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Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

kevinchen.co

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Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#111

Post by jdewerd »

Edman274 wrote: post #106
jdewerd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's OK to have more deaths so long as we can punish someone with no expectation that doing so will fix the problem? I suspect you are right, but I don't think it reflects well on us.

I think a way to think about it is that we (at a societal level) wouldn't accept a desk calculator to be sold as a consumer product if it did correct arithmetic almost all of the time but then would spit out a close but wrong answer 1 time out of 1000, even if that would be significantly better than the average person doing arithmetic. Our expectation would be that it could (and should) perform flawlessly. If our tec…

A respectable track record and a margin for error are fine things to insist on, but that was not the argument being presented or objected to.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#112

Post by atahanacar »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70
nativeit wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaaaand we’re back to reinventing trains. There should be a name for this phenomenon. How long do tech folks discuss how to improve transportation until they attempt to reinvent trains?

> we’re back to reinventing trains The term you’re looking for is armchair logistics. Trains and trucks have been competing for a long time. Autonomous trucks, even in convoys, even where freeways have RFID signs, are vastly different from trains. You don’t need to lay and maintain tracks. You’re not limited to where tracks go. You can assemble and disassemble on demand.

Yet you need to lay and maintain roads, you're limited to where roads and RFID signs go. You also have the added inefficiency and environmental problems of rubber-to-asphalt contact. In addition, you need to carry batteries which means even more inefficient transportation.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#113

Post by telotortium »

gwern wrote: post #72

How much of this is just money? Waymo has been operating for a decade and a half and has spent billions upon billions. Probably it's spent more than all the trucking startups listed put together. So it'd not be surprising if they are doing much better.

Didn't they recently lay off a bunch of people in their trucking division? They clearly think rideshare is more promising, at least in the short term.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#114

Post by justanotherjoe »

fallingknife wrote: post #75
Edman274 wrote: post #26

I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is hig…

The problem is that if you have safer than human systems but you don't deploy them it's basically killing people. If you had autonomous driving that was 90% as deadly as the average human driver, not deploying it would cause 4000 deaths every year in the US.

since this is literally the trolley problem, the issue here is whether you want to take authorship of the deaths or not. I personally never move the lever in those puzzles.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#115

Post by alistairSH »

jmull wrote: post #80
Havoc wrote: post #69

Yes trucks slow down slower than cars but that's just physics. You've got the exact same problem with humans driving under say rainy or foggy conditions. If anything driverless helps dramatically on this front. If you can run trucks 24/7 without stopping then you can cut their speed say 33% or whatever and still come out on top. You can also adjust the cargo to reduce stopping distance - use autonomous truckers for t…

> …you can cut their speed say 33%… You probably can’t have cars going 70 or faster sharing the road with trucks going a steady 45.

Isn’t dual speed limits (lower for trailers) fairly normal in Western Europe? Pretty sure that’s true in the UK for caravans/personal trailers, though I don’t recall if that lower limit applies to commercial trucks.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#116

Post by ramboldio »

I'm wondering why there is so little talk about changing road infrastructure to make self-driving easier to pull off.

E.g. dedicated lanes for self driving or hand-off stations where human drivers can take over etc etc.

Amid the massive potential upsides, any reasonable government would invest in measures that turn out to effectivley improve self-drivability of the respective national grid.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#117

Post by oatmeal1 »

jampekka wrote: post #78
fallingknife wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if you have safer than human systems but you don't deploy them it's basically killing people. If you had autonomous driving that was 90% as deadly as the average human driver, not deploying it would cause 4000 deaths every year in the US.

We have a lot safer transportation systems than private cars but don't deploy them. Is this basically killing people too? Driving is murder?

It's not murder. Relying excessively on a dangerous mode of transportation is killing people.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#118

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #83
nativeit wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society is literally willing to let truck drivers die to maintain shipping times. See the responses during the height of COVID-19, or even just the demands placed on every day operators cross-referenced with their average health and mortality rates. Our treatment of truck drivers is already subhuman, I don’t think we’re likely to extend a lot of understanding to the robots.

That's a bit of hyperbole. Lots of jobs take their toll on your health. That's nothing special about truck drivers, and it doesn't mean we "let them die". And you're ignoring the fact that not requiring a driver is significantly cheaper. And when it's speed versus cost, cost generally wins. So yes, society is absolutely going to be fine with trucks pausing in bad weather, because it means cheaper shipping . (And stuf…

[deleted]

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#120

Post by telotortium »

darkwater wrote: post #8
stevage wrote: post #2

That was compellingly argued. I'd like to see the braking distances fully loaded too.

But an autonomous truck can just go slower, no? It never gets tired, so unless there is a logistic pressure, it would be reasonable to trade speed for safety.

No one will tolerate self-driving trucks that are limited to lower speed than human-driven trucks. Since human drivers have time limits by law, they need to be able to move relatively quickly. Human drivers attempting to move around super slow autonomous trucks is a guarantee for a lot more accidents, more than erasing whatever safety benefits self driving would get in the first place. Also, slow trucks would not be preferred by the logistics managers that arrange truck delivery in the first place. So self driving trucks would have to be a lot cheaper to be competitive. I don't think labor is 90% of the cost of a truck delivery.
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