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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

#81

Post by Edman274 »

kevinchen wrote: post #40
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…

I agree achieving human safety equivalent is the minimum bar. Ex: We can all agree that if your system is below human safety, it is definitely unacceptable. That’s not the argument being presented though. For example Waymo claims to exceed human performance by a large margin: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor... (Again, one may disagree about the methodology or the conclusions of the study.…

Yeah, I should clarify that my response is in anticipation of the comment sections I often see on hackernews about self driving cars, rather than arguments from the self driving car companies themselves. Waymo won't say "we're slightly better than people, let us on your roadways" but I feel like every time I see something about self driving on Hackernews there's a handful of commenters taking the hyper-utilitarian viewpoint of "they're better than people, we all need to let the robots do driving for us" which will never convince anyone outside these comment sections.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#82

Post by amelius »

foofie wrote: post #53
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…

> We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything. I'll add that one of the penalties for accidents caused by human error is a prison term. Until a Tesla/Uber/Waymo exec responsible for autonomous driving can serve a prison term for accidents caused by their service, the penalty for…

We should also demand that these companies are run by engineers, not MBA types. Otherwise, we'd end up with neglect of safety measures as seen at Boeing. And I'm not sure if any kind of external incentive could change that.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#83

Post by crazygringo »

nativeit wrote: post #50
crazygringo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I really don't feel like society will accept anything other than trucks / vehicles that are able to operate under all conditions Trucks are different because they're just for transportation of goods. As challenging weather arrives they can just wait at the nearest rest stop, pull over on the shoulder, etc. Your shipping will be delayed, but outside of that I don't think society will care. Totally acceptable as…

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 stuff that is urgent and requires next-day delivery is sent across the country by plane anyways, not by truck.)

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#84

Post by [deleted] »

nativeit wrote: post #55
lvl102 wrote: post #41

We need smart roads. Not just smart cars. Until that happens, autonomous is impractical. You don’t want to build an autonomous system to match human error rate. That basically got us nowhere in the past seven years since Elon bs’d his way to selling vaporware.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#86

Post by aurizon »

Australia has there system of 'road trains' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXL9UfP6FMk. They use these because they have very long sections of highway that are suitable. The USA has a smaller length version used on the controlled access interstates, with the same hookup as tractor trailers, with the trains broken down to 1 or 2 trailers for local delivery(usually the third one is shorter and is called a 'pup' trailer. Very common in gasoline/oil delivery. On larger flat areas, with automobiles forbidden, it would be quite doable to have longer trains, with the hauling force/strength suited to the grade. We already do this with piggybacked trailers on flatbedded rail cars, some of which can have side load/unload of trailers for granular load access at stretches to avoid having to unload them all to get at one. Railyards do this via switching 'hump-yards' where long trains are distributed car by car. Here is one in operation, usually the hump has enough height to allow gravity sorting and there are numerous remotely operated switches where a long load of 100-200 cars is sent over the hump one at a time and assembled into trains of cars on diverse lines for other geographic destinations, with some send directly for local delivery, both as unit containers to be picked of by special top/bottom/side lift fork lifts(locked load type). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0CUtE5-kKQ

I can see that this would allow integration with road trains, as methods evolve.

I saw several posts that spoke about the ground level interaction of bicycle traffic and car traffic being dangerous to bicycle traffic. Years ago we had elevated railways, that came to be unsightly, but functional ways to mix subways(elways) - it made me think that elevated bike-ways might work to reduce bike/car interactions. Bikes are so much lighter in weight that a suspended bike 'mono-road' would work well, it could even be roofed against weather. It has been done in a few places, and seems to work. https://www.google.com/search?q=bicycle+elevated+path&sca_es...

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#87

Post by ScoobleDoodle »

nativeit wrote: post #50
crazygringo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I really don't feel like society will accept anything other than trucks / vehicles that are able to operate under all conditions Trucks are different because they're just for transportation of goods. As challenging weather arrives they can just wait at the nearest rest stop, pull over on the shoulder, etc. Your shipping will be delayed, but outside of that I don't think society will care. Totally acceptable as…

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 might be more a result of capitalist motivations i.e: funnel money to the share holders / owners and C-suite and away from workers. Which is much more direct than someone buying legos or a stove.

We can either legislate that or they need an effective union.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#88

Post by Edman274 »

maxerickson wrote: post #77
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…

Really the bar for humans to legally operate a vehicle is whatever licensing process is in place in a given state. We don't make them pinky swear to not do anything dangerous or illegal. If an autonomous system can get a CDL, it's probably gonna be more effective at continuously meeting that standard than a lot of the humans that do the same thing (but are distracted on a given day or have started using substances, o…

> Really the bar for humans to legally operate a vehicle is whatever licensing process is in place in a given state. We don't make them pinky swear to not do anything dangerous or illegal.

That is not sufficient for self-driving vehicles. The license is the thing that shows "okay, this person seems safe" but then some of the things that keep them safe are the threat of accidentally killing themselves, or being arrested and put in jail for a crime they commit while driving, or the financial penalty of being sued for an injury / damage they cause, or the risk of having their license taken away for errors. If a human being applying for their license was invincible, incapable of being jailed, sued, or having their license taken away, you might expect that our CDL or other licensing processes would be more stringent.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#89

Post by AlotOfReading »

mschuster91 wrote: post #47

> The trucks could also be commercially viable with only freeway driving capability, or freeways plus a short segment of surface streets needed to reach a transfer hub. The question is... isn't the problem being approached from an entirely bad premise in the first place? Why would it even make sense to develop autonomous trucks for that part of any freight's journey? Laying train tracks might incur a large initial ex…

To a pretty good approximation, everything that feasibly can get shipped by rail already is. Railroad companies operate fairly close to capacity, and they have no desire to reduce their massive profit margins building new rails en masse and handling the maintenance burden. That leaves only the shippers themselves, who are often much smaller companies that couldn't reasonably build a new rail line or buy cars for every customer, but can easily afford a few trucks to be relocated anywhere in the country they have demand.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#90

Post by creer »

kevinchen wrote: post #39
silvestrov wrote: post #10

If he thinks driving cars in cities is the easiest problem, he does not have experience driving a car in a European city with lots of cyclists and pedestrians. Driving a car in inner Copenhagen is a stressful situation due to the insane number of cyclist you have to watch out for, see https://youtu.be/FaySp9i2zMA?t=113

Thst video looks fairly sparse and well structured by SF standards? eg interactions starting at 9:00 https://youtu.be/TOV0ndPr0Dk Many examples of high pedestrian density in https://youtu.be/P6sw4EKegp4

Thanks! Pretty alert pedestrian handling in that 1st video. Including one threatening to dash in between cars, one actually doing so, and one (apparently) making to cross and then not crossing. Also traffic cones are now explicitly shown on the monitor.
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