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Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

santacruzsentinel.com

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Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#61

Post by jelliclesfarm »

sdan wrote: post #42

Interesting thing is that their Silicon Valley office is next to a strip mall and is more of an office space than an industrial one. I live near there and so far haven't seen any of their branded trucks or anything of their brand really relative to other self driving startups like Apple roaming around with their mattress-like hardware system. So I'm guessing most development work is happening in China, just like seve…

Yes. You are right R&D offices are in China. US HQ in Cupertino. It only started in 2016...so I guess most of the AI R&D already developed in China prior.

Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#62

Post by aggie »

sys_64738 wrote: post #47

How does a self-driving truck refill its gas tank without human intervention?

Why does it need to be without human intervention? A gas station attendant on major trucking routes is a pretty easy solution until some autonomous docking standard is developed.

Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#63

Post by TuringNYC »

joe_the_user wrote: post #36
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day. If they can drive I-70 from SF to NYC with no human, or the 10 from Florida to California, that seems like a win, even if the person has to drive in the city. Warehousing will just get shifted around to work with where the trucks can safely drive.

I'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day. If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%. Edit: There's no comment in the article about there being period with no safety driver.

>> If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%.

If this trial period helps us improve the technology and eventually remove the safety driver after 1, 2, or 10yrs, that is a huge gain. What is the rush? -- every technology takes time to perfect. Lets judge the technology once it has had time to mature.

Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#64

Post by aggie »

catalogia wrote: post #60
peterwwillis wrote: post #32

They were delivering butter... to Pennsylvania? TIL: California is the nation's leading milk producer, New York is fourth, Pennsylvania is 7th.

Yeah that doesn't make much sense to me. Local brands of butter made with local dairy are popular in Pennsylvania. It's alarming to think how environmentally inefficient shipping butter two thousand miles must be.

It's a good argument for a carbon tax.

Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#65

Post by waste_monk »

joe_the_user wrote: post #36
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day. If they can drive I-70 from SF to NYC with no human, or the 10 from Florida to California, that seems like a win, even if the person has to drive in the city. Warehousing will just get shifted around to work with where the trucks can safely drive.

I'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day. If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%. Edit: There's no comment in the article about there being period with no safety driver.

If the truck still requires a human for some tasks (intra-city, fuelling, etc.) but can be rated to legally drive itself for most of the trip, then the human could sleep / eat / etc. during those times they're not required. This would presumably let them avoid minimum stationary rest times etc. since they could get a full rest of sleep while the truck drives itself (on sufficiently long journeys).

For owner-operators who live out of their vehicle anyway and are more concerned about getting work than sleeping in a hotel somewhere this could dramatically increase the volume of work they can take on (at least until fully autonomous trucks become widely available and humans are completely deprecated as truck drivers).

From that perspective it would be more efficient, not 90% but there would be significant gains.

Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#66

Post by deeblering4 »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #46
deeblering4 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it you are not a trucker who is providing for a family. Think about not only losing your job but losing your entire industry.

Are you a trucker? Once upon a time, horse drawn carriages transported people and there were stables and groomsmen and carriage drivers and those who provided food and board for the horses. That entire industry and those jobs disappeared when the motor cars came along. They found other jobs. We moved on.

Yeah, and once dinosaurs roamed the earth. It’s easy to make generalizations about the merits of moving on when you aren’t being left behind.

Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#67

Post by [deleted] »

catalogia wrote: post #60
peterwwillis wrote: post #32

They were delivering butter... to Pennsylvania? TIL: California is the nation's leading milk producer, New York is fourth, Pennsylvania is 7th.

Yeah that doesn't make much sense to me. Local brands of butter made with local dairy are popular in Pennsylvania. It's alarming to think how environmentally inefficient shipping butter two thousand miles must be.

[deleted]

Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#68

Post by Tempest1981 »

PBS recently had a good show about the AI revolution, saying it's similar to the industrial revolution. They show Embark AI/trucking in SF, and interview an unsuspecting truck driver: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/frontline-in...

Excerpt about tearing society apart:

"I believe about 50 percent of jobs will be somewhat or extremely threatened by AI in the next 15 years or so,” says Kai-Fu Lee, who has written a book called AI Superpowers. He fears that the rise of AI will contribute to another alarming trend: the growing inequality in earnings. “AI will exacerbate that and I think it will tear the society apart,” Kai-Fu Lee warns, “because the rich will have just too much, and those who are have-nots will have perhaps very little way of digging themselves out of the hole."

It also mentions China's heavy investment in AI.

Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#69

Post by berbec »

catalogia wrote: post #60
peterwwillis wrote: post #32

They were delivering butter... to Pennsylvania? TIL: California is the nation's leading milk producer, New York is fourth, Pennsylvania is 7th.

Yeah that doesn't make much sense to me. Local brands of butter made with local dairy are popular in Pennsylvania. It's alarming to think how environmentally inefficient shipping butter two thousand miles must be.

One can not forget the genius product that is Fiji Water[1]. Thinking about what happened to get that bottle into the fridge of my bodega makes me shudder.

1: https://www.fijiwater.com/faqs.html

"IS FIJI WATER FROM FIJI?

One hundred percent of FIJI Water is from a single source in the pristine, tropical Fiji Islands, an archipelago of over 300 islands nestled in the South Pacific, more than 1600 miles from the nearest industrialized country."

Re: Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

#70

Post by angry-sw-dev »

tshadley wrote: post #45
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day. If they can drive I-70 from SF to NYC with no human, or the 10 from Florida to California, that seems like a win, even if the person has to drive in the city. Warehousing will just get shifted around to work with where the trucks can safely drive.

Handling that 10% is going to be tricky, though. Can an unpiloted truck be trusted to know its limitations perfectly, shutdown and park when it hits borderline road conditions? Edit: Okay, remote driver access might solve this.

Judging by how frequently I occasionally lose internet connection for a mile or two in my major metro area for even basic tasks, like Siri dictation or streaming audio, I can't imagine how remote takeover could possibly be the answer to the "10%" situation unless we're prepared for some percentage of the time we are faced with a truck that simply gives up, puts on four-way flashers and comes to a stop wherever it may be (which could include network dead zones)... and then it's a matter for the police and/or recovery workers to either get the AI back in the saddle or move the truck.
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