hire new workers. It’s a tsunami of deflation incoming.
IF any of it achieves scale.
Why would it not achieve scale?
It hasn’t yet. And the construction industry might just ignore it, as long as they can keep building as they do now and sell all the product they can produce.
They’ll end up like the taxi industry
Good thing we raised tariffs on goods from China, to keep out a flood of container homes from China in the 2020’s. Wouldn’t want barely struggling workers to buy shelter for $150k instead of $350k. How else can D.C/NYC force people to take loans? /s
The tRumptards will blame China because all those jobs lost must have been shipped to China.
Hello, Andrew Yang … maybe we better start up this “free money for everyone” idea you campaigned on, as with two million “rough” truckers unemployed and ready to bring poverty, hunger and protests to the suburbs, we’re gonna need your idea thought out … pretty fast …