251–260 of 471 posts
No, consumers won't. The savings will be funneled directly to shareholders.
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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
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This is one of many reasons we will still need humans present, if only in a guard capacity.
Your house sits empty all day and nobody robs it. Video cameras work pretty well for this if it becomes a problem. Great to live in a country with rule of law.
> Trucking represents a considerable portion of the cost of all the goods we buy, so consumers everywhere will experience this change as lower prices and higher standards of living. No, consumers won't. The savings will be funneled directly to shareholders.
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> Things involving humans (vehicles cutting you off, pedestrians, etc.) are part of the general class of problems that I'm assuming all automated vehicles are working on and are much harder. The more mass you have, the longer your braking distance and the more sluggish the reactions. While the problem is the same, and the mechanical differences easily modelled, light vehicles get away with lower accuracy and higher l…
But it's still simple math. More weight, be more aggressive with brakes. If human truck drivers can do it, then a computer truck with a 360 model of the environment around it can do it more efficiently right. I don't understand the problem here really. Computers are way better at logical computation than humans and that's all we require here.
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If that's the case, then why aren't cargo ships already automated to this extent? It seems like automating a container vessel would be even easier - there are far fewer things to run into on the water (even in a busy port) than there are on a busy highway.
Pirates? You need a crew on cargo ships regardless of whether they are automated or not.
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…
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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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> 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…
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> 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…
As I've said before about smaller autonomous vehicles, they'll be programmed to always choose the option which is most defensible in court. I will be amazed if we ever see an autonomous vehicle on public roads which does something more complicated than "come to a complete halt as fast as possible while steering for the clearest area of asphalt."