121–130 of 141 posts
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Source: The Wire Season 2.
It always bothered me that they gave Sobotka the "We used to make shit in this country" line considering his entire job was importing stuff made in other countries.
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Or even simpler, have the self-driving truck, but keep the "driver" to do all the normal non-driving stuff. Would be a great opportunity to get a lot of reading done, for example.
That's possible, but it's rather expensive to pay someone to read for most of the day.
This company basically wants to increase efficiency of long haul truckers. They can sleep in the wheel and move 24/7 without mandatory breaks.
Turning 11 hour drive into 23 hour drive would bring huge savings for the company. If they make it happen, it sells like candy and after few years all have one.
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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…
I come from a dying factory town. I understand the pain, the grief, the suffering of having your livelihood vanish in a puff of machine-shaped smoke. It destroys people - whole identities get hung on one occupation. It destroys communities - whole towns depend on one factory or one trucking line. So bear that in mind with what I say next. Suck it up. The rest of us have changed our lives, reshaped our minds, and left…
That they need training to find new employment is a given. But, that they should be aware of the goings on in technology, or that they should just pull their boots harder to get out of the mud are both very naive statements.
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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…
The train engineer analogy is a good one, you would imagine that a single "truckgineer" so to speak could be responsible for managing a convoy of let's say 10-15 trucks which would make it much more efficient. In regards to fueling, would you make that more efficient by adding a larger fuel tank or fuel car?
Or have someone at the gas station fill up the trucks like it was decades ago.
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I come from a dying factory town. I understand the pain, the grief, the suffering of having your livelihood vanish in a puff of machine-shaped smoke. It destroys people - whole identities get hung on one occupation. It destroys communities - whole towns depend on one factory or one trucking line. So bear that in mind with what I say next. Suck it up. The rest of us have changed our lives, reshaped our minds, and left…
That's just new-age bootstrap bullshit. For many of these families, they are one paycheck away from poverty and homelessness. There is no 'suck it up' when your kids are hungry. There is no money to leave behind the communities they know, where their social supports also exist. Your statements strike me as incredibly naive. That they need training to find new employment is a given. But, that they should be aware of t…
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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.
Basically my argument boils down to, it is easier to drive on an interstate on average, but for autonomous vehicles we are not interested in average and the hard challenges are similar to hard challenges for a fully autonomous car.
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Or even simpler, have the self-driving truck, but keep the "driver" to do all the normal non-driving stuff. Would be a great opportunity to get a lot of reading done, for example.
That's possible, but it's rather expensive to pay someone to read for most of the day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I come from a dying factory town. I understand the pain, the grief, the suffering of having your livelihood vanish in a puff of machine-shaped smoke. It destroys people - whole identities get hung on one occupation. It destroys communities - whole towns depend on one factory or one trucking line. So bear that in mind with what I say next. Suck it up. The rest of us have changed our lives, reshaped our minds, and left…
That's just new-age bootstrap bullshit. For many of these families, they are one paycheck away from poverty and homelessness. There is no 'suck it up' when your kids are hungry. There is no money to leave behind the communities they know, where their social supports also exist. Your statements strike me as incredibly naive. That they need training to find new employment is a given. But, that they should be aware of t…
I wish you luck in your quest, but I don't hold out much hope. I've lived too much of it.
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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.
If the driver can sleep, than the car needs to handle everything that can happen on the interstate, including deer or people on the road. So I would guess that a interstate autopilot has the same difficult challenges, but 'simpler' things like navigation may be easier. Basically my argument boils down to, it is easier to drive on an interstate on average, but for autonomous vehicles we are not interested in average a…
Interstates are less complicated overall. You don't get a lot of jaywalkers or bicycles doing unexpected things. Nor negotiation of left-hand turns, etc. What you do have is events happening at higher speeds but handling the car in front jamming on its brakes is probably easier in general for a machine that's always paying perfect attention. As a result, I do expect to see autonomous systems on limited access highways before I see them in a busy city.
That said, I fully agree that once you have full automation you can't depend on human backup that can take over quickly. Whether or not people are supposed to, they will doze off, read, text, etc.--even more than they do today.