Otto, really bad name regarding googling
It's the name of the autopilot in "Airplane!". I'm hoping they whimsically include an inflatable entity to let people know the truck is under computer control.
What if Otto starts deflating?
Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
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Re: Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
#92Sending a truck down an interstate for 20 hours has to be the lowest hanging fruit for self driving vehicles. When was the last time an entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough that laid off employees blamed the technology? When long haul truckers are out of work, how will municipal bus driver unions react?
The interesting challenges on a interstate are pretty similar as the usual challenges of autonomous vehicles, so what happens if there is a construction site, or if there are people on the road. (But you have to deal with that at a lot higher speeds.)
And Ars had a very interesting article on the validation of self-driving cars, the thing is humans are rather good at driving, to the tune of 10^8 km per fatal accident, so you need really huge statistics to validate self driving cars. I suspect that if you want to show that your autonomous truck is as save as a human truck driver, then you acquire another factor of 2 in the kilometers needed. (Actually I seem to remember that it is about a factor of 5, but that is entirely unsourced.)
[0] http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/04/car-makers-cant-drive-th...
Re: Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
For trains, where 1 person directs 200+ cars, the reward just isn't great enough. For trucks, where one person directs 1 truckload, it's 200+ times as rewarding. Plus, almost every country in the world has stopped building infrastructure to allow trains to go where you'd want them to go. So trains are only useful for huge manufacturing firms and things like harbors. Goods trains don't even go to most airports anymore…
Bit of an aside, but I've often heard it argued that trains make more sense for passenger traffic. The reasoning is that you can shift a lot of people into one central station, and they then deliver themselves over the last stage of a journey through ambulation.
Interesting! Have you read anything recently about that? Any link?
Re: Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
For trains, where 1 person directs 200+ cars, the reward just isn't great enough. For trucks, where one person directs 1 truckload, it's 200+ times as rewarding. Plus, almost every country in the world has stopped building infrastructure to allow trains to go where you'd want them to go. So trains are only useful for huge manufacturing firms and things like harbors. Goods trains don't even go to most airports anymore…
Bit of an aside, but I've often heard it argued that trains make more sense for passenger traffic. The reasoning is that you can shift a lot of people into one central station, and they then deliver themselves over the last stage of a journey through ambulation.
That entirely depends on land use.
If downtown Palo Alto near the station were full of skyscrapers, as its land value would justify, the Caltrain would be an effective commute for many more workers.
Re: Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
At any one time, what percentage of the total truck drivers would you imagine are currently on the road vs maneuvering the last mile. The last mile might be a significant portion of where their skill shines, but it's almost certainly not a significant portion of the time spent. If a driver spends 1 hour at each end of a 20 hour cross region trip, that could still be a 10 times decrease in the total number of skilled…
I frown when we look at a technology negatively for the impact on the JOBS out there. Instead, let's take a look at the tech for the benefits it provides the person doing the job, how much it will improve the quality of life and the quality of work, and how much more a worker can accomplish. Few people realize there is a caveat here too: Driver efficiency goes up and that means drivers can get paid more. The cost of…
There's a difference between recognizing that a technology will negatively impact jobs, and holding back progress because of it.
It's grossly irresponsible to not think about the former, though I agree that we shouldn't risk doing the latter.
Re: Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
#96Sending a truck down an interstate for 20 hours has to be the lowest hanging fruit for self driving vehicles. When was the last time an entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough that laid off employees blamed the technology? When long haul truckers are out of work, how will municipal bus driver unions react?
> When was the last time an entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough that laid off employees blamed the technology? Containerized shipping. Interestingly, it's in the world of logistics too. Longshoremen/dockworkers/stevedores used to be among the most common occupations in the US at the turn of the century, but now the industry employs a tiny fraction. A small group of a few hundred people can effectively…
Apparently in some parts of the world the docks have been further automated that hardly any dockworkers are needed but for obvious reasons, in the US, they have been able to limit that somewhat. I guess it wont fully happen here until the current generation retires.
Re: Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is so flippant and just the most immature thing. As an under 30 year old, highly educated individual, yep - just get another job. Move somewhere across country if you need to; you don't have kids or a mortgage. As a specialized veteran of a job that requires very few transferable skills, truck drivers are fucked initially, and we'll see massive unemployment from this. In many cases, the areas with high ratios of…
What about stagecoach drivers? Bread makers? Blacksmiths? Switchboard operator? What did all these people do when their services were no longer necessary / greatly diminished? It's not like by Friday automated trucking will take over. You know it's coming, and if you don't start learning new skills or look for new work, then you're just ignorant to technology and will be out of a job.
I think the key difference 'this time' is how quickly change is happening.
Second, in the past, change was necessarily isolated in most cases, because society and business wasn't so highly connected as it is today.
Concretely, at some point, a major trunking firm could replace most of its drivers with machines over the course of a couple of years, at most.
More generally, the rate of change continues to increase. A few hundred years ago, a person could live their life and see no substantive technological change. Now we see those changes happen, in some cases, in a few years.
Re: Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
#98Who goes to jail when the self-driving truck kills someone?
The same people who went to prison when this vehicle's automated control system failed and killed people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_tra...
In practice, sober automobile drivers who stay at the scene of a crash can kill people in an astoundingly negligent fashion without facing jail time: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/opinion/why-drivers-get-aw... This is a major reason I am excited about automated vehicles, along with the potential to unclog the madness that is urban parking politics, which is one of the major factors preventing the building of new neighborhoods that are truly urban.
Re: Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
#99Sending a truck down an interstate for 20 hours has to be the lowest hanging fruit for self driving vehicles. When was the last time an entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough that laid off employees blamed the technology? When long haul truckers are out of work, how will municipal bus driver unions react?
The interesting challenges on a interstate are pretty similar as the usual challenges of autonomous vehicles, so what happens if there is a construction site, or if there are people on the road. (But you have to deal with that at a lot higher speeds.) And Ars had a very interesting article on the validation of self-driving cars, the thing is humans are rather good at driving, to the tune of 10^8 km per fatal accident…
It's a big step to go from interstate autopilots to having no human in the loop end-to-end. If autopilot systems improve safety and/or are autonomous enough that drivers can sleep and thereby make fewer stops, they'll certainly make sense. However, it may also make economic sense to keep a human on board to handle unanticipated issues or last mile tasks that may be harder to automate.
Re: Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
#100Sending a truck down an interstate for 20 hours has to be the lowest hanging fruit for self driving vehicles. When was the last time an entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough that laid off employees blamed the technology? When long haul truckers are out of work, how will municipal bus driver unions react?
An actual long-haul trucker commented at length about this on a reddit thread. I can't seem to find it. The TL;DR was that tyhe actual driving of the truck was a no-brainer to automate away, but that despite being a large portion of the job from a time perspective, it was a small portion of the job functionally speaking. The majority of a long haul trucker's job is interacting with legal authorities at weigh stations, dealing with loading crews, performing required truck maintenance on the road, etc...
It was an interesting insight. I'm sure all of that could be automated away eventually, but no where near as quickly as the actual driving. I agree with other commenters in this thread that I see truck driving going the way of the train engineer quite soon, but that having truly driverless trucks is a bit further out.