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The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

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Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#241

Post by [deleted] »

estefan wrote: post #224
ilamont wrote: post #218

The demonstration in Europe shows that driverless trucking is right around the corner. The primary remaining barriers are regulatory. What about the roads themselves? I'm curious how an autonomous truck will handle a snow-covered highway, fog, potholes, and tight corners caused by narrow roads, bad parking, snow banks, etc. This is a way of life where I live (Boston area). The article about the Russian driverless van…

> Industry players are aware that just one serious accident on the roads involving a driverless car could set back their development by decades. It'd be awfully "convenient" for the truckers & taxi drivers if this were to happen... I predict a dirty tricks campaign with one or two engineered "accidents" to safeguard their industries. Vehicles, autonomous and current ones, will need incredibly reliable security to pre…

[deleted]

Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#242

Post by FussyZeus »

TheLogothete wrote: post #207
FussyZeus wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disruption nothing, this is going to be an economic apocalypse for huge swathes of the country. We've never seen an automation wave like this one. It's exciting times to be alive for sure but I'm also legitimately worried if we're going to be able to handle it as a society, if anything is going to tip us into needing basic income, this could be a serious contender. It's not even just the trucking, it's truck stops, h…

Yeah, it's not like this has happened ever before. We definitely need basic income. It will solve all the problems.

No it won't, and it will come with a few of it's own (getting American's past the bootstrap narrative is probably the biggest single one) but it is a step in the right direction.

That being said if you can think of another example where we put 3.5 million people out of work nearly overnight along with an entire support system built on their salaries and needs, I'd love to hear it. The only similar thing I could think of would be the rise of automation in American factories, and even then that didn't replace EVERY human with a machine, and carried with it a certain PR cost for the companies involved, whereas I think a shipping company removing humans from their trucks would have a PR boon, not bust.

Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#243

Post by orbat »

rayiner wrote: post #240
estefan wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Industry players are aware that just one serious accident on the roads involving a driverless car could set back their development by decades. It'd be awfully "convenient" for the truckers & taxi drivers if this were to happen... I predict a dirty tricks campaign with one or two engineered "accidents" to safeguard their industries. Vehicles, autonomous and current ones, will need incredibly reliable security to pre…

Yes, because computers and software aren't buggy by themselves without human intervention.

It's not a question of whether they're buggy, but whether they are better than human drivers despite the bugs

Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#244

Post by hannibalhorn »

peterwwillis wrote: post #104
ctvo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trucks are way more complicated to drive. Once they're up to cruising speed, they're easy. But it's everything leading up to that point which is hard. Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more. The mechanical aspects of controlling a large truck and accounting for the variables is probably the easiest part of the problem. Things involving hum…

Yes. Truckers have to deal with a sort of standard "road safety dilemma" all the time, which can be boiled down to this: A trucker is driving a 40 ton truck at 65mph. A passenger car with a family of four cuts in front of it, and the distance is closing fast. A passenger car takes roughly 315 feet to come to a complete stop. A fully loaded truck takes 525 feet. The trucker now has to make a decision. A) Do I slam on…

There's a real possibility that once driverless trucks become widespread, human behavior will change as well. A very aggressive driver may take advantage of the fact that an automated truck will brake for them, and start routinely cutting off trucks, whereas today they'd be a little more respectful. Even pedestrians could start crossing a highway where they shouldn't and know they could get away with it.

Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#245

Post by DanielBMarkham »

verytrivial wrote: post #213
HorizonXP wrote: post #2

My father is a truck driver. He made his living driving vehicles and doing heavy lifting and menial work. Truck driving is just the latest evolution in his "career" and I'm ever grateful to him for battering his body in various ways to ensure I had every opportunity available to myself. We talk a lot about his job. It's not fun. He works long hours, a lot of it is mundane driving, and he sits idle a lot of the time.…

> And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad. I wonder if there will be a more specialised role for human drivers here akin to pilots in ports. Companies at the scale able to invest in the tech might have the trucks arrive at a queue near regional hubs and have wet-ware do the 10 minutes of fiddly driving after clearing off the Smart car…

If I had to bet, that's the way I see it playing out.

In the states, many distribution centers are located next to major transportation arteries, whether rail or interstate highway. In addition, many of the places they ship to are also located on major arteries. It wouldn't be a huge stretch to have automated trucks you load on one end, they drive to the other (using 98% highway driving), then park in a waiting area until a human finishes the job by parking them.

The interesting edge cases here would be accidents, construction, and detours. Whatever you deploy should be able to handle those without human intervention. Otherwise we could end up with every accident site also having 100 automated trucks at a dead stop waiting on drivers to show up. That'd be ugly.

Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#246

Post by ddebernardy »

afterburner wrote: post #176
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #103

A very useful visual to add next to this is "The Most Common Job In Every State"[0] map from NPR's Planet Money. As soon as I was aware of the research in autonomous driving I was pretty confident trucking would be the first industry hit. Until I saw that map I had no sense of how major of a disruption this could be. [0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...

A very interesting map, but: "The prominence of truck drivers is partly due to the way the government categorizes jobs. It lumps together all truck drivers and delivery people, creating a very large category. Other jobs are split more finely; for example, primary school teachers and secondary school teachers are in separate categories." ... I really wish they'd collapsed some of those categories, could have been even…

Then again, teachers are probably on their way to being (at least semi-)automated as well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#247

Post by minikomi »

Svip wrote: post #226
bane wrote: post #225

Many of the comments here are overestimating what's required for this to have an impact. Driverless trucks only need to cover some large percentage of the driving currently performed by humans to be major economic changers. For example, let's say they can only run during daylight hours, in conditions other than rain and snow, only on long-haul routes, and humans will do the "last-mile" piloting on local roads. Now le…

Indeed. I find the binary view of self-driving/driverless/robot lorries somewhat narrow. Furthermore, a lot of these sort of technologies have already made it into lorries and cars, just commonly called 'driver aids'. Such as radar controlled cruise control, lane control, etc. Most of lorry hauling takes place on motorways, where the process can be easily automated. Only when trips from the origin to the motorway and…

It doesn't even have to be all or nothing. Imagine a kind of road-train, where the leading truck is driven in a heavily assisted manner but still has human control in the mix. Another 5 - 10 fully automated "follow the leader" style trucks could simply imitate the leader truck. All the while gathering data..

Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#248

Post by rtkwe »

peterwwillis wrote: post #168
schiffern wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A passenger car takes roughly 315 feet to come to a complete stop. A fully loaded truck takes 525 feet. How does this change if truck design and "per-axel" fee incentives were rationalized[1][2] to instead maximize the number of axles? Doubling the number of axles reduces road damage by 94%. Currently semi trucks account for 6% of vehicle miles driven[3] and 99% of all traffic damage to roads. But would this measur…

Braking distance is a factor of speed, weight, brakes, tires and road surface. A 40 ton truck can only stop so fast with rubber tires on typical brakes on a typical highway road surface. Race cars are designed to stop faster than passenger cars. Their brakes are huge, they're designed with exotic components to transfer heat to air faster, designed to take higher heat for longer, the cars are designed to flow air over…

> Race cars are designed to stop faster than passenger cars. Their brakes are huge, they're designed with exotic components to transfer heat to air faster, designed to take higher heat for longer, the cars are designed to flow air over the brakes, and they cost much more and don't last as long, and have advanced computerized systems to optimize brake utilization.

A lot of that isn't to brake faster but to keep the brakes from overheating from constant high use during a race that can last a couple hours or more. For normal emergency use you can drop a lot of that because they only need to be used extremely hard rarely and they'll have time to cool.

Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#249

Post by ajuc »

mantas wrote: post #200
ajuc wrote: post #195

Wouldn't it be much easier to assure security on roads if every car had to have 50 USD short-range (500 m is enough) radio transmitter that sends its velocity and position (from GPS). It's obviously possible techincaly (see cheap tablets), and from law POV (see seat belts requirement). It would be useful (the device can have cheap black and white lcd screen and show "radar"-like view with cars ahead and behind). It w…

Would it require to have a backup device? Would cyclists and pedestrians have to have it as well?

Backups - yes I guess. It's cheap so why not.

Pedestrians and cyclists would surely protest.

Re: The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

#250

Post by emp_zealoth »

mattlutze wrote: post #234
vgoh1 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One accident might set back consumer driving for 50 years, but not commercial. The safety record simply needs to be much better than human drivers, which shouldn't be too hard, because one driver is already taken out of the equation. And there are billions upon billions to be saved, in our corporatocracy of the USA, it WILL happen. Bad roads shouldn't be too much of a problem, they can just use humans on the bad road…

Public and political perception need to consider autonomous commercial trucking to be safe, rather than safer. "Safer than human drivers" all too easily becomes "we can't control when these robot trucks my crash into a mother driving her kids to school," when you put it into the political regulation arena.

So it's all fine when a lorry rear ends and pancakes a car because the driver fell asleep?
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