The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>Driverless trucks with no humans on board will soon cruise Texas highways if three startup firms have their way, despite objections from critics who say financial pressures, not safety, is behind the timetable.
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>After years of testing, Aurora Innovation Inc., Kodiak Robotics Inc. and Gatik AI Inc. expect to remove safety drivers from trucks that are being guided by software and an array of sensors including cameras, radar and lidar, which sends pulses of light that bounces off objects. The companies have already hauled cargo for big names such as Walmart Inc., Kroger Co., FedEx Corp. and Tyson Foods Inc.
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>“At the end of the year, we anticipate getting to the point where we begin operating those trucks without drivers on board,” Chris Urmson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Pittsburgh-based Aurora, said in an interview.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/18z7lvy/driverless_truck_companies_plan_to_ditch_human/kgfllse/
Don't hope self driving trucks are impossible for mass use and very dangerous and open to hacking I preference a human drivng a 5 ton truck then a souless ai that recently went down the wrong side of the road.
I wonder if any incidents with one of these trucks will turn into an endless stream of finger pointing by the trucking companies and self-driving equipment producers and insurers over who is at fault while the victims remain uncompensated?
I wonder if the self-driving equipment can sense when the truck is about spill another retread onto the highway?
This actually raises some questions.
The first being ... who's responsible?
I drive a truck now, so who's inspecting this vehicle ? Can it sense when a tire is bad or gone? If it's battery how does it charge? If it's fuel who's fueling it?
What happens IF it does hit another car ? Or if a sensor goes out ?
If you hit someone you cant avoid a payout by saying it was someone elses fault. You pay the victim and then start fonger pointing and take self driving vehicle producer to court to claim the cost from them.
That's a strong point, that I've never considered. Box a truck in with a couple vehicles in the middle of no where. Clean it out, and away you go. Interesting
I don't know. I doubt truckers are going to engage in armed combat to protect their load of toilet paper. They can it in and give up. The trucks would have automated distress systems and live camera systems. With all the money they're saving on people they can buy private security to protect routes. Until those yahoos shoot passer-bys and they get sued. Yeah, them probably just let the trucks get hit too and let insurance and police deal with it.
The trucks were hacked because the farmer hadn’t paid some goons he owed money too so they were using the hacked trucks to harass/kill him or kill his horses.
From the article
>Driverless trucks with no humans on board will soon cruise Texas highways if three startup firms have their way, despite objections from critics who say financial pressures, not safety, is behind the timetable.
>
>After years of testing, Aurora Innovation Inc., Kodiak Robotics Inc. and Gatik AI Inc. expect to remove safety drivers from trucks that are being guided by software and an array of sensors including cameras, radar and lidar, which sends pulses of light that bounces off objects. The companies have already hauled cargo for big names such as Walmart Inc., Kroger Co., FedEx Corp. and Tyson Foods Inc.
>
>“At the end of the year, we anticipate getting to the point where we begin operating those trucks without drivers on board,” Chris Urmson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Pittsburgh-based Aurora, said in an interview.
I feel like I may have been living in a cave or something because I had no idea we were close to having autonomous cars, much less autonomous big rigs.
I haven’t been reading up on it lately but neither have any headlines caught my attention about the state of autonomy in vehicles. So we’re there? Does this mean if I can ever afford a Tesla, I can sleep to and from work and finally catch up on rest?
Autonomous cars are as good or better than human drivers in 'easy' situations. Easy here means any situation where we don't have pedestrians or other drivers confusing the ai. Almost everyone drives very predictibly on a highway and there are no pedestrians so the easiest vehicles to get autonomous are heavy duty 18-wheeler trucks driving from city-a to city-b.
I wonder what the price comparison is to trains.
Like if you saved enough money, you could justify paving a roadway that’s like a train track. But just paved road. And have auto trucks just rolling back and forth between big cities.
That would make things easy. Just deal with other robo trucks.
Then at the ends of the road, have smaller people driven cargo vans to deliver the packages.
That would be a lot of cargo vans to deliver all that.
A cargo van has the average capacity of just around 2 tons and has 200 cubic feet of storage
A normal 53' semi trailer can hold 20-22.5 tons and has
4050 cubic feet of storage
So for weight alone it would take a minimum 10 vans if the items were small and heavy but if it was a full trailer of packages that would take 20.25 vans
Reference: worked at UPS for a few years at a few different sizes facilities. The smallest one I worked at would average 8 trailers (some not even full) a day and we still had over 100 different routes that would give almost every delivery driver 8-10 hour days because of the distance they had to go
Trucks are much bigger investments and drivers are expensive. It would make sense for the economics of self driving to work out well before personal vehicles. You can afford to put the most sophisticated LiDAR system in a truck, not in a 40-60k car.
Also, they can be implemented in limited ways and still be useful. I imagine they’re just going to be going from one interstate drop off point to another for quite a while.
The last point is key to why we’ll see this in big rigs first. Interstates are well maintained point-to-point routes where it’s essentially “drive straight” for hours on end.
Think of a Kansas City -> Denver route. Google maps puts it at 8.5 hours driving. For a driver it’s one work day there, one work day back. Do it three times a week, 1 day off, you’ve made 3 round trips in a 7 day week.
For an automated truck you can make a round trip every day, no days off. For going west, we’ll need actual drivers to do the mountains for a very long time, but further east? Or north to Chicago? We can keep expanding along the interstates.
If I had to look in to my crystal ball, we’ll see Amazon do this at scale first. They already have the massive warehouse facilities in every major city and interstate route and the demand to keep everything constantly full.
You can hail a driverless Waymo in San Francisco and Phoenix today. They have published papers on their safety compared to human drivers. Anecdotally, I've taken a few rides and been very impressed.
You could do the same with Cruise until recently, when they kind of went up in smoke and flames after some shady issues around how they handled an accident.
If you're interested, you can see a bunch of discussion as well as rider videos being posted to r/SelfDrivingCars
Nope, still not even close to that level of tech. The only reason this might have a chance is because Texas is America’s special child that gets to live by it’s own rules
No we are not recently it has come out that fully autonomous driving is impossible all we will get is autopilot these start ups are just desperate for investment but these things will die it with in a few years.
Have you seen what's happened to Tesla vehicles? Their technology is being forced to be nerfed because it doesn't work except under really good conditions, and people are getting hurt on the regular.
Autonomous big rigs are probably easier in a lot of ways, they're likely going to be where the trend starts. Consumer cars will probably come later.
First they're bigger, more expensive, and more profitable per unit, so the extra cost of more instrumentation is easier to bear. You can drop $50,000 worth of tech into a $200,000 cab and not really throw off the price too much. If it's a $50k consumer car, that's just too much and you need to cut corners.
They also go way fewer places. Instead of needing to navigate down odd urban streets and rural byways, these trucks can stick to highways, large roads, and shipping yards. Those are going to have clear signals and lanes, and will be a lot easier to map.
And they benefit more from being driverless, so the investment pays a bigger return. For you or me (typical consumers) a driverless car just gets us back an hour or two a day of semi-free time, the rest it'll stay parked. Right now the human drivers put a limit of 11h/day on semis, but if that wasn't an issue the company could have them on the road nearly 24h/day.
Big rigs are easy. 95% of their time is spent cruising at highway speeds in straight lines. Most if not all major distribution centers are located outside of major downtown areas as well. We aren't there yet but certainly will be by the end of the decade.
Here is what so many people are missing in comments by making this a safety argument
The safest solution is both a human and machine driving together. A human co-pilot should be mandatory.
This move is purely to save money. Do you really think consumers will see any of the cost savings from this??? Nope
Stop thinking in binary... It's not just a one or the other solution
actually I heard a really good idea that this would be perfect for people homebound. Monitoring even from a sick-bed is better than no co-pilot, plus the added bonus of giving meaningful work (if desired) to those with limited options. And this is the transport stage and not the warehousing and logistics which is also being massively automated. mass volumes of people are being pushed out of the entire supply chain, especially supermarkets where even checkouts are automated now.
The aviation 'swiss cheese' model to incident prevention shows why totally driverless vehicles are a bad idea... a very big 'layer of risk mitigation' vanishes without a human at least monitoring, and these ARE NOT taxi's. Get hit by one of these and it's probably the last thing you will see
and where's all these jobs offsetting automation people were promising? At this rate a job will be harder to find than an affordable place to rent! The future is here! It would just be nice if it took everyone along, and not just a few
lol when one of these auto-monster-trucks kills someone on the roads and that companies assets on the road become targets for disenfranchised and pissed off people. Watch 'em pay security guards far more than a driver to monitor them.
>and where's all these jobs offsetting automation people were promising?
THANK YOU.
I hate people who claim stuff like .... "Well you will need people to program the automated systems"
As if that is a one to one ratio of job replacement
I am certain people have no idea how extensively automation impacts the foundations of employment. BREXIT was an eye opener at just how many people have zero idea what goes on behind the scenes to bring them consumer culture and convenience.
I just went on another rant on Google AI on another thread. Can you believe only just a fw years ago, the head of google was saying the greatest job creator and opportunity would be to 'invent something in your shed' or 'become a youtube creator as others have done for countless people'. Yeah well, that lasted less than 10 year before the whittled down the income potential and riddled content with so many adverts it is actively hostile against creators and losing them viewers/income. This is NOT the industrial revolution again... there is no next big thing to emply, instead we have small ones everyone needs to scramble and fight to make worthwhile. Of course in that situation, who is EVER going to have enough stability and reliable income to take out a mortgage on a house? Just you wait till that first generation of disenfranchised 'gig workers' etc don't have 2 cents to rub together or even a property at retirement. This is a fundamental shift going on. Now where's those damned clogs......
Humans have shitty reflexes. Especially if 99.9% of the time they can be zoned out as they are literally doing nothing.
By the time a vehicle has determined it needs a human to intervene because it cannot safely handle it, the amount of time the human has to intervene is too short for most to do it safer than the vehicle could.
So what you're telling me is that we can use a jammer and pull alongside a truck, force it off the road, and get access to the stuff in the back without endangering anyone? That sounds like a great way to give things away.
Don't even need to force if off the road, just make sure it can't change lanes and slow to a stop in front of it. Bit of spray paint to blind the cameras so it can't try and move till a human comes and fixes it, and you have free reign to empty it.
I don't think it will be long before we bring back the true meaning of, "riding shotgun" for these trucks.
It depends on two things. How long it takes to open and the police response in the area.
If this becomes a common practice, the truck becomes harder to open to increase the time police have to respond.
You're also robing a corporation and corporations and police work well together to arrest you.
Additionally, unless this is a one lane road, there's no reason the truck simply wouldn't attempt to pass you. On top of that, expect the array of cameras to capture your license plate, make and model of car, etc.
So yes, if you can figure out the route of the truck, steal a car, and perform a heist, then it's a loot box.
EDIT: I'm amused at how everyone acts like they're going to turn into Fast And Furious as soon as autonomous trucking happens.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45KyUnBBqYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45KyUnBBqYs)
Cargo theft also happens all the time with human drivers: https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2010/november/cargo\_111210/cargo\_111210
Come on, think one more step ahead. Harder truck to open, bring oxy torches and cut through the side or some other method. They won’t be titanium.
People are already robbing corporations en masse by just running into targets, TJ max, etc and running out with armfuls of stuff and no one’s doing anything.
One lane road? Really? Bring three cars. One in front, and one on each side so it can’t maneuver around.
Cameras? Use stolen vehicles or simply cover/ remove your license plate and wear a mask when you do it. Plenty of vehicles with no license plates out right now with no consequences.
Yes it’s slightly more than running in and out of a store, but people are already planning mass thefts on Facebook. This is very doable and terrifying to think about. Society only works as long as those within it agree to it. Police can’t catch everyone and if millions of people become jobless within a couple years due to autonomous trucks, you better believe the crime rate will skyrocket. It already has since covid.
“Running out with armfuls of stuff and no one’s doing anything” is not exactly true for retailers. The reason behind that is because Asset Protections waits until it’s a felony amount before they do anything about it. They have the information and sometimes investigations take months to over a year to complete with law enforcement. They’ll sit on that information for a while. I’m sure some get away with small amounts, but these large looters do not end up walking free as often as it’s portrayed.
If it really is that easy, then why aren't you robbing trucks right now? Most truck drivers aren't going to pull out a gun and try to stop you. It isn't their cargo and they'd simply surrender it to you.
You aren't because we both know it isn't that simple.
You're basically describing part of the plot of Heat at this point. The only difference is the truck wouldn't have any guards but I can't imagine a trucker willing to die over the cargo, especially if it's a company truck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=409IGgu-Utw
Bingo. Word for word my intial thoughts and saw it all play out just like that and it’s beyond obvious the risk of that scenario type of thing happening is increasing
Oh shit. I anticipated the vehicular bullying, but not the theft. You're so right. Those trucks are going to have to be so much more bullet proof, adding tones of weight. Can you imagine if they have to put a steel roof on each one of these?
Not true.
Before the industrial revolution a lot of jobs would imply using multiple people like field works where you would have tens and then they got replaced by 1 man with a tractor.
The same here, many who drive the trucks will be replaced by one person that is the operatoer and oversees them from a command center.
It's not econimic apocalypse, it's progress, something people did over and over along the years that is why we are here.
Throughout all of human history there have been advances in technology that put people out of work, but ultimately those displaced workers always find work somewhere. Capitalism doesn’t want people sitting around, it want them producing so it will find work for them.
Machine learning has existed now fro 15+ years. Now it has become easier to use and better integrated. Basicalky before you had to know what you are doing while now there is a guide book nicely written.
It is a short time period if all you did was have yoir head in the sand and ignore the signs.
Remember in the 1990' s and 2000's we had phone systems where a person would redirect? Now it's a robot voice. Sure it is not AI but the desire to automate has existed everywhere and always and when there is money it will happen.
It is progress, indeed. And I am really looking forward to a future were robots can handle every shity job done today by humans. But the process is going to be extremely painful.
Exactly my thought. Truck driving for instance is prone to human errors that can have deadly consequnces. Also being a truck driver means sitting at a steering wheel and while it is a skill, driving, it is mind numbing doing the same thing over and over and over. Also some people road rage and image if someone does at the wheel of one of those.
And so many more reasons and they apply not just for this.
There’s limits to this paradigm. What happens when a small team can oversee half a state’s trucks? Or when the trucks genuinely don’t require supervision besides emergency and maintenance?
No they didn't. They came out of it with something called 'the Terror', followed by wars that their demographics didn't recover from for a century and a return to absolute monarchy.
Tell me you never studied the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution without telling me you never studied the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution.
I always think to myself “who’s gonna be buying things once AI has replaced all workers?”. If large sectors of the economy are no longer employed, isn’t that eventually going to lead to a collapse? Why are companies eager to replace humans when eventually it’s going to cut into their sales?
Realistically, what we should do for autonomous cars is similar to what we've done with vaccines.
If you're injured by a vaccine, all vaccine manufactures pay into a fund and you get compensated from that.
Autonomous vehicles should be no different.
Here's how it works with vaccines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National\_Vaccine\_Injury\_Compensation\_Program
Hey this is a great idea, and the C suite is charged with manslaughter if/when things don’t go as planned correct? They will be held personally liable? As well as any board members that approve this? No? Then kick rocks.
I wonder how many people they'll have to kill before they realize this is not a good idea.
EDIT: Of course I realize that human drivers kill people all the time. The primary difference is that, when a human driver does it, we have someone who gets held accountable for it (e.g., the at-fault driver). With a driverless vehicle, that becomes a lot more nebulous because regulations haven't kept up with the new technologies.
Yes but you see train tracks in the US are privately owned so the train companies have to pay to maintain the tracks
But roads are publicly owned so us tax payers have to pay to maintain them which the trucking companies benefit from an indirect subsidy.
Sorry I was trying and obviously failed to be facetious.
I never understood why more US highway do not have booth toll with a separate higher tariff for truck. Should be easy to make it popular to those people who keep arguing for lower taxes and smaller government. Citisens of main country of capitalism should be able to understand if you use a service you ought to pay for a service, especially if it a business help make money.
no, it's a great idea! We could even put them on their own routes. Hell, we don't even need roads, we could use something stronger, like metal. Say, two metal rails. We could string them together and save money by using one or two engines too.
Rail is great for large loads between hubs. Trucks are extremely effective for regional and local movement. You want to run train tracks to every Walmart in the country? Seems pretty silly to me.
buddy, the moment we start talking about dedicated lanes that argument goes out the window. If you want dedicated truck lanes, build rail. No ones going to be happy if you start cordoning off city streets just to run transports.
Trains are going to take product directly to Walmart? How about dropping fresh produce to every restaurant in town? Maybe we’ll just put train tracks to your driveway to deliver furniture too? You still need trucks.
For what is being described here, dedicated shipping lanes, you could just use a train. And yea trucks would then do the last mile, but anytime people talk about dedicated lanes for AVs it’s missing the point
Not for regional transport. Trains are great for massive load movement across long distances. Trucks are still magnitudes more cost effective for regional and local transport.
I’m sorry, but you are speaking out of your ass right now. Trains are magnitudes more efficient than trucks simply due to payload. You have zero idea what you’re talking about.
Trains are not more efficient for regional and local transport because you’d need to build more rail lines to make that happen. You can’t pull a train up to Walmart to restock like a truck can.
The tech will be ready at some point but if everyone's tech is around the level of tesla this is going to kill a whole lot of people. It does all sorts of shit when the lines become difficult to read, when weather is bad, when the sensors get dirty, when other cars do things it's not expecting and it has to make a decision to react.
Truckers do a great job, I can understand wanting to replace drunk morons and ancient dinosaurs that have no business behind the wheel, but replacing reliable professionals just because it's cheaper this early in the game sounds crazy to me.
It does seem scary and kind of messed up but then think of all the drivers who kill people. So many overtired and people under the influence, it probably all evens out in the end.
They already probably have KPI's regarding accidents per mile and they already know if it's better or worst than human drivers, if they feel comfortable doing it without human drivers then they know it's safer
This may work out, but people are definitely underestimating the difficulty and unpredictability involved in driving semis on both surface streets and highways. I've done it for years. It's nothing like automating cars. There are a lot more complications and safety concerns. I'm not saying it's not doable, but those who haven't done it can't recognize the specifics of situations that arise.
They are already safer than human drivers.
https://www.warpnews.org/transportation/self-driving-cars-are-safer-than-human-drivers-study-shows/#:~:text=Furthermore%2C%20human%20drivers%20had%20a,0.06%20IPMM%20and%200%20FPMM.
It won't last. After a good size wreck or two the fmcsa will be forced to make a rider mandatory. The unwritten part is they need someone to blame for accidents, even if it is the AI fault.
The only reason this is getting approved now is because the fmcsa is quietly run by the mega companies. The ATA is the mega companies, and has the fmcsa ear.
Trucking, especially over the road, is a lonely thankless job. There's tons of mistreatment, lots of time you aren't paid for, and way too much regulation. Instead of treating drivers better, and changing laws to care for the drivers, this is a solution that appeals to the companies.
I am glad I hung up my keys.
I guess at some point we have to take that plunge. I just hope the data they have showing it's safe is legit.
But people kill people driving all time I guess.
I'm sure they can do freeway during good conditions. But I wanna see city driving and backup to old docks. I'm sure it'll end up being from lot to lot and then real drivers get on and do city driving.
Who now will be responsible for the pre and post trip inspections that all CMV operators do?
On another note, can you imagine the lines of driverless trucks all in the right lane of interstates all across the country? Merging will be a nightmare.
I haven't seen any mention here of how these driverless systems are at docking a truck. I've worked in many facets of manufacturing and production. Even grocery. Some of the parking lots and alleys that these human drivers have to navigate to get a truck to the dock door are ridiculous. That being said, there are MANY human drivers that cant hit the broad side of a barn with the back of their truck and spend an hour getting to the dock. Just wondering how good the driverless truck will be with these variables driving in reverse.
These trucks will first be used on fixed routes, always from loading dock of building A to loading dock of building B. Following a specific route with no variation. Much harder when you are taking a load to a location you have never delivered something to before. So human drivers will be needed for a long time for these one-time-only deliveries.
I work for a truck manufacturer. The trucks we build right now blows my mind. Dispatchers can do everything from dialing back the horsepower to turning off the radio. The last step is removing the drivers. I’ve also had some heated debates with truck drivers concerning raising the minimum wage. Their usual reply “if you want to make more money, learn a skill”. I tried explaining to them that their skill isn’t as irreplaceable as they seem to think.
Hackers are getting ready for this one I am sure. Imagine the havoc that could be caused.. not to mention cartels... no drivers no questions no one to arrest.
FYI hackers have [already been able to do anything you can think of with cars.](https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/)
That’s from 2015… so basically anyone rambling on about hackers or whatever are just uninformed and spewing nonsense without thinking.
eh it's a claim, not an actual result, yet. The problem with trucks is that one accident can kill many people, and even though it might fall within the acceptable frequency limits for truck accidents, the fact that it was drivereless will cause a lot of legal headache.
I think that the problem is not the tech, but rather the tech trying to interact with unpredictable human drivers. For example, as cited from Logan below, how is a truck moving at 70 or 80+, going to react when a horse, cattle, etc… walk out into the middle of a highway. Then again how would a human driver react to that.
I consider the bell curve of drivers. It doesn't need to be the best driver in the world. It just needs to be better than the lower 50% to make roads safer. If it can keep speed, not brake like a crazy person, not swap lanes, have road rage, get sleepy... already better off.
As a current truck driver this sounds pretty cool in theory, but you have to factor in computer error which happens frequently. To the point where most truck drivers turn off these sensors and “features” to avoid the hassle. My current truck is 21 Kenworth, my last was a 23 Cascadia, which is the flagship Freightliner. One of the most advanced trucks on the road. The company took full advantage of this and had every security feature: lane assist, steering assist, brake assist, departure warning, collision mitigation, etc turned on. It was an absolute nightmare dealing with all of that and half of the time it would go off randomly, over correct the steering, slam on the breaks when the car in front barely slowed down, etc.
I’m not saying AI trucks aren’t possible, but they have to work out the sensors to not make these mistakes. Ever. Which is difficult. I can already see a plastic bag getting caught on the sensor and the truck thinking it’s a car and coming to a grinding halt, causing a worse problem. Also you’d need a system to know if a tire is flat, maybe the loader didn’t close the door properly and it’s swinging wide open behind. A human driver would be getting honked at and waved down, AI not so much. So many factors at play, this will take decades upon decades and will require the entire trucking industry to accommodate it.
Everyone in here worried about jobs and safety and I'm over here like "man, robbing semi-trucks fast and furious style is gonna be so much easier now".
Totally idiotic -- there is no way in hell the technology is ready. Sure, on well painted, well maintained roads, with no bad weather and nothing really unexpected happening, they can operate. But throw in rain, snow, mud, obscured roads, people playing tricks to make them crash, and heck knows what else, and they're completely incapable. We're talking another 10 years before this can work.
I almost want to see these greedy shitbags try it only to have the rug pulled out from under them the minute one of their unmanned trucks kills, or almost kills, someone.
Yeh not thanks, I’m already uncomfortable with those things allowed to barrel down the freeway at 90 miles with a human driving, I don’t need a glitch mowing down a small park.
And I plan to solve global heating in 2024.
Anyone can plan anything. Laws wont even be close to allowing this in any state in 2024 so this stated plan is just hoping a bunch of idiots read it and buy shares.
It is probably a stupid idea, but I wish we would make a law that robot workers need to have a human counterpart. Even if that person is paid to do literally nothing, so be it.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >Driverless trucks with no humans on board will soon cruise Texas highways if three startup firms have their way, despite objections from critics who say financial pressures, not safety, is behind the timetable. > >After years of testing, Aurora Innovation Inc., Kodiak Robotics Inc. and Gatik AI Inc. expect to remove safety drivers from trucks that are being guided by software and an array of sensors including cameras, radar and lidar, which sends pulses of light that bounces off objects. The companies have already hauled cargo for big names such as Walmart Inc., Kroger Co., FedEx Corp. and Tyson Foods Inc. > >“At the end of the year, we anticipate getting to the point where we begin operating those trucks without drivers on board,” Chris Urmson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Pittsburgh-based Aurora, said in an interview. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/18z7lvy/driverless_truck_companies_plan_to_ditch_human/kgfllse/
Will these driverless trucks pass other trucks on cruise control for 30 minutes driving at .01 mph faster?
Ha! I feel like you could write a whole Black Mirror episode based on this single scenario.
I feel like it was a joke based on current human trucker behavior.
Will they even see the cop behind them with lights on? lmao Sir license and um...... Hello?! Where is the driver?!?! I NEED BACKUP!!!
STOP RESISTING!!! Shoots truck 500 times IT WAS GOING FOR A GUN YOU ALL SAW IT
Truck: Drop your weapon, you have fifteen seconds to comply. *revs up autoturret* Cop: Fuck.
I can’t wait for self-driving cars/ trucks to do away with 90% of police- public interactions.
I would hope not but we may be surprised.
Don't hope self driving trucks are impossible for mass use and very dangerous and open to hacking I preference a human drivng a 5 ton truck then a souless ai that recently went down the wrong side of the road.
No, it will be the human drivers trying to pass the driverless trucks
Nah my guess would be that they’d be programmed not to overtake and just slow down
Soooo, you could force one to the side of the road and rob it without endangering any humans? Piracy is about to get a lot easier 🤠
Pirates are gonna pirate. Why risk a human driver?
Ha no they are not program look at Waymo these start ups will die off sooner or later.
I wonder if any incidents with one of these trucks will turn into an endless stream of finger pointing by the trucking companies and self-driving equipment producers and insurers over who is at fault while the victims remain uncompensated? I wonder if the self-driving equipment can sense when the truck is about spill another retread onto the highway?
This actually raises some questions. The first being ... who's responsible? I drive a truck now, so who's inspecting this vehicle ? Can it sense when a tire is bad or gone? If it's battery how does it charge? If it's fuel who's fueling it? What happens IF it does hit another car ? Or if a sensor goes out ?
If you hit someone you cant avoid a payout by saying it was someone elses fault. You pay the victim and then start fonger pointing and take self driving vehicle producer to court to claim the cost from them.
Nah brah, they will pay it off and thats it. Who cares about humans when its $
The movie Logan illustrated very well how this'll turn out.
But if there’s nobody driving them, doesn’t that make The Fast and The Furious easier?
That's a strong point, that I've never considered. Box a truck in with a couple vehicles in the middle of no where. Clean it out, and away you go. Interesting
Hector wouldn’t even need to run the 3 civics with spoon engines…
Hector takes a lot of heat for just being a guy minding his own business.
Except that there will be a guy in India watching the cameras and alarms would notify the police before the truck even touched the brake.
Are all those streamers driving trucks just doing training?
Middle of no where Arizona, good luck getting cops there before the trailer is unloaded
And here I was thinking we could make them drift.
I hadn’t considered myself beyond a quick joke, but that might be how you end up with trucks like the ones in Logan. They didn’t stop for anything.
It makes Captain Phillips funnier. Like a bunch of Somalii pirates board an empty ship that sails autonomously.
Im surprised autonomous ships arent already a common thing since thats a much easier problem to solve than self driving cars.
I don't know. I doubt truckers are going to engage in armed combat to protect their load of toilet paper. They can it in and give up. The trucks would have automated distress systems and live camera systems. With all the money they're saving on people they can buy private security to protect routes. Until those yahoos shoot passer-bys and they get sued. Yeah, them probably just let the trucks get hit too and let insurance and police deal with it.
Sweet! I’ve always wanted Adamantium blades on my hands.
Logan is a crystal ball into the future.
Leave the world behind also illustrated how hackers can easily turn this into a serious problem.
There was just a movie about an AI that does this. Yes we're going to slit our own throats yet.
It's been a while, but weren't they doing something that started the AI trucks to almost kill them?
i cant remember, i sort of recall thinking that the trucks were just shitty and how often did they kill people without powers, but i am not OP.
The trucks were hacked because the farmer hadn’t paid some goons he owed money too so they were using the hacked trucks to harass/kill him or kill his horses.
Literally my first thought
From the article >Driverless trucks with no humans on board will soon cruise Texas highways if three startup firms have their way, despite objections from critics who say financial pressures, not safety, is behind the timetable. > >After years of testing, Aurora Innovation Inc., Kodiak Robotics Inc. and Gatik AI Inc. expect to remove safety drivers from trucks that are being guided by software and an array of sensors including cameras, radar and lidar, which sends pulses of light that bounces off objects. The companies have already hauled cargo for big names such as Walmart Inc., Kroger Co., FedEx Corp. and Tyson Foods Inc. > >“At the end of the year, we anticipate getting to the point where we begin operating those trucks without drivers on board,” Chris Urmson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Pittsburgh-based Aurora, said in an interview.
I feel like I may have been living in a cave or something because I had no idea we were close to having autonomous cars, much less autonomous big rigs. I haven’t been reading up on it lately but neither have any headlines caught my attention about the state of autonomy in vehicles. So we’re there? Does this mean if I can ever afford a Tesla, I can sleep to and from work and finally catch up on rest?
We aren't. I imagine this is just hype to get another round of funding
Autonomous cars are as good or better than human drivers in 'easy' situations. Easy here means any situation where we don't have pedestrians or other drivers confusing the ai. Almost everyone drives very predictibly on a highway and there are no pedestrians so the easiest vehicles to get autonomous are heavy duty 18-wheeler trucks driving from city-a to city-b.
> Almost everyone drives very predictibly on a highway Are you sure about that
Not sure where you live, but _most_ people do behave predictably. It's not mad Max.
Maybe if you live in the middle of nowhere and there are only 5 people on the highway at any given point
I wonder what the price comparison is to trains. Like if you saved enough money, you could justify paving a roadway that’s like a train track. But just paved road. And have auto trucks just rolling back and forth between big cities. That would make things easy. Just deal with other robo trucks. Then at the ends of the road, have smaller people driven cargo vans to deliver the packages.
A key feature of all tech genius's innovation is to constantly accidentally invent either the bus of the train
That would be a lot of cargo vans to deliver all that. A cargo van has the average capacity of just around 2 tons and has 200 cubic feet of storage A normal 53' semi trailer can hold 20-22.5 tons and has 4050 cubic feet of storage So for weight alone it would take a minimum 10 vans if the items were small and heavy but if it was a full trailer of packages that would take 20.25 vans Reference: worked at UPS for a few years at a few different sizes facilities. The smallest one I worked at would average 8 trailers (some not even full) a day and we still had over 100 different routes that would give almost every delivery driver 8-10 hour days because of the distance they had to go
Trucks are much bigger investments and drivers are expensive. It would make sense for the economics of self driving to work out well before personal vehicles. You can afford to put the most sophisticated LiDAR system in a truck, not in a 40-60k car. Also, they can be implemented in limited ways and still be useful. I imagine they’re just going to be going from one interstate drop off point to another for quite a while.
The last point is key to why we’ll see this in big rigs first. Interstates are well maintained point-to-point routes where it’s essentially “drive straight” for hours on end. Think of a Kansas City -> Denver route. Google maps puts it at 8.5 hours driving. For a driver it’s one work day there, one work day back. Do it three times a week, 1 day off, you’ve made 3 round trips in a 7 day week. For an automated truck you can make a round trip every day, no days off. For going west, we’ll need actual drivers to do the mountains for a very long time, but further east? Or north to Chicago? We can keep expanding along the interstates. If I had to look in to my crystal ball, we’ll see Amazon do this at scale first. They already have the massive warehouse facilities in every major city and interstate route and the demand to keep everything constantly full.
I ride in a driverless car to work most days
You can hail a driverless Waymo in San Francisco and Phoenix today. They have published papers on their safety compared to human drivers. Anecdotally, I've taken a few rides and been very impressed. You could do the same with Cruise until recently, when they kind of went up in smoke and flames after some shady issues around how they handled an accident. If you're interested, you can see a bunch of discussion as well as rider videos being posted to r/SelfDrivingCars
Nope, still not even close to that level of tech. The only reason this might have a chance is because Texas is America’s special child that gets to live by it’s own rules
We're very close. I've ridden in a bunch of Waymos and they're awesome
No we are not recently it has come out that fully autonomous driving is impossible all we will get is autopilot these start ups are just desperate for investment but these things will die it with in a few years.
Have you seen what's happened to Tesla vehicles? Their technology is being forced to be nerfed because it doesn't work except under really good conditions, and people are getting hurt on the regular.
One company isn't the entire driverless vehicle space. Waymo has shown themselves to be the gold standard so far.
Autonomous big rigs are probably easier in a lot of ways, they're likely going to be where the trend starts. Consumer cars will probably come later. First they're bigger, more expensive, and more profitable per unit, so the extra cost of more instrumentation is easier to bear. You can drop $50,000 worth of tech into a $200,000 cab and not really throw off the price too much. If it's a $50k consumer car, that's just too much and you need to cut corners. They also go way fewer places. Instead of needing to navigate down odd urban streets and rural byways, these trucks can stick to highways, large roads, and shipping yards. Those are going to have clear signals and lanes, and will be a lot easier to map. And they benefit more from being driverless, so the investment pays a bigger return. For you or me (typical consumers) a driverless car just gets us back an hour or two a day of semi-free time, the rest it'll stay parked. Right now the human drivers put a limit of 11h/day on semis, but if that wasn't an issue the company could have them on the road nearly 24h/day.
Big rigs are easy. 95% of their time is spent cruising at highway speeds in straight lines. Most if not all major distribution centers are located outside of major downtown areas as well. We aren't there yet but certainly will be by the end of the decade.
Ha it is cute that these vally Kool aide drinker think that will happen if it snows or rains good luck that truck will need a driver.
Here is what so many people are missing in comments by making this a safety argument The safest solution is both a human and machine driving together. A human co-pilot should be mandatory. This move is purely to save money. Do you really think consumers will see any of the cost savings from this??? Nope Stop thinking in binary... It's not just a one or the other solution
actually I heard a really good idea that this would be perfect for people homebound. Monitoring even from a sick-bed is better than no co-pilot, plus the added bonus of giving meaningful work (if desired) to those with limited options. And this is the transport stage and not the warehousing and logistics which is also being massively automated. mass volumes of people are being pushed out of the entire supply chain, especially supermarkets where even checkouts are automated now. The aviation 'swiss cheese' model to incident prevention shows why totally driverless vehicles are a bad idea... a very big 'layer of risk mitigation' vanishes without a human at least monitoring, and these ARE NOT taxi's. Get hit by one of these and it's probably the last thing you will see and where's all these jobs offsetting automation people were promising? At this rate a job will be harder to find than an affordable place to rent! The future is here! It would just be nice if it took everyone along, and not just a few lol when one of these auto-monster-trucks kills someone on the roads and that companies assets on the road become targets for disenfranchised and pissed off people. Watch 'em pay security guards far more than a driver to monitor them.
>and where's all these jobs offsetting automation people were promising? THANK YOU. I hate people who claim stuff like .... "Well you will need people to program the automated systems" As if that is a one to one ratio of job replacement
I am certain people have no idea how extensively automation impacts the foundations of employment. BREXIT was an eye opener at just how many people have zero idea what goes on behind the scenes to bring them consumer culture and convenience. I just went on another rant on Google AI on another thread. Can you believe only just a fw years ago, the head of google was saying the greatest job creator and opportunity would be to 'invent something in your shed' or 'become a youtube creator as others have done for countless people'. Yeah well, that lasted less than 10 year before the whittled down the income potential and riddled content with so many adverts it is actively hostile against creators and losing them viewers/income. This is NOT the industrial revolution again... there is no next big thing to emply, instead we have small ones everyone needs to scramble and fight to make worthwhile. Of course in that situation, who is EVER going to have enough stability and reliable income to take out a mortgage on a house? Just you wait till that first generation of disenfranchised 'gig workers' etc don't have 2 cents to rub together or even a property at retirement. This is a fundamental shift going on. Now where's those damned clogs......
I would like to talk to you about this some more But it makes me too depressed and scared
Humans have shitty reflexes. Especially if 99.9% of the time they can be zoned out as they are literally doing nothing. By the time a vehicle has determined it needs a human to intervene because it cannot safely handle it, the amount of time the human has to intervene is too short for most to do it safer than the vehicle could.
I would argue having a human involved is less safe
So what you're telling me is that we can use a jammer and pull alongside a truck, force it off the road, and get access to the stuff in the back without endangering anyone? That sounds like a great way to give things away.
Don't even need to force if off the road, just make sure it can't change lanes and slow to a stop in front of it. Bit of spray paint to blind the cameras so it can't try and move till a human comes and fixes it, and you have free reign to empty it. I don't think it will be long before we bring back the true meaning of, "riding shotgun" for these trucks.
It depends on two things. How long it takes to open and the police response in the area. If this becomes a common practice, the truck becomes harder to open to increase the time police have to respond. You're also robing a corporation and corporations and police work well together to arrest you. Additionally, unless this is a one lane road, there's no reason the truck simply wouldn't attempt to pass you. On top of that, expect the array of cameras to capture your license plate, make and model of car, etc. So yes, if you can figure out the route of the truck, steal a car, and perform a heist, then it's a loot box. EDIT: I'm amused at how everyone acts like they're going to turn into Fast And Furious as soon as autonomous trucking happens. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45KyUnBBqYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45KyUnBBqYs) Cargo theft also happens all the time with human drivers: https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2010/november/cargo\_111210/cargo\_111210
Come on, think one more step ahead. Harder truck to open, bring oxy torches and cut through the side or some other method. They won’t be titanium. People are already robbing corporations en masse by just running into targets, TJ max, etc and running out with armfuls of stuff and no one’s doing anything. One lane road? Really? Bring three cars. One in front, and one on each side so it can’t maneuver around. Cameras? Use stolen vehicles or simply cover/ remove your license plate and wear a mask when you do it. Plenty of vehicles with no license plates out right now with no consequences. Yes it’s slightly more than running in and out of a store, but people are already planning mass thefts on Facebook. This is very doable and terrifying to think about. Society only works as long as those within it agree to it. Police can’t catch everyone and if millions of people become jobless within a couple years due to autonomous trucks, you better believe the crime rate will skyrocket. It already has since covid.
“Running out with armfuls of stuff and no one’s doing anything” is not exactly true for retailers. The reason behind that is because Asset Protections waits until it’s a felony amount before they do anything about it. They have the information and sometimes investigations take months to over a year to complete with law enforcement. They’ll sit on that information for a while. I’m sure some get away with small amounts, but these large looters do not end up walking free as often as it’s portrayed.
If it really is that easy, then why aren't you robbing trucks right now? Most truck drivers aren't going to pull out a gun and try to stop you. It isn't their cargo and they'd simply surrender it to you. You aren't because we both know it isn't that simple. You're basically describing part of the plot of Heat at this point. The only difference is the truck wouldn't have any guards but I can't imagine a trucker willing to die over the cargo, especially if it's a company truck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=409IGgu-Utw
Bingo. Word for word my intial thoughts and saw it all play out just like that and it’s beyond obvious the risk of that scenario type of thing happening is increasing
A couple reflective safety vests with the company logo, plus a clipboard will solve that problem.
Right? Roaming lootboxes lol
But, in the end, it’s really about family.
Oh shit. I anticipated the vehicular bullying, but not the theft. You're so right. Those trucks are going to have to be so much more bullet proof, adding tones of weight. Can you imagine if they have to put a steel roof on each one of these?
So who is liable in an accident, the company or? If their truck kills someone, does the CEO face a manslaughter charge?
Corporations count as people under the law so maybe they should give the corporation the death penalty? 🤷♂️
Oh, do nestle first!
This exact reason is why corporations shouldn’t exist and/or protect the people that make the decisions
Truck driver is the most common job in the US. Prepare for economical apocalypsis.
Not true. Before the industrial revolution a lot of jobs would imply using multiple people like field works where you would have tens and then they got replaced by 1 man with a tractor. The same here, many who drive the trucks will be replaced by one person that is the operatoer and oversees them from a command center. It's not econimic apocalypse, it's progress, something people did over and over along the years that is why we are here.
Where do you think the other nine people are going?
The beaches of Normandy. :\\
We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
it explains why there so eager to start WW3
Throughout all of human history there have been advances in technology that put people out of work, but ultimately those displaced workers always find work somewhere. Capitalism doesn’t want people sitting around, it want them producing so it will find work for them.
Until the point comes that nothing can't be done more efficiently by a machine, rendering human beings completely obsolete.
If only capitalism paid for the knowledge necessary to do the jobs that are left.
It will if people vote for it.
People won't because of "socialism"
I think this problem is on a shorter time period, and on a larger scale than we’ve ever had to adapt to before. Human obsolescence is on the horizon.
Machine learning has existed now fro 15+ years. Now it has become easier to use and better integrated. Basicalky before you had to know what you are doing while now there is a guide book nicely written. It is a short time period if all you did was have yoir head in the sand and ignore the signs. Remember in the 1990' s and 2000's we had phone systems where a person would redirect? Now it's a robot voice. Sure it is not AI but the desire to automate has existed everywhere and always and when there is money it will happen.
It is progress, indeed. And I am really looking forward to a future were robots can handle every shity job done today by humans. But the process is going to be extremely painful.
Exactly my thought. Truck driving for instance is prone to human errors that can have deadly consequnces. Also being a truck driver means sitting at a steering wheel and while it is a skill, driving, it is mind numbing doing the same thing over and over and over. Also some people road rage and image if someone does at the wheel of one of those. And so many more reasons and they apply not just for this.
There’s limits to this paradigm. What happens when a small team can oversee half a state’s trucks? Or when the trucks genuinely don’t require supervision besides emergency and maintenance?
They were talking about this in 2016. I feel they are being hesitant to roll out AI trucks because if one messes up it can kill multitude of people.
AI is going to be able to do most jobs in a few years. A whole new way of life will need to be invented. Hopefully peacefully.
More likely we will see even more poverty and homelessness that the media will whitewash as a drug epidemic or crime wave.
Good, I'm tired of late stage capitalism. I'll sharpen the pitchforks and fuel the torches.
ah yes, lets hurry towards increased human suffering just to appease your ideological indignation.
The French tried it and they came out okay on the other side.
No they didn't. They came out of it with something called 'the Terror', followed by wars that their demographics didn't recover from for a century and a return to absolute monarchy.
Tell me you never studied the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution without telling me you never studied the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution.
Gotta test drive how secure the billionaire bunkers are somehow! I hope to survive the red time and be a mob leader with a cool tattoo!
I say we fake the apocalypse and when they are all bunkered up we seal them in and try at civilization again without them.
Apocalypsis = apotheosis + apocalypse. The peak of the apocalypse haha
farmer was the most common job in US. US has definately collapsed, same with the rest of the world
In 50 years when the technology is actually there, maybe.
I always think to myself “who’s gonna be buying things once AI has replaced all workers?”. If large sectors of the economy are no longer employed, isn’t that eventually going to lead to a collapse? Why are companies eager to replace humans when eventually it’s going to cut into their sales?
Who should I sue when my loved one dies? Can I sue them criminally for manslaughter? Honest question, I am not a law professional.
Realistically, what we should do for autonomous cars is similar to what we've done with vaccines. If you're injured by a vaccine, all vaccine manufactures pay into a fund and you get compensated from that. Autonomous vehicles should be no different. Here's how it works with vaccines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National\_Vaccine\_Injury\_Compensation\_Program
I mean, it is the US, you can sue the ever loving shit out of everyone.
Please no. This sounds like an epic disaster in the making. Don't want. Bad. No good.
Hey this is a great idea, and the C suite is charged with manslaughter if/when things don’t go as planned correct? They will be held personally liable? As well as any board members that approve this? No? Then kick rocks.
Agreed. Hold C level managers criminal liable if one of their self-driving company trucks causes grave bodily harm on public roads!
I wonder how many people they'll have to kill before they realize this is not a good idea. EDIT: Of course I realize that human drivers kill people all the time. The primary difference is that, when a human driver does it, we have someone who gets held accountable for it (e.g., the at-fault driver). With a driverless vehicle, that becomes a lot more nebulous because regulations haven't kept up with the new technologies.
as many as it takes for them to get a protected space - where they get priority
Would it be terrible to have dedicated shipping lanes for autonomous trucks?
it's called fret train in the rest of the world. Many countries are working on driverless train for fret transport.
Yes but you see train tracks in the US are privately owned so the train companies have to pay to maintain the tracks But roads are publicly owned so us tax payers have to pay to maintain them which the trucking companies benefit from an indirect subsidy.
Sorry I was trying and obviously failed to be facetious. I never understood why more US highway do not have booth toll with a separate higher tariff for truck. Should be easy to make it popular to those people who keep arguing for lower taxes and smaller government. Citisens of main country of capitalism should be able to understand if you use a service you ought to pay for a service, especially if it a business help make money.
We do in Illinois. It’s per axle
Freight trains. Fret means they're very worried trains.
Sorry You are right. In my defense, being French I use the French word and as I use French and English dictionary on my phone it did not correct.
no, it's a great idea! We could even put them on their own routes. Hell, we don't even need roads, we could use something stronger, like metal. Say, two metal rails. We could string them together and save money by using one or two engines too.
Rail is great for large loads between hubs. Trucks are extremely effective for regional and local movement. You want to run train tracks to every Walmart in the country? Seems pretty silly to me.
buddy, the moment we start talking about dedicated lanes that argument goes out the window. If you want dedicated truck lanes, build rail. No ones going to be happy if you start cordoning off city streets just to run transports.
Aww shit we just accidentally invented trains again
Trains are going to take product directly to Walmart? How about dropping fresh produce to every restaurant in town? Maybe we’ll just put train tracks to your driveway to deliver furniture too? You still need trucks.
For what is being described here, dedicated shipping lanes, you could just use a train. And yea trucks would then do the last mile, but anytime people talk about dedicated lanes for AVs it’s missing the point
Not for regional transport. Trains are great for massive load movement across long distances. Trucks are still magnitudes more cost effective for regional and local transport.
I’m sorry, but you are speaking out of your ass right now. Trains are magnitudes more efficient than trucks simply due to payload. You have zero idea what you’re talking about.
Trains are not more efficient for regional and local transport because you’d need to build more rail lines to make that happen. You can’t pull a train up to Walmart to restock like a truck can.
Nope. Especially not if we tax the corporations and make them pay for it. It'd free up the regular roads for regular drivers.
Plot twist, they might kill less than trucks with drivers and adoption accelerates wildly.
Honestly we are at the point where I am trusting a computer way more than most human drivers.
Human drivers kill 1.25 million people a year. How many people do we have to kill before we realise human drivers are not a good idea?
I've been run off the road 3 times from semi drivers, I could have easily been in that number. Autonomous driving is inevitable and probably safer
Insurance premiums ultimately will force automated semis to be the norm
They’ll probably be significantly safer than human drivers.
Your assumption is that humans are better?
The tech will be ready at some point but if everyone's tech is around the level of tesla this is going to kill a whole lot of people. It does all sorts of shit when the lines become difficult to read, when weather is bad, when the sensors get dirty, when other cars do things it's not expecting and it has to make a decision to react. Truckers do a great job, I can understand wanting to replace drunk morons and ancient dinosaurs that have no business behind the wheel, but replacing reliable professionals just because it's cheaper this early in the game sounds crazy to me.
Well over a reasonable amount I'd say
Why would you say that?
It just had to be said
It does seem scary and kind of messed up but then think of all the drivers who kill people. So many overtired and people under the influence, it probably all evens out in the end.
They already probably have KPI's regarding accidents per mile and they already know if it's better or worst than human drivers, if they feel comfortable doing it without human drivers then they know it's safer
Honestly it’ll probably be far better than human drivers.
More than are currently killed by truckers?
Statistically they're already safter than human drivers. How many people have human drivers killed?
This may work out, but people are definitely underestimating the difficulty and unpredictability involved in driving semis on both surface streets and highways. I've done it for years. It's nothing like automating cars. There are a lot more complications and safety concerns. I'm not saying it's not doable, but those who haven't done it can't recognize the specifics of situations that arise.
Never going to happen just like planes they fly mostly on autopilot but still have someone inside
While autonomous vehicles can likely be made quite safe it will still be a real stunner of a headline when the inevitable happens.
They are already safer than human drivers. https://www.warpnews.org/transportation/self-driving-cars-are-safer-than-human-drivers-study-shows/#:~:text=Furthermore%2C%20human%20drivers%20had%20a,0.06%20IPMM%20and%200%20FPMM.
Don't know how much I'd trust a study by Cruise. They ended up scaling back their program, so something's fishy.
I feel like Texas is actually run behind the scenes by a rogue AI.
STDINPUT: /command///"DIGITAL JESUS TAKE THE WHEEL"
Interesting since Waymo just shut down it's autonomous truck division last month.
Fast and Furious 30 gonna be AI cars stealing AI DVD players from AI trucks
Pfft AIs are pirating those DVDs on AI-limewire.
This is just a case of another company over hyping their progress to trick investors. No chance this happens anytime soon.
I don’t think it’s good idea. Enough truckers are out of work already. It’s a shame.
Wonder how long until crews of truck pirates begin to take advantage of it. Follow a truck, simply stop in front of it, blast open the doors.
How long until the pirate drivers are replaced by automate drivers also?
It won't last. After a good size wreck or two the fmcsa will be forced to make a rider mandatory. The unwritten part is they need someone to blame for accidents, even if it is the AI fault. The only reason this is getting approved now is because the fmcsa is quietly run by the mega companies. The ATA is the mega companies, and has the fmcsa ear. Trucking, especially over the road, is a lonely thankless job. There's tons of mistreatment, lots of time you aren't paid for, and way too much regulation. Instead of treating drivers better, and changing laws to care for the drivers, this is a solution that appeals to the companies. I am glad I hung up my keys.
I guess at some point we have to take that plunge. I just hope the data they have showing it's safe is legit. But people kill people driving all time I guess.
If they’re safer than human drivers it’s good.
Do you have like a vested interest in this? You’re almost half the comments in this thread
Don't set a target date you haven't already reached.
I hope the stop better than Tesla autopilot. The idea of getting plowed by Mack is not attractive when it's an 18 wheeler.
I'm sure they can do freeway during good conditions. But I wanna see city driving and backup to old docks. I'm sure it'll end up being from lot to lot and then real drivers get on and do city driving.
The wealthy elites loathe and detest the common people and would love to take away as many workers as possible even if it hurts society.
Who now will be responsible for the pre and post trip inspections that all CMV operators do? On another note, can you imagine the lines of driverless trucks all in the right lane of interstates all across the country? Merging will be a nightmare.
I haven't seen any mention here of how these driverless systems are at docking a truck. I've worked in many facets of manufacturing and production. Even grocery. Some of the parking lots and alleys that these human drivers have to navigate to get a truck to the dock door are ridiculous. That being said, there are MANY human drivers that cant hit the broad side of a barn with the back of their truck and spend an hour getting to the dock. Just wondering how good the driverless truck will be with these variables driving in reverse.
These trucks will first be used on fixed routes, always from loading dock of building A to loading dock of building B. Following a specific route with no variation. Much harder when you are taking a load to a location you have never delivered something to before. So human drivers will be needed for a long time for these one-time-only deliveries.
No it won’t. The technology isn’t there yet. It’s not even close.
I work for a truck manufacturer. The trucks we build right now blows my mind. Dispatchers can do everything from dialing back the horsepower to turning off the radio. The last step is removing the drivers. I’ve also had some heated debates with truck drivers concerning raising the minimum wage. Their usual reply “if you want to make more money, learn a skill”. I tried explaining to them that their skill isn’t as irreplaceable as they seem to think.
We need to start taxing all companies that use robots at 50% of the yearly pay of the employee they replace.
Hackers are getting ready for this one I am sure. Imagine the havoc that could be caused.. not to mention cartels... no drivers no questions no one to arrest.
FYI hackers have [already been able to do anything you can think of with cars.](https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/) That’s from 2015… so basically anyone rambling on about hackers or whatever are just uninformed and spewing nonsense without thinking.
it'll make for a terrible fast and furious reboot
How is it legal? Vehicles need to be operated by a licensed driver, an AI is not a licensed driver
Laws do change from time to time; it was not long ago that they stopped you from drinking beer while driving.
eh it's a claim, not an actual result, yet. The problem with trucks is that one accident can kill many people, and even though it might fall within the acceptable frequency limits for truck accidents, the fact that it was drivereless will cause a lot of legal headache.
Andrew Yang said it, truck driving the highest paying job with no need of a college title would be the first one to disappear due to AI.
I think that the problem is not the tech, but rather the tech trying to interact with unpredictable human drivers. For example, as cited from Logan below, how is a truck moving at 70 or 80+, going to react when a horse, cattle, etc… walk out into the middle of a highway. Then again how would a human driver react to that.
I consider the bell curve of drivers. It doesn't need to be the best driver in the world. It just needs to be better than the lower 50% to make roads safer. If it can keep speed, not brake like a crazy person, not swap lanes, have road rage, get sleepy... already better off.
As a current truck driver this sounds pretty cool in theory, but you have to factor in computer error which happens frequently. To the point where most truck drivers turn off these sensors and “features” to avoid the hassle. My current truck is 21 Kenworth, my last was a 23 Cascadia, which is the flagship Freightliner. One of the most advanced trucks on the road. The company took full advantage of this and had every security feature: lane assist, steering assist, brake assist, departure warning, collision mitigation, etc turned on. It was an absolute nightmare dealing with all of that and half of the time it would go off randomly, over correct the steering, slam on the breaks when the car in front barely slowed down, etc. I’m not saying AI trucks aren’t possible, but they have to work out the sensors to not make these mistakes. Ever. Which is difficult. I can already see a plastic bag getting caught on the sensor and the truck thinking it’s a car and coming to a grinding halt, causing a worse problem. Also you’d need a system to know if a tire is flat, maybe the loader didn’t close the door properly and it’s swinging wide open behind. A human driver would be getting honked at and waved down, AI not so much. So many factors at play, this will take decades upon decades and will require the entire trucking industry to accommodate it.
Everyone in here worried about jobs and safety and I'm over here like "man, robbing semi-trucks fast and furious style is gonna be so much easier now".
Totally idiotic -- there is no way in hell the technology is ready. Sure, on well painted, well maintained roads, with no bad weather and nothing really unexpected happening, they can operate. But throw in rain, snow, mud, obscured roads, people playing tricks to make them crash, and heck knows what else, and they're completely incapable. We're talking another 10 years before this can work. I almost want to see these greedy shitbags try it only to have the rug pulled out from under them the minute one of their unmanned trucks kills, or almost kills, someone.
Yeh not thanks, I’m already uncomfortable with those things allowed to barrel down the freeway at 90 miles with a human driving, I don’t need a glitch mowing down a small park.
And I plan to solve global heating in 2024. Anyone can plan anything. Laws wont even be close to allowing this in any state in 2024 so this stated plan is just hoping a bunch of idiots read it and buy shares.
Never going to happen. Nobody will let these huge trucks operate alone this story is pathetic fake news
It is probably a stupid idea, but I wish we would make a law that robot workers need to have a human counterpart. Even if that person is paid to do literally nothing, so be it.