> But ultimately, Seltz-Axmacher believes, the tools he’s developing will be good for truckers. He cites a new book by Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking, in which the chess great observes that middling chess players who play with the help of a standard computer are reliably better than either grandmasters or supercomputers by themselves. “I think humans and technology working together are always going to be better than either one alone,” Seltz-Axmacher says. “But maybe that’s just because I like humans.”
This is amusing because this stopped being true a long time ago. Even by 2007, it was hard for anyone to improve, and after 2013 or so, the very best centaurs were reduced to basically just opening book preparation (itself an extremely difficult skill involving compiling millions of games and carefully tuning against the weakness of possible opponent engines), to the point where official matches have mostly stopped (making it hard to identify the exact point at which centaur ceased to be a thing at all).
I've never really understood Kasparov's pro-biological opinion along those lines. I suspect it's a combination of an observation that was true at that time (that humans are better are intuition), and his own comment “But maybe that’s just because I like humans”.
If you think about it, AIs have a significant advantage in that their evolution is completely artificially guided. They can be focused on tasks in isolation, and the results can be observed and improved upon. Biological evolution does not have this luxury, overall the entire organism has to "work", and survive long enough to reproduce. Sure, current technology is in its infancy, but extrapolating into the far future, things are interesting.
I think it's a mix of outdated information, wishful thinking, and the contrarian appeal. It was true for a few years that a grandmaster or a random chess player with good 'mechanical sympathy' could crush a solo chess engine (which is why discussions of this tend to stop in 2007 despite being a decade ago), it would be very convenient if AIs required humans for the best performance (https://github.com/JackToaster/Reassuring-Parable-Generator/... 'A computer will never play the best chess in the world'), and it provides a meta-contrarian (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...) take on AI risk/technological unemployment which is clearly Tyler Cowen's main motivation in popularizing it (object: 'AIs will never be able to do X better than humans as they have no soul'; contrarian: 'they totally will, just look'; meta-contrarian: 'ah, but the human element is still critical for a last bit of performance due to the creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit!').
It's also interesting in that it demonstrates that there's at least two levels of 'superhuman' performance in chess and other domains: there's superhuman in being able to beat any living human one on one (Deep Blue, Sedol AlphaGo), and superhuman in being unable to be improved upon by a human collaborator (post-2013 chess engines; AlphaGo Master?). I'm not sure this gap was really expected, but though it only lasts a few years (or months), it's still interesting to note.
Driverless Trucks, and to a lesser extent, driverless cars, have got to be the 21st century Jihadi / Islamic "Fighter"'s wet dream.
I don't think the day is far off, when a Jihadi will remote control a Driverless Truck loaded with explosives, and plough it right into a Concert / Festival gathering...
This looks like trucking's version of off-shoring.
You get paid to train your replacements. If you don't train them, someone else will. It's a no win for them. They don't have pull or unions that commuter train operators have so it's not like they'll get to ride along and supervise the autonomous vehicle, in the long term. Instead, there may be an ops center somewhere in TX where operators intervene remotely when an irregular operating pattern pops up. Those will be fewer operators.
I am not a trucker but from what I understood from other truckers is that this can be seen as a benefit to them. There is a lot more effort as a trucker in managing the cargo than the driving. Lots of paperwork at pickup, drop off and in between checks. There is effort to ensure the security of the cargo. I think the expectation is that wages would stay the same and truckers stop driving and start managing. Keep in mind wages are already fairly low.
You linked a site that makes money on convincing people to spend money getting a CDL, not really a reliable source. Very few truckers are doing well, even your source wages aren't that great for most positions when you add in the other costs. And USA Today had a piece last week about one working unsafe hours and making as little as $.67 a week.
Wages might stay the same, but half of them would lose their jobs.
Wages are a trucking firm's biggest expense. Why would a firm go out and buy a bunch of expensive self-driving trucks, so that they could pay the same number of people the same wages.
Someone still needs to accompany the truck. Sure perhaps in the distant future this is not true but at least for the generation of current truckers a person will still be necessary.
Yes wages are the biggest expense but I think the big pushed for self-driving trucks is
1) Reduced liability
2) Trucks can be operating nearly 24hrs a day.
3) Greater fuel efficiency.
So sure some will lose their jobs but I think half is overly pessimistic.
I`m sure The first driverless cars for the public will start being available for rides in Silicon Valley or AZ and just on the regular roads they know very very well. I've still never seen one on the highway.
If the cost of electricity halves, will you start using twice as much electricity?
Halving the cost of transporting goods will not double the demand for transporting goods. Consumer budgets are fixed, and transportation is a very small fraction of the price of goods that consumers buy.
Dropping the cost of transport by 30%, because you only need to employ half the truckers, will not double demand. Unlike the before-after world of trucking, air travel, container shipping, etc, there isn't a mountain of businesses that suddenly become viable when long-haul costs get slashed by a third.
Exactly which categories of businesses are sitting on their hands, going 'Golly - we'd make and sell so much more of our product, if only shipping & handling were 30% cheaper'?
What fraction of the economy do they make up?
What if efficiency gains are not 2x, but 10x? What if you'll only need to employ one trucker to do the job of 10? Do you think demand for trucking will go up 10x? This isn't a web framework.
Everything that you buy online, in a Walmart, or is otherwise manufactured a city away from where it's sold?
Trucking costs are built into most products. My grocery store sells apples from California. If the cost of trucking them to me goes down, those apples will decrease in cost and they will potentially sell more apples.
Shipping probably cost less than the plastic container.
Automation of driving is all about making people with lots of capital richer. Efficiency is just the dream -- this stuff will dramatically increase costs of shipping as capacity is constrained.
The demand will not rise 1:1, that's a given. It will rise the same way that when gas is cheap people are more likely to take road trips.
For example, I just requested quotes for waterjetting some stuff today. If LTL shipping were cheap enough to I'd look outside the high CoL sphincter of the country where I happen to reside but instead I'm stuck paying a premium because the local cost of everything is high. There's also a cylinder head in my garage for a 60s Ford I'd like to give to someone who needs it but nobody needs it bad enough to pay for me to ship it across the country.
At the higher volume levels similar stuff happens. A construction company may source steel from farther away to undercut it's competition. You can bet the logistics people at Walmart (and anyone else with a big fleet) are drooling over all the optimizations they could implement if trucks could run like call centers.
Lots of products have price elasticity of greater than 1.
Shipping seems like a very elastic industry. If anything, demand would increase by more than 1% for every 1% decrease in cost.
This is because shipping costs if shipping costs are low enough, then you can build something for cheap somewhere else and then ship stuff across the country to high cost of living locations.
YOU wouldn't ship stuff more, but industry would.
IE imagine if something costs 1/3 if it is made in China.
If shipping costs are more then you save, then nobody would ship it. But if shipping costs go down, now you can easy get those cost benefits of across world or across country manufacturing.
Amdahl's law. Shipping is only useful when you have goods to ship. Unless you're selling bricks, shipping is a small portion of the price of most products. Reducing the cost of shipping, which is already a small portion of the price of the product will not result in price elasticity of greater then 1.
There's an obvious difference between various resources. If a cross-country airplane ticket cost $4000, instead of $400, air travel would be much less then 1/10th what it is now. A lot of people will fly somewhere for $400. Almost nobody will fly somewhere for $4000.
On the other hand, if the price of that ticket dropped from $400 to $360, we wouldn't see a 10% increase in passenger volume. The set of people who will fly somewhere for $360, but won't for $400 is tiny.
I posit that trucking is in the latter, rather then the former category. It's already cheap.
I disagree. Given companies like Amazon, it is currently not cheap enough. I would argue that it will take longer before it's 'cheap'. The appetite for 'free shipping' is still growing and it's very different from the demand for airplane tickets. Kind of like with your electricity example, you're missing parts of the big picture.
in Walmart's case it would allow them to offer free shipping for even more items. For other companies it would allow them to offer free shipping or better terms for free shipping (i.e. you have to buy less to get it).
Yes I could be wrong but I feel further lowering the costs of long distance trucking would help increase eccomerce sales for retailers which in turn would further increase demand for it
If you're still paying the same number of truck operators the same wage, how are costs going to go down at all? Self-driving trucks certainly aren't going to be cheaper to buy or maintain than their non-sentient counterparts... What other factors drive the cost of truck transportation?
Precisely. Someone said that once driving is automated, truckers will only be responsible for cargo management, with a few people standing by for a fleet, ready to take over manually if autopilot breaks.
Yup, end-of-the-line logistics would be an easily transitioned to stopgap measure. Some former truckers would be able to stay local and handle loading/unloading. Not as many as are currently on the road, but every little bit of transitioning helps.
Trucker wages are not low. It's a middle class job in many cases and a decent semiskilled job in others.
Most of those roles managing bullshit at the head end will go away as the robot fleets consolidate and the current carriers die off. Customers will have to take or leave on whatever terms the carrier demands -- just like the old railroad days.
It doesn't help that human drivers are fundamentally unsafe (even if you restrict the discussion to sober drivers). Making computers safer than human drivers (not perfect) is enough for me to restrict human drivers to private tracks. I am not the only person who has lost a loved friend because of a careless driver.
There is no data to make this assertion about computer driven vehicles.
There is little basis to declare human drivers 'fundamentally unsafe' given the proportion of accidents pales in comparison to the gigantic volume of vehicles on roads worldwide over varied road and traffic conditions.
It can be speculated automated vehicles may require constraints on roads in which case it becomes apples to oranges. And human drivers equipped with the kind of technology and sensors on self driven cars would be much safer.
> There is no data to make this assertion about computer driven vehicles.
Today that is true. I am speculating when I say that autonomous vehicles will be safer than humans drivers. There is enough effort going into developing them that we will soon have that data though.
Google's data is already showing promise that the autonomous car is likely to be safer, but they don't have enough miles to be significant.
> There is little basis to declare human drivers 'fundamentally unsafe' given the proportion of accidents pales in comparison to the gigantic volume of vehicles on roads worldwide over varied road and traffic conditions.
10.6 deaths per 100,000 people is enough for me to call humans fundamentally unsafe. (though cancer and other medical conditions are bigger)
Since humans cannot be equipped with the sensors a computer can (ie eyes on the back of your head) it isn't fair to compare the as if situation.
Humans have only two eyes and terrible reaction times. They also get distracted easily and tend to act emotionally often. There is little data to show that computers are better drivers, because currently they aren't, but they lack human weaknesses and are safer than humans in many other situations (planes, trains...).
While computers lack human weaknesses, they bring a slew of new ones. Computers have no situational awareness, no context, are vulnerable to hacking, respond in predetermined ways which can be manipulated or abused, etc.
There just is not enough evidence to make the claim that ubiquitous autonomous cars will be any safer than human drivers on shared roads. There are many known unknowns and who knows how many unknown unknowns left to discover and mitigate with this tech.
But also computeres are easily being possessed by WannaCry and other malicious activities. It is pretty sad that all the praising of AI doesn't take into account the adversarial nature of the World.
It's a little harder because you can lock it with a pretty significant lock, it's generally moving, and it has a ton of location and camera data. If the police are notified of your exact position when you start the robbery it's probably hard to get enough stuff to make it actually worth the risk. The hard part isn't getting the truck to stop (which is trivially easy now), it's actually getting stuff and getting away with it.
Police aren't going to follow every automated truck on the road. And a balance has to be found or PDs will ignore shipping companies. Too many false alarms; they stop responding.
So by the time a truck is stopped, realizes a robbery is in progress, contacts command, who assesses if it's a real event, who contact local police, who send a cruiser to check investigate. They thiefs could have gotten away with quite a lot.
Btw, a grand theft rarely rises to immediate action. City PD have bigger concerns, most of the Midwest is sparsely populated. That leaves the bored suburb PD who'll be in the most responsive.
What is it that you think the current person involved's course of action? Are you suggesting that the person in a truck regularly defends its load from piracy today?
2 aspects
1) If drivers are at such danger that they do more than contact police then the liability would require they have trained security with them.
2) Drivers themselves are a major security vulnerability, how susceptible is a driver to being paid off by a "pirate". [and there was a recent article in Outside about how healthy nuts go through a lot of truck theft]
These trucks often have 1,000,000+$ worth of cargo. That's worth a fair amount of risk and effort even if you lose 80% of it on the black market that's still better than most robberies.
Just go on an open stretch of road in the country side with a firearm and open fire through the truck windows. A truck driver isn't going to be able to defend themselves.
You might argue that this doesn't happen because criminals are afraid of getting caught by the police and sent to jail.
But, if anything, the risks would be even greater for a self driving truck that has dozens of always on cameras recording, GPS tracking, and an emergency police call system.
> These trucks often have 1,000,000+$ worth of cargo.
That's true, but the problem is which one? Most of them are dry vans that you don't know what's inside, and/or not worth the risk. My loaded trailer was once opened and they didn't touch the merchandise. The only loss was the lock.
Most Fedex trucks already have $100k+ worth of cargo and only one person driving it. Doesn't mean it's easy to rob. Going through 80,000lb of shipments to find those that are worth enough is very time consuming and the truck will be hard to hide while you're doing it.
Much harder than a manned one. You can secure unmanned trucks better than manned trucks. Truckers need to be able to open the truck which is a weakness currently. With autonomous vehicles you don't have that. Camera data allows you to see theft earlier (currently it sometimes happens while the trucker is sleeping in the front) and directly report it to the police. The video also provides evidence and helps the police identifying the exact vehicle and location.
I would compare it to banks. ATMs are still a target of theft but it's much harder to crack them compared to robbing a bank where tellers have access to cash. The same will be true for trucks. There will be some thefts that are more sophisticated (and successful) but the overall rate will go down.
I think the concept looks good. They will still use truckers for some parts of the trip (and will have to do so for a while). The good thing is that those truckers can work 8 hour shifts close to home. And it won't really be a topic for outsourcing because the latency would be too high, so control centers will have to be somewhat close to the truck (at least same continent).
Semi-autonomous driving of trucks could change the job for the better. It would cost a lot of jobs but then again, few people become truck drivers because they love being on the road for days. For most it's a job and they'd be happy to take another one. And there is currently little evidence that no new jobs would come up as they always have for past disruptions.
> Most people in Silicon Valley subscribe to either the first or second school. Much of the rest of the country, including many truckers, favor the third. "I can tell the difference between a dead porcupine and a dead raccoon, and I know I can hit a raccoon, but if I hit a porcupine, I’m going to lose all the tires on the truck on that side," says Tom George, a veteran driver who now trains other Teamsters for the union’s Washington-Idaho AGC Training Trust. "It will take a long time and a lot of software to program that competence into a computer."
Driverless trucks are a very interesting concept. Once they're on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. But getting through traffic congestions, busy multi-turn-lane intersections, and making sure you don't sideswipe someone who's hugging the line seems rather complex given the different trailer dimensions and blind spots, (un)marked lanes and everything else it takes to get to the highway.
Why would the automated system have blind spots though? If it is viable at $50,000 it is probably viable at $100,000 or $200,000 (automated trucks will roughly double the efficiency of driving because of more hours on the road).
I would think that a physics model would also give a reasonable automated system superior control over where the trailer is at a given moment (and to account for different trailers).
Don't forget what happens when people find out they can abuse driverless vehicles. Cutting them off, getting closer to them, slowing down in front of them, etc. God knows what commuters will do to them in the Boston area.
> Cutting them off, getting closer to them, slowing down in front of them, etc.
My brother is a lorry driver who frequently crosses the Turkish - Bulgarian border with his truck (as in once every 2 weeks). Once or twice he caught refugees (or whatever you want to call them) trying to get inside his trailer by cutting through the thick textile material that covers it, while he was awaiting at the border. You generally do not whant people mixing with your industrial equipment while the truck drives at 90-100 km/h. In other cases it happened to him that other people had stolen diesel gas from his tank while he was asleep during the mandatory break (this happened somewhere in Western Europe, I forget where).
And leaving aside all this, assuming that bad people won't suddenly stop stealing and generally doing bad stuff to unattended expensive material (like trucks and the things that the trucks carry), being a truck driver you're also doing lots, and lots of bureaucracy work. I once shared the cabin with him as a passenger during one of his routes, while we passed two European borders. The amount of paperwork he had to fill in was mind-blogging, I half-jokingly told him that his job looks more like a clerk-job than being an actual driver. Now, lots of clerk jobs have already been automated, I know that, but it mostly happened in the private sector, inside private companies doing business with other private companies. But once your clerk-like job involves having to do business with several State-like entities things become a lot more complicated, with legislation changing once every 6 months, being very diverse from State to State etc.
What I'm trying to say is that theoretically the self-driving problem looks achievable for trucks, but once you get into the messy details things become a lot more complicated.
Driverless trucks will be better protected, not worse. You can lock the vehicle much better if there's no driver who needs access to it. Cameras everywhere will mean that the control center sees people approaching the truck much earlier than drivers at the moment (who won't see it at all if you keep in the blind spot). It's the same as robbing an ATM. Theoretically also unattended but well enough secured that few people do it. The insurance premium for cash in an ATM is lower than in a bank branch where the teller can access it. A driver doesn't provide a lot of protection against serious theft, video surveillance could deter more people.
You generally do not want people mixing with your industrial equipment while the truck drives at 90-100 km/h.
He should let them ride with him in the cab up front, then.
It's the human thing to do - and in another universe (or if this universe were configured only slightly differently) they could be his own family, after all.
Then put them in the back while you drive a careful 50km/h the first few clicks before and after the border.
The point is, I'm actually amazed at the downvotes, and that people aren't naturally, viscerally having a more human response -- "For heaven's sake, can't I think of a way to help these people? They're fearing for their lives, after all!" -- rather than the response described in the post I was responding to: "Oh shit, it's risky/complicated! Avoid, avoid!"
Especially given this history, among other sordid events in the past:
I doubt they are fearing for their life in Turkey. They definitely will make more money in Europe but it's not like Turkey is putting them in gas chamber or something.
To suggest that these people are out to make a quick buck is just -- pure snark.
And to think that just because Turkey isn't currently running gas chambers that these people have nothing to worry about is, unfortunately, very naive:
Amnesty International has slammed Turkey for expelling dozens of Syrian refugees to their war-stricken country, saying the move is in violation of international law.
According to a new report released by the UK-based rights group, a total of about 80 Syrian asylum seekers, who were previously held incommunicado in a detention center in the Turkish city of Erzurum, were forced to leave for their country, with 50 more people facing deportation.
I don't think you understand how dangerous the situation is for the drivers. And if it is a human thing to do, you can always go and help to smuggle them over the border. Good luck.
And going across boarders I could see people smugglers hiring hackers to slow down the vehicles so that there clients could board the trucks.
Drug smugglers are another group that could use this and how would a cop stop an autonomous vehicle to search it they would have to have a back door which could be abused
Stopping a safe, automated vehicle would be trivial. Just dress up as a road worker, and hold up a stop sign. Do it above a manhole cover, and you have easy access to the bottom of the vehicle. A remote human supervisor might not even notice what was going on.
Admittedly it seems just as trivial to mitigate with some more sensors e.g. weight sensors to detect the load being modified while stopped, cameras to detect aberrant movement inside the cab, etc.
And what would currently happen? Killing the road worker? No, every truck would stop and you could operate in the driver's blind spot. Autonomous vehicles won't have blind spots so that the operator can identify the theft much faster.
Smuggling is trivial currently, but not without risking incarceration or death. Once the contraband can be ferried by an autonomous vehicle without risk to the operator, the incentives will change dramatically.
Don't forget that the driverless vehicle will have tracking. Expect to get a ticket complete with video if you do things like that. If you are costing the trucking company money they might be willing to send people to court against you as well (taking you to court might not be worth it, but the teach people a lesson aspect might make it worth it anyway)
I live in (ok, ok, near) Boston and I constantly fantasize about this. I don't commute by car I look forward to riding my bike 5mph in front of driverless cars, at least if they don't run me over...
I also have to imagine they will be a ripe target for vandalism, especially if operators don't aggressively remove graffiti.
And they'll also be surrounded by camera's and hard drives. I would imagine that the sensors that can see through fog could also get more detail than the average CCV camera - meaning that even with a mask, you're going to get a lot of detail on vandals or road hazards (aka: You going 5mph in front of one)
Vandalism already happens to cars. As are cyclists who go 5mph in front of a car (on a road where it cannot overtake you) to take revenge on a driver they don't like.
None of that will change and that's not dependent on drivers.
I wonder what % of truck driving is highway driving? If you are covering the trucks in cameras and you have the control software there already it seems pretty easy(relatively at least) to have someone take over via remote for the last mile.
AI sensors combined with some sort of 360 view VR with drivers for the last mile with full AI on highways/freeways would allow for progressive roll out of self driving technology. A lot of video to push down the wire though but probably manageable with modern codecs.
pretty much every sleeper truck is designed to be mostly highway. The ones that stay in-city are the single cab designs. This isn't always true for Owner-Operators taking a buck where they can get it, but most trucks are designed for this use. There's no other cost-efficient way to get goods across cities/states/provinces/countries/continents.
Of course those need to be taken into consideration but to be fair, aren't most of the conditions you listed dealt with by a human driver pulling over and waiting it out/calling for assistance? That's exactly what an autonomous system could do in those situations.
And if there _are_ dangerous conditions that a human driver could navigate but an autonomous one would give up on, is that so bad? The industry is making enough efficiency gains to offset that.
In those conditions human drivers don't work very well either. I'd rather have computers that drive very slowly because they can't see very well instead of humans that drive faster than they can see because "I'm a good driver".
People are astonishingly good at dealing with unconventional conditions. This idea that computers are 'smarter' than humans (that program them) in the realm of driving is amusing and terrifying at the same time. Calling them 'self driving cars' is oxymoronic. They are pre-programmed cars.
The people duped into this will lose their driving skills and pretend it's other humans fault for not conforming to the program they invested in. I'm not all that worried, the market will sort this out in the US at least.
If not the market, definitely the regulations once traffic reports start piling up... Even faster when there's no one behind the wheel to blame.
Can't even imagine a manslaughter case where a driverless vehicle killed someone. Who's at fault? Most fault current resides in the driver, as they're the final call.
Exactly. Humans. Humans are the bugs in their code. The control writers will argue for more laws so their programs work. The possibility that their code revisions are futile will dismissed as [insert buzzword]. I am excited that we get to watch this play out. The wildcard is biological CPU's: http://www.research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extra...
Remote driving, though, might solve for this. You still have a human to react to unforeseen circumstances, but you can switch up the remote driver easily so you can work in shifts, drive 24/7, not stop for bathrooms/food etc.
I'd imagine the quality of life would be significantly better too since they would work in the same spot with co-workers and could go home every day.
>I'd imagine the quality of life would be significantly better too since they would work in the same spot with co-workers and could go home every day.
Actually, working in the same spot with coworkers was exactly the reason I started driving a truck. Going back to that would be an enormous downgrade in quality of life for me and a lot of drivers.
I grew up in Minnesota where we learned to deal with bad roads. We did drive on them and got good at it. The truth is we went in the ditch a lot when the weather was bad.
Driverless trucks aren't going to 100% perfect. They just need to be significantly safe and more reliable than humans.
Humans get sleepy, get emotional, zone out, and make all kinds of mistakes all the time.
The first generation of driverless trucks will still have a human as passenger to be backup in case of mistakes. You may be thinking, "What's the point if there will still be a human there? s/he might as well drive." Well, humans still need breaks and can help give feedback to Truck for it to improve.
The first generation won't be perfect, but it will be on its way.
More reliable than humans is too low a bar. People mostly forgive each other's imperfections, not so much a computer's. A self-driving truck is going to need to be at least an order of magnitude or more safer than a human.
I'm not doubting the professional truck driver, though. Do you have experience running over porcupines? I do not. They've seen a lot. Enough to draw conclusions from fringe conditions like this.
Perhaps this is more of an occurrence on re-treads.
> This is a company that employs truck drivers, is how the talk begins. The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings. Truckers have very different ideas and different experiences from people like you, Seltz-Axmacher continues. Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters. They will say things that you may find startling. Not in a malicious way, but because people from, say, rural West Virginia talk differently than people from San Francisco. Can you handle that?
It's good to see someone doing more than just talk about this sort of thing; both the employment aspect and the culture clash side of it. Compare that to say, how Google treats its ex-military drone contractors [1].
> "We hire truckers," Seltz-Axmacher tells prospective drivers right before offering them a job. "But we also have a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley. Everything you’ve heard about San Francisco—it’s all basically true. There is something called raw denim, and in San Francisco people wear it, which means that some of your colleagues will pay up to $300 for a pair of blue jeans. They sometimes drink $7 lattes, too. Many of your co-workers will not be from the U.S. They will have accents. Can you handle that?"
In my experience, the culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes. As a member of the latter, I take exception to this statement:
> “We basically have people from two worlds, neither of which has ever talked to each other,” says Seltz-Axmacher, who grew up in suburban Maryland. “That’s kind of what’s wrong with this country.”
Perhaps that's true of the founder's life experience, or true of the trucking industry, but most manufacturing jobs seem to be merging these cultures comparatively smoothly. I've been at a couple companies in the automotive industry, and been to hundreds of different plants, and everywhere you look there are blue collar technicians running the machines and white collar engineers building and automating the machines. The situation is not so bad as the article paints it outside the extremes of Ivy League PHD programs contrasted with the trucking industry.
Hah, you're definitely right (I work at an EMS provider). In the context of the piece it seems to me like they're more focused on SF type startups than places like where you or I work. I agree very much with:
> ...culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes.
Everybody in heavy industry encounters this. There's a whole range of skill levels and backgrounds in an industrial plant.
I'm surprised they don't send their engineers through a truck driving course, and have them get a CDL. If you're going to work on self-driving truck software, you need to be able to drive a truck. At least get a Commercial Learners Permit.
The examples in the article are trite, but the culture clash is a very real thing. I would point to things like the acceptance of alcohol in the workplace, expectations around work/home balance, the comparatively uniform social/political views of SF tech workers (and educational backgrounds), etc.
With the amount of regulations in truck driving, I wouldn't be surprised if SV clashes with the culture and work ethic truck drivers have to endure. It's good to see this company hiring drivers themselves; those who are open to improving on this tech.
I think people from most industries that are at the worst risk from automation are willing to help companies who make said automation products, as long as said company doesn't exist solely to put them out of a job and actually listens to them and their concerns. Those are the real rarity.
This is eerily like a scene from Player Piano, Vonnegut's first novel. Some smart engineers find the best machinist at a factory, use some machines to record his movements and process and then use them to program the robots that replace him, and everyone else in his position at the factory.
For those that haven't read it, the book is an interesting and prescient story about what the future of America looks like when nearly all human labor has been made obsolete.
I know it is novel to talk about blue collar workers working alongside phd grads who are specialists in this field... but surely any good system which needs to deliver a quality outcome needs to be built with domain expertise, in this case driving trucks. I just don't see why this is that exciting. I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this.
> I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this
Me too. There's so much more than just driving. Just as an example, we truck drivers learn to anticipate possible problems based on other people's behaviors. Why anticipate? Because 80,000 lbs can take too long to stop, and people can die.
This is an interesting approach in the short term and could help bootstrap Starsky's business before the conversion to fully autonomous driving.
I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so. There's just too much money riding on this problem, and logistics companies are fairly ruthless about efficiency.
"I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so."
I hope so. Trucking is one of the toughest professions for a person to endure that I've ever seen. It destroys a person's body and mind...and you're lucky to end up making minimum wage when you account for how many hours they spend working.
And what job alternatives will you provide them, think specially about current long haul drivers, not future candidates you can discourage and divert to greener fields.
From whom, the govt? I don't trust that would happen (see rustbelt industries). These automation startups? What's their profit if they have to train the people they help get laid off/made redundant?
> and you're lucky to end up making minimum wage when you account for how many hours they spend working.
If you're driving fleet, that's correct; however, there are a large number of "Owner/Operators" out there and they do make significantly more than you'd expect. If you have a good freight contract and a logistical mind, an O+O can easily make around $125k/year.
It's a lot further away than 20 years. It really won't be practical for autonomous trucks to share the roads with passenger vehicles using the existing infrastructure. After a handful or more major accidents with multiple deaths involving autonomous trucks, there will be no public support for them.
And there will be major accidents with multiple deaths, since the average passenger car driver is so unskilled. No software can account for every idiotic move made by the typical car driver, and big trucks take a lot of room and time to stop. A few lawsuits later, all the financial gains will disappear for the trucking companies and drivers are back in the seat.
I could see in 20 years a system where computer assisted driving automates much of the trip, much like commercial aircraft operate now.
Self driving trucks on the highway are already legal in some states. EX: Arizona.
Yeah, city driving is hard. That might be a long ways away. But highway driving? Thats easy. You can even buy a highway driving, consumer self driving vehicle right NOW. Tesla sells them.
Self-driving is not the same as autonomous, though. There is always a human present, and sometimes that's not enough to make up for the fact that a Tesla apparently can't "see" a 75 foot long, 13 1/2 foot high truck in front of it while driving down the highway.
And while highway driving generally has fewer decision points per mile than city driving, the speeds are much higher and so the effects of errors are much greater on the highway. The worst wrecks I've seen have all been on the highway, not in cities.
You know I read an article a long time ago about two guys who drove truck and took turns coding (team drivers so the person not driving would write code) and wrote shareware this way - it might have been a game published by Epic or Apogee in the early 90's or I might be imagining the whole thing
No their not . People feed up with some asshole from Silicon Valley; talking about destroying their jobs are trying to make money before they don't have a job .
Driverless Trucks, and to a lesser extent, driverless cars, have got to be the 21st century Jihadi / Islamic "Fighter"'s wet dream.
I don't think the day is far off, when a Jihadi will remote control a Driverless Truck loaded with explosives, and plough it right into a Concert / Festival gathering...
This alone is reason #1 to ban driverless vehicles.
> But ultimately, Seltz-Axmacher believes, the tools he’s developing will be good for truckers. He cites a new book by Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking, in which the chess great observes that middling chess players who play with the help of a standard computer are reliably better than either grandmasters or supercomputers by themselves. “I think humans and technology working together are always going to be better than either one alone,” Seltz-Axmacher says. “But maybe that’s just because I like humans.”
This is amusing because this stopped being true a long time ago. Even by 2007, it was hard for anyone to improve, and after 2013 or so, the very best centaurs were reduced to basically just opening book preparation (itself an extremely difficult skill involving compiling millions of games and carefully tuning against the weakness of possible opponent engines), to the point where official matches have mostly stopped (making it hard to identify the exact point at which centaur ceased to be a thing at all).
I've never really understood Kasparov's pro-biological opinion along those lines. I suspect it's a combination of an observation that was true at that time (that humans are better are intuition), and his own comment “But maybe that’s just because I like humans”.
If you think about it, AIs have a significant advantage in that their evolution is completely artificially guided. They can be focused on tasks in isolation, and the results can be observed and improved upon. Biological evolution does not have this luxury, overall the entire organism has to "work", and survive long enough to reproduce. Sure, current technology is in its infancy, but extrapolating into the far future, things are interesting.
I think it's a mix of outdated information, wishful thinking, and the contrarian appeal. It was true for a few years that a grandmaster or a random chess player with good 'mechanical sympathy' could crush a solo chess engine (which is why discussions of this tend to stop in 2007 despite being a decade ago), it would be very convenient if AIs required humans for the best performance (https://github.com/JackToaster/Reassuring-Parable-Generator/... 'A computer will never play the best chess in the world'), and it provides a meta-contrarian (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...) take on AI risk/technological unemployment which is clearly Tyler Cowen's main motivation in popularizing it (object: 'AIs will never be able to do X better than humans as they have no soul'; contrarian: 'they totally will, just look'; meta-contrarian: 'ah, but the human element is still critical for a last bit of performance due to the creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit!').
It's also interesting in that it demonstrates that there's at least two levels of 'superhuman' performance in chess and other domains: there's superhuman in being able to beat any living human one on one (Deep Blue, Sedol AlphaGo), and superhuman in being unable to be improved upon by a human collaborator (post-2013 chess engines; AlphaGo Master?). I'm not sure this gap was really expected, but though it only lasts a few years (or months), it's still interesting to note.
Driverless Trucks, and to a lesser extent, driverless cars, have got to be the 21st century Jihadi / Islamic "Fighter"'s wet dream.
I don't think the day is far off, when a Jihadi will remote control a Driverless Truck loaded with explosives, and plough it right into a Concert / Festival gathering...
This looks like trucking's version of off-shoring.
You get paid to train your replacements. If you don't train them, someone else will. It's a no win for them. They don't have pull or unions that commuter train operators have so it's not like they'll get to ride along and supervise the autonomous vehicle, in the long term. Instead, there may be an ops center somewhere in TX where operators intervene remotely when an irregular operating pattern pops up. Those will be fewer operators.
I am not a trucker but from what I understood from other truckers is that this can be seen as a benefit to them. There is a lot more effort as a trucker in managing the cargo than the driving. Lots of paperwork at pickup, drop off and in between checks. There is effort to ensure the security of the cargo. I think the expectation is that wages would stay the same and truckers stop driving and start managing. Keep in mind wages are already fairly low.
Keep in mind wages are already fairly low
In comparison to a computer programmer, yes. In comparison to the nationwide average, no. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
I can immediately think of one (retired) truck driver I know who comfortably raised a family of 6 on a single salary.
You linked a site that makes money on convincing people to spend money getting a CDL, not really a reliable source. Very few truckers are doing well, even your source wages aren't that great for most positions when you add in the other costs. And USA Today had a piece last week about one working unsafe hours and making as little as $.67 a week.
https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forc...
The hourly wages are very low. Some truckers earn decent money because they work insane hours.
Wages might stay the same, but half of them would lose their jobs.
Wages are a trucking firm's biggest expense. Why would a firm go out and buy a bunch of expensive self-driving trucks, so that they could pay the same number of people the same wages.
Someone still needs to accompany the truck. Sure perhaps in the distant future this is not true but at least for the generation of current truckers a person will still be necessary.
Yes wages are the biggest expense but I think the big pushed for self-driving trucks is 1) Reduced liability 2) Trucks can be operating nearly 24hrs a day. 3) Greater fuel efficiency.
So sure some will lose their jobs but I think half is overly pessimistic.
Unless the drivers are allowed to sleep while the truck is driving, then they can't operate any more hours than they operate now.
Long stretches on open highway will be the first place we allow drivers to be completely hands off.
I`m sure The first driverless cars for the public will start being available for rides in Silicon Valley or AZ and just on the regular roads they know very very well. I've still never seen one on the highway.
You can spot the Google self-driving car on 101 and 280.
You assumed that the trucking volume will stay the same when the cost goes down significantly.
If the cost of electricity halves, will you start using twice as much electricity?
Halving the cost of transporting goods will not double the demand for transporting goods. Consumer budgets are fixed, and transportation is a very small fraction of the price of goods that consumers buy.
Dropping the cost of transport by 30%, because you only need to employ half the truckers, will not double demand. Unlike the before-after world of trucking, air travel, container shipping, etc, there isn't a mountain of businesses that suddenly become viable when long-haul costs get slashed by a third.
It won't double it but it will be close in some locales. It would also slightly decrease the cost of a heck of a lot of things.
Exactly which categories of businesses are sitting on their hands, going 'Golly - we'd make and sell so much more of our product, if only shipping & handling were 30% cheaper'?
What fraction of the economy do they make up?
What if efficiency gains are not 2x, but 10x? What if you'll only need to employ one trucker to do the job of 10? Do you think demand for trucking will go up 10x? This isn't a web framework.
Everything that you buy online, in a Walmart, or is otherwise manufactured a city away from where it's sold?
Trucking costs are built into most products. My grocery store sells apples from California. If the cost of trucking them to me goes down, those apples will decrease in cost and they will potentially sell more apples.
Shipping probably cost less than the plastic container.
Automation of driving is all about making people with lots of capital richer. Efficiency is just the dream -- this stuff will dramatically increase costs of shipping as capacity is constrained.
The demand will not rise 1:1, that's a given. It will rise the same way that when gas is cheap people are more likely to take road trips.
For example, I just requested quotes for waterjetting some stuff today. If LTL shipping were cheap enough to I'd look outside the high CoL sphincter of the country where I happen to reside but instead I'm stuck paying a premium because the local cost of everything is high. There's also a cylinder head in my garage for a 60s Ford I'd like to give to someone who needs it but nobody needs it bad enough to pay for me to ship it across the country.
At the higher volume levels similar stuff happens. A construction company may source steel from farther away to undercut it's competition. You can bet the logistics people at Walmart (and anyone else with a big fleet) are drooling over all the optimizations they could implement if trucks could run like call centers.
> The demand will not rise 1:1, that's a given.
This is the only point I seek to make.
If salaries are 60% of the cost of shipping, and self-driving trucks make drivers twice as productive, costs will drop 30%.
This will bring a demand increase of less then 30%. Let's say 15%.
... Doing the math, it looks like 42% of truckers just lost their jobs. But at least they can buy more apples with the money they no longer have.
The bigger the productivity gain, the worse it will look for them.
Why would you think this?
Lots of products have price elasticity of greater than 1.
Shipping seems like a very elastic industry. If anything, demand would increase by more than 1% for every 1% decrease in cost.
This is because shipping costs if shipping costs are low enough, then you can build something for cheap somewhere else and then ship stuff across the country to high cost of living locations.
YOU wouldn't ship stuff more, but industry would.
IE imagine if something costs 1/3 if it is made in China.
If shipping costs are more then you save, then nobody would ship it. But if shipping costs go down, now you can easy get those cost benefits of across world or across country manufacturing.
Amdahl's law. Shipping is only useful when you have goods to ship. Unless you're selling bricks, shipping is a small portion of the price of most products. Reducing the cost of shipping, which is already a small portion of the price of the product will not result in price elasticity of greater then 1.
> If the cost of electricity halves, will you start using twice as much electricity?
Possibly since not all my cars are electric yet.
You can also see this happening for other resources
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Making-the-Modern-World
There's an obvious difference between various resources. If a cross-country airplane ticket cost $4000, instead of $400, air travel would be much less then 1/10th what it is now. A lot of people will fly somewhere for $400. Almost nobody will fly somewhere for $4000.
On the other hand, if the price of that ticket dropped from $400 to $360, we wouldn't see a 10% increase in passenger volume. The set of people who will fly somewhere for $360, but won't for $400 is tiny.
I posit that trucking is in the latter, rather then the former category. It's already cheap.
> It's already cheap.
I disagree. Given companies like Amazon, it is currently not cheap enough. I would argue that it will take longer before it's 'cheap'. The appetite for 'free shipping' is still growing and it's very different from the demand for airplane tickets. Kind of like with your electricity example, you're missing parts of the big picture.
What's not cheap is the last mile. We're talking about long-haul trucking, here.
For companies like Amazon and Walmart, there's no such thing as cheap enough especially when it's tied to shipping.
Of course you want to cut costs.
But what percentage do trucking expenses make, of their overall sales receipts?
Will their sales double if the cost of trucking drops by a third?
in Walmart's case it would allow them to offer free shipping for even more items. For other companies it would allow them to offer free shipping or better terms for free shipping (i.e. you have to buy less to get it).
Yes I could be wrong but I feel further lowering the costs of long distance trucking would help increase eccomerce sales for retailers which in turn would further increase demand for it
If you're still paying the same number of truck operators the same wage, how are costs going to go down at all? Self-driving trucks certainly aren't going to be cheaper to buy or maintain than their non-sentient counterparts... What other factors drive the cost of truck transportation?
Because the same number of truck operators can now drive 3 trucks at once.
Cost stay the same, but trucking capacity triples.
Precisely. Someone said that once driving is automated, truckers will only be responsible for cargo management, with a few people standing by for a fleet, ready to take over manually if autopilot breaks.
Yup, end-of-the-line logistics would be an easily transitioned to stopgap measure. Some former truckers would be able to stay local and handle loading/unloading. Not as many as are currently on the road, but every little bit of transitioning helps.
Trucker wages are not low. It's a middle class job in many cases and a decent semiskilled job in others.
Most of those roles managing bullshit at the head end will go away as the robot fleets consolidate and the current carriers die off. Customers will have to take or leave on whatever terms the carrier demands -- just like the old railroad days.
It doesn't help that human drivers are fundamentally unsafe (even if you restrict the discussion to sober drivers). Making computers safer than human drivers (not perfect) is enough for me to restrict human drivers to private tracks. I am not the only person who has lost a loved friend because of a careless driver.
There is no data to make this assertion about computer driven vehicles.
There is little basis to declare human drivers 'fundamentally unsafe' given the proportion of accidents pales in comparison to the gigantic volume of vehicles on roads worldwide over varied road and traffic conditions.
It can be speculated automated vehicles may require constraints on roads in which case it becomes apples to oranges. And human drivers equipped with the kind of technology and sensors on self driven cars would be much safer.
> There is no data to make this assertion about computer driven vehicles.
Today that is true. I am speculating when I say that autonomous vehicles will be safer than humans drivers. There is enough effort going into developing them that we will soon have that data though.
Google's data is already showing promise that the autonomous car is likely to be safer, but they don't have enough miles to be significant.
> There is little basis to declare human drivers 'fundamentally unsafe' given the proportion of accidents pales in comparison to the gigantic volume of vehicles on roads worldwide over varied road and traffic conditions.
10.6 deaths per 100,000 people is enough for me to call humans fundamentally unsafe. (though cancer and other medical conditions are bigger)
Since humans cannot be equipped with the sensors a computer can (ie eyes on the back of your head) it isn't fair to compare the as if situation.
Humans have only two eyes and terrible reaction times. They also get distracted easily and tend to act emotionally often. There is little data to show that computers are better drivers, because currently they aren't, but they lack human weaknesses and are safer than humans in many other situations (planes, trains...).
No, there's just not enough data.
While computers lack human weaknesses, they bring a slew of new ones. Computers have no situational awareness, no context, are vulnerable to hacking, respond in predetermined ways which can be manipulated or abused, etc.
There just is not enough evidence to make the claim that ubiquitous autonomous cars will be any safer than human drivers on shared roads. There are many known unknowns and who knows how many unknown unknowns left to discover and mitigate with this tech.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/laying-a-trap-for-self-dri...
But also computeres are easily being possessed by WannaCry and other malicious activities. It is pretty sad that all the praising of AI doesn't take into account the adversarial nature of the World.
> it's not like they'll get to ride along and supervise the autonomous vehicle
You don't think so? Seems like an unmanned truck would be a great target for theft.
It's a little harder because you can lock it with a pretty significant lock, it's generally moving, and it has a ton of location and camera data. If the police are notified of your exact position when you start the robbery it's probably hard to get enough stuff to make it actually worth the risk. The hard part isn't getting the truck to stop (which is trivially easy now), it's actually getting stuff and getting away with it.
Police aren't going to follow every automated truck on the road. And a balance has to be found or PDs will ignore shipping companies. Too many false alarms; they stop responding.
So by the time a truck is stopped, realizes a robbery is in progress, contacts command, who assesses if it's a real event, who contact local police, who send a cruiser to check investigate. They thiefs could have gotten away with quite a lot.
Btw, a grand theft rarely rises to immediate action. City PD have bigger concerns, most of the Midwest is sparsely populated. That leaves the bored suburb PD who'll be in the most responsive.
What is it that you think the current person involved's course of action? Are you suggesting that the person in a truck regularly defends its load from piracy today?
2 aspects
1) If drivers are at such danger that they do more than contact police then the liability would require they have trained security with them.
2) Drivers themselves are a major security vulnerability, how susceptible is a driver to being paid off by a "pirate". [and there was a recent article in Outside about how healthy nuts go through a lot of truck theft]
A driver calls 911 and is immediately routed to the local PD. Do remember a robbery (a person) has a higher priority than theft (just property)
These trucks often have 1,000,000+$ worth of cargo. That's worth a fair amount of risk and effort even if you lose 80% of it on the black market that's still better than most robberies.
Sure, but you could also just rob people NOW.
Just go on an open stretch of road in the country side with a firearm and open fire through the truck windows. A truck driver isn't going to be able to defend themselves.
You might argue that this doesn't happen because criminals are afraid of getting caught by the police and sent to jail.
But, if anything, the risks would be even greater for a self driving truck that has dozens of always on cameras recording, GPS tracking, and an emergency police call system.
> These trucks often have 1,000,000+$ worth of cargo.
That's true, but the problem is which one? Most of them are dry vans that you don't know what's inside, and/or not worth the risk. My loaded trailer was once opened and they didn't touch the merchandise. The only loss was the lock.
Most Fedex trucks already have $100k+ worth of cargo and only one person driving it. Doesn't mean it's easy to rob. Going through 80,000lb of shipments to find those that are worth enough is very time consuming and the truck will be hard to hide while you're doing it.
Much harder than a manned one. You can secure unmanned trucks better than manned trucks. Truckers need to be able to open the truck which is a weakness currently. With autonomous vehicles you don't have that. Camera data allows you to see theft earlier (currently it sometimes happens while the trucker is sleeping in the front) and directly report it to the police. The video also provides evidence and helps the police identifying the exact vehicle and location.
I would compare it to banks. ATMs are still a target of theft but it's much harder to crack them compared to robbing a bank where tellers have access to cash. The same will be true for trucks. There will be some thefts that are more sophisticated (and successful) but the overall rate will go down.
I think the concept looks good. They will still use truckers for some parts of the trip (and will have to do so for a while). The good thing is that those truckers can work 8 hour shifts close to home. And it won't really be a topic for outsourcing because the latency would be too high, so control centers will have to be somewhat close to the truck (at least same continent).
Semi-autonomous driving of trucks could change the job for the better. It would cost a lot of jobs but then again, few people become truck drivers because they love being on the road for days. For most it's a job and they'd be happy to take another one. And there is currently little evidence that no new jobs would come up as they always have for past disruptions.
> Most people in Silicon Valley subscribe to either the first or second school. Much of the rest of the country, including many truckers, favor the third. "I can tell the difference between a dead porcupine and a dead raccoon, and I know I can hit a raccoon, but if I hit a porcupine, I’m going to lose all the tires on the truck on that side," says Tom George, a veteran driver who now trains other Teamsters for the union’s Washington-Idaho AGC Training Trust. "It will take a long time and a lot of software to program that competence into a computer."
Driverless trucks are a very interesting concept. Once they're on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. But getting through traffic congestions, busy multi-turn-lane intersections, and making sure you don't sideswipe someone who's hugging the line seems rather complex given the different trailer dimensions and blind spots, (un)marked lanes and everything else it takes to get to the highway.
Why would the automated system have blind spots though? If it is viable at $50,000 it is probably viable at $100,000 or $200,000 (automated trucks will roughly double the efficiency of driving because of more hours on the road).
I would think that a physics model would also give a reasonable automated system superior control over where the trailer is at a given moment (and to account for different trailers).
Don't forget what happens when people find out they can abuse driverless vehicles. Cutting them off, getting closer to them, slowing down in front of them, etc. God knows what commuters will do to them in the Boston area.
> Cutting them off, getting closer to them, slowing down in front of them, etc.
My brother is a lorry driver who frequently crosses the Turkish - Bulgarian border with his truck (as in once every 2 weeks). Once or twice he caught refugees (or whatever you want to call them) trying to get inside his trailer by cutting through the thick textile material that covers it, while he was awaiting at the border. You generally do not whant people mixing with your industrial equipment while the truck drives at 90-100 km/h. In other cases it happened to him that other people had stolen diesel gas from his tank while he was asleep during the mandatory break (this happened somewhere in Western Europe, I forget where).
And leaving aside all this, assuming that bad people won't suddenly stop stealing and generally doing bad stuff to unattended expensive material (like trucks and the things that the trucks carry), being a truck driver you're also doing lots, and lots of bureaucracy work. I once shared the cabin with him as a passenger during one of his routes, while we passed two European borders. The amount of paperwork he had to fill in was mind-blogging, I half-jokingly told him that his job looks more like a clerk-job than being an actual driver. Now, lots of clerk jobs have already been automated, I know that, but it mostly happened in the private sector, inside private companies doing business with other private companies. But once your clerk-like job involves having to do business with several State-like entities things become a lot more complicated, with legislation changing once every 6 months, being very diverse from State to State etc.
What I'm trying to say is that theoretically the self-driving problem looks achievable for trucks, but once you get into the messy details things become a lot more complicated.
Driverless trucks will be better protected, not worse. You can lock the vehicle much better if there's no driver who needs access to it. Cameras everywhere will mean that the control center sees people approaching the truck much earlier than drivers at the moment (who won't see it at all if you keep in the blind spot). It's the same as robbing an ATM. Theoretically also unattended but well enough secured that few people do it. The insurance premium for cash in an ATM is lower than in a bank branch where the teller can access it. A driver doesn't provide a lot of protection against serious theft, video surveillance could deter more people.
You generally do not want people mixing with your industrial equipment while the truck drives at 90-100 km/h.
He should let them ride with him in the cab up front, then.
It's the human thing to do - and in another universe (or if this universe were configured only slightly differently) they could be his own family, after all.
Regardless of anybodies sympathies for refugees, this is simply not going to achieve anything.
They are not going to let you cross the border with a cab filled with refugees/asylum seekers/undocumented immigrants.
Then put them in the back while you drive a careful 50km/h the first few clicks before and after the border.
The point is, I'm actually amazed at the downvotes, and that people aren't naturally, viscerally having a more human response -- "For heaven's sake, can't I think of a way to help these people? They're fearing for their lives, after all!" -- rather than the response described in the post I was responding to: "Oh shit, it's risky/complicated! Avoid, avoid!"
Especially given this history, among other sordid events in the past:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
I doubt they are fearing for their life in Turkey. They definitely will make more money in Europe but it's not like Turkey is putting them in gas chamber or something.
To suggest that these people are out to make a quick buck is just -- pure snark.
And to think that just because Turkey isn't currently running gas chambers that these people have nothing to worry about is, unfortunately, very naive:
Amnesty International has slammed Turkey for expelling dozens of Syrian refugees to their war-stricken country, saying the move is in violation of international law.
According to a new report released by the UK-based rights group, a total of about 80 Syrian asylum seekers, who were previously held incommunicado in a detention center in the Turkish city of Erzurum, were forced to leave for their country, with 50 more people facing deportation.
-- source: look it up yourself
Please watch this http://imgur.com/gallery/zkafo . You are giving life-threatening advice.
I don't think you understand how dangerous the situation is for the drivers. And if it is a human thing to do, you can always go and help to smuggle them over the border. Good luck.
And going across boarders I could see people smugglers hiring hackers to slow down the vehicles so that there clients could board the trucks.
Drug smugglers are another group that could use this and how would a cop stop an autonomous vehicle to search it they would have to have a back door which could be abused
Stopping a safe, automated vehicle would be trivial. Just dress up as a road worker, and hold up a stop sign. Do it above a manhole cover, and you have easy access to the bottom of the vehicle. A remote human supervisor might not even notice what was going on.
This seems like a vulnerability for human-operated vehicles also.
Admittedly it seems just as trivial to mitigate with some more sensors e.g. weight sensors to detect the load being modified while stopped, cameras to detect aberrant movement inside the cab, etc.
Let the arms race begin!
And what would currently happen? Killing the road worker? No, every truck would stop and you could operate in the driver's blind spot. Autonomous vehicles won't have blind spots so that the operator can identify the theft much faster.
I think you have been watching too much ocean's eleven. This would be trivial to fix with a sensor on the bottom.
> Ok, but what if the refugees were lowered by a helicop...
Sensor on the roof. Sensor on the side. Sensor everywhere.
Autonomous trucks will be searched just like non-autonomous ones at borders.
Outside of national borders, smuggling felonious quantities of hard drugs from state to state is already trivial.
Smuggling is trivial currently, but not without risking incarceration or death. Once the contraband can be ferried by an autonomous vehicle without risk to the operator, the incentives will change dramatically.
Has been done between Mexico and California already. Aside from that, many of the drivers aren't really given a choice, so the risk is irrelevant.
Tag the vehicle, follow it, arrest everyone who comes to pick the drugs up.
Don't forget that the driverless vehicle will have tracking. Expect to get a ticket complete with video if you do things like that. If you are costing the trucking company money they might be willing to send people to court against you as well (taking you to court might not be worth it, but the teach people a lesson aspect might make it worth it anyway)
Issuing that traffic ticket would not be a good long-term PR move for any organization that needs to work with the public (like the police).
Trucks getting cut off is the norm in many areas. Punishing people for normal is generally not smart.
Punishing people for "normal" has a way of discouraging "normal" and changing it into "not as normal".
> Cutting them off, getting closer to them, slowing down in front of them, etc
Car drivers already take advantage of trucks leaving a safe distance or their slow acceleration in traffic.
I live in (ok, ok, near) Boston and I constantly fantasize about this. I don't commute by car I look forward to riding my bike 5mph in front of driverless cars, at least if they don't run me over...
I also have to imagine they will be a ripe target for vandalism, especially if operators don't aggressively remove graffiti.
"ripe target for vandalism"
And they'll also be surrounded by camera's and hard drives. I would imagine that the sensors that can see through fog could also get more detail than the average CCV camera - meaning that even with a mask, you're going to get a lot of detail on vandals or road hazards (aka: You going 5mph in front of one)
Vandalism already happens to cars. As are cyclists who go 5mph in front of a car (on a road where it cannot overtake you) to take revenge on a driver they don't like.
None of that will change and that's not dependent on drivers.
> I also have to imagine they will be a ripe target for vandalism
Is a lone driver with a tire iron, mag-lite, or billy club really the deterrent to this? Especially, the stereotypical obese early 50s driver?
I wonder what % of truck driving is highway driving? If you are covering the trucks in cameras and you have the control software there already it seems pretty easy(relatively at least) to have someone take over via remote for the last mile.
AI sensors combined with some sort of 360 view VR with drivers for the last mile with full AI on highways/freeways would allow for progressive roll out of self driving technology. A lot of video to push down the wire though but probably manageable with modern codecs.
pretty much every sleeper truck is designed to be mostly highway. The ones that stay in-city are the single cab designs. This isn't always true for Owner-Operators taking a buck where they can get it, but most trucks are designed for this use. There's no other cost-efficient way to get goods across cities/states/provinces/countries/continents.
> Once they're on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well.
That's assuming nice weather conditions. Mudslides, flash floods, extreme code, ice, snow, etc. needs to be taken into consideration.
Of course those need to be taken into consideration but to be fair, aren't most of the conditions you listed dealt with by a human driver pulling over and waiting it out/calling for assistance? That's exactly what an autonomous system could do in those situations.
And if there _are_ dangerous conditions that a human driver could navigate but an autonomous one would give up on, is that so bad? The industry is making enough efficiency gains to offset that.
Doesn't most self-driving protocols out right now demand perfect conditions to even operate?
In those conditions human drivers don't work very well either. I'd rather have computers that drive very slowly because they can't see very well instead of humans that drive faster than they can see because "I'm a good driver".
People are astonishingly good at dealing with unconventional conditions. This idea that computers are 'smarter' than humans (that program them) in the realm of driving is amusing and terrifying at the same time. Calling them 'self driving cars' is oxymoronic. They are pre-programmed cars.
The people duped into this will lose their driving skills and pretend it's other humans fault for not conforming to the program they invested in. I'm not all that worried, the market will sort this out in the US at least.
If not the market, definitely the regulations once traffic reports start piling up... Even faster when there's no one behind the wheel to blame.
Can't even imagine a manslaughter case where a driverless vehicle killed someone. Who's at fault? Most fault current resides in the driver, as they're the final call.
'Who's at fault?'
Exactly. Humans. Humans are the bugs in their code. The control writers will argue for more laws so their programs work. The possibility that their code revisions are futile will dismissed as [insert buzzword]. I am excited that we get to watch this play out. The wildcard is biological CPU's: http://www.research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extra...
Remote driving, though, might solve for this. You still have a human to react to unforeseen circumstances, but you can switch up the remote driver easily so you can work in shifts, drive 24/7, not stop for bathrooms/food etc.
I'd imagine the quality of life would be significantly better too since they would work in the same spot with co-workers and could go home every day.
>I'd imagine the quality of life would be significantly better too since they would work in the same spot with co-workers and could go home every day.
Actually, working in the same spot with coworkers was exactly the reason I started driving a truck. Going back to that would be an enormous downgrade in quality of life for me and a lot of drivers.
I grew up in Minnesota where we learned to deal with bad roads. We did drive on them and got good at it. The truth is we went in the ditch a lot when the weather was bad.
Driverless trucks aren't going to 100% perfect. They just need to be significantly safe and more reliable than humans.
Humans get sleepy, get emotional, zone out, and make all kinds of mistakes all the time.
The first generation of driverless trucks will still have a human as passenger to be backup in case of mistakes. You may be thinking, "What's the point if there will still be a human there? s/he might as well drive." Well, humans still need breaks and can help give feedback to Truck for it to improve.
The first generation won't be perfect, but it will be on its way.
More reliable than humans is too low a bar. People mostly forgive each other's imperfections, not so much a computer's. A self-driving truck is going to need to be at least an order of magnitude or more safer than a human.
I am extremely skeptical that a porcupine would take out a truck tire.
I'm not doubting the professional truck driver, though. Do you have experience running over porcupines? I do not. They've seen a lot. Enough to draw conclusions from fringe conditions like this.
Perhaps this is more of an occurrence on re-treads.
If dead porcupines are a problem, the system can be trained to identify them.
They're not dead, yet.
> This is a company that employs truck drivers, is how the talk begins. The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings. Truckers have very different ideas and different experiences from people like you, Seltz-Axmacher continues. Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters. They will say things that you may find startling. Not in a malicious way, but because people from, say, rural West Virginia talk differently than people from San Francisco. Can you handle that?
It's good to see someone doing more than just talk about this sort of thing; both the employment aspect and the culture clash side of it. Compare that to say, how Google treats its ex-military drone contractors [1].
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-military-contractor-google...
And I love the counterpoint:
> "We hire truckers," Seltz-Axmacher tells prospective drivers right before offering them a job. "But we also have a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley. Everything you’ve heard about San Francisco—it’s all basically true. There is something called raw denim, and in San Francisco people wear it, which means that some of your colleagues will pay up to $300 for a pair of blue jeans. They sometimes drink $7 lattes, too. Many of your co-workers will not be from the U.S. They will have accents. Can you handle that?"
In my experience, the culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes. As a member of the latter, I take exception to this statement:
> “We basically have people from two worlds, neither of which has ever talked to each other,” says Seltz-Axmacher, who grew up in suburban Maryland. “That’s kind of what’s wrong with this country.”
Perhaps that's true of the founder's life experience, or true of the trucking industry, but most manufacturing jobs seem to be merging these cultures comparatively smoothly. I've been at a couple companies in the automotive industry, and been to hundreds of different plants, and everywhere you look there are blue collar technicians running the machines and white collar engineers building and automating the machines. The situation is not so bad as the article paints it outside the extremes of Ivy League PHD programs contrasted with the trucking industry.
Hah, you're definitely right (I work at an EMS provider). In the context of the piece it seems to me like they're more focused on SF type startups than places like where you or I work. I agree very much with:
> ...culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes.
Everybody in heavy industry encounters this. There's a whole range of skill levels and backgrounds in an industrial plant.
I'm surprised they don't send their engineers through a truck driving course, and have them get a CDL. If you're going to work on self-driving truck software, you need to be able to drive a truck. At least get a Commercial Learners Permit.
I'm a software pro, not a trucker, and I have a problem with $300 jeans and $7 lattes. And what is all this I keep hearing about $20 avocado toast?
The culture clash is Silicon Valley banging its own cymbals.
The examples in the article are trite, but the culture clash is a very real thing. I would point to things like the acceptance of alcohol in the workplace, expectations around work/home balance, the comparatively uniform social/political views of SF tech workers (and educational backgrounds), etc.
> Perhaps that's true of the founder's life experience, ...
That's what I was thinking. They might be exaggerating a little bit the difference in culture.
> The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings.
That's nice to see, since the change-the-world spiel is almost always howling bullshit.
With the amount of regulations in truck driving, I wouldn't be surprised if SV clashes with the culture and work ethic truck drivers have to endure. It's good to see this company hiring drivers themselves; those who are open to improving on this tech.
I think people from most industries that are at the worst risk from automation are willing to help companies who make said automation products, as long as said company doesn't exist solely to put them out of a job and actually listens to them and their concerns. Those are the real rarity.
Excellent read - thanks.
This is eerily like a scene from Player Piano, Vonnegut's first novel. Some smart engineers find the best machinist at a factory, use some machines to record his movements and process and then use them to program the robots that replace him, and everyone else in his position at the factory.
For those that haven't read it, the book is an interesting and prescient story about what the future of America looks like when nearly all human labor has been made obsolete.
I know it is novel to talk about blue collar workers working alongside phd grads who are specialists in this field... but surely any good system which needs to deliver a quality outcome needs to be built with domain expertise, in this case driving trucks. I just don't see why this is that exciting. I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this.
> I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this
Me too. There's so much more than just driving. Just as an example, we truck drivers learn to anticipate possible problems based on other people's behaviors. Why anticipate? Because 80,000 lbs can take too long to stop, and people can die.
> Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters....Can you handle that?
I hope this is a joke. If someone literally cannot handle working alongside someone who voted for Trump, that is so sad.
This is an interesting approach in the short term and could help bootstrap Starsky's business before the conversion to fully autonomous driving.
I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so. There's just too much money riding on this problem, and logistics companies are fairly ruthless about efficiency.
"I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so."
I hope so. Trucking is one of the toughest professions for a person to endure that I've ever seen. It destroys a person's body and mind...and you're lucky to end up making minimum wage when you account for how many hours they spend working.
And what job alternatives will you provide them, think specially about current long haul drivers, not future candidates you can discourage and divert to greener fields.
Economic assistance. Give them the resources to choose their new career path for themselves.
From whom, the govt? I don't trust that would happen (see rustbelt industries). These automation startups? What's their profit if they have to train the people they help get laid off/made redundant?
You asked a pretty important question (we agree that this isn't simple) and I replied with what I thought to be the best solution.
And yes, the government. The funny thing about a democracy is that if enough people want the govt. to provide something, it will.
> and you're lucky to end up making minimum wage when you account for how many hours they spend working.
If you're driving fleet, that's correct; however, there are a large number of "Owner/Operators" out there and they do make significantly more than you'd expect. If you have a good freight contract and a logistical mind, an O+O can easily make around $125k/year.
It's a lot further away than 20 years. It really won't be practical for autonomous trucks to share the roads with passenger vehicles using the existing infrastructure. After a handful or more major accidents with multiple deaths involving autonomous trucks, there will be no public support for them.
And there will be major accidents with multiple deaths, since the average passenger car driver is so unskilled. No software can account for every idiotic move made by the typical car driver, and big trucks take a lot of room and time to stop. A few lawsuits later, all the financial gains will disappear for the trucking companies and drivers are back in the seat.
I could see in 20 years a system where computer assisted driving automates much of the trip, much like commercial aircraft operate now.
Self driving trucks on the highway are already legal in some states. EX: Arizona.
Yeah, city driving is hard. That might be a long ways away. But highway driving? Thats easy. You can even buy a highway driving, consumer self driving vehicle right NOW. Tesla sells them.
Self-driving is not the same as autonomous, though. There is always a human present, and sometimes that's not enough to make up for the fact that a Tesla apparently can't "see" a 75 foot long, 13 1/2 foot high truck in front of it while driving down the highway.
And while highway driving generally has fewer decision points per mile than city driving, the speeds are much higher and so the effects of errors are much greater on the highway. The worst wrecks I've seen have all been on the highway, not in cities.
If I was a trucker I'd be learning diesel tech, not training my replacement drivers
I'm actually learning to code. I drive over-the-road and live in the truck cab. Hopefully someday it will help me get out of here.
You know I read an article a long time ago about two guys who drove truck and took turns coding (team drivers so the person not driving would write code) and wrote shareware this way - it might have been a game published by Epic or Apogee in the early 90's or I might be imagining the whole thing
That's a good idea. For now I'm solo, so there's not really much time.
As much as the devs probably hate riding with truckers it's good for them
Probably really hard on the truckers, though.
Why do you think they'd hate it?
I would hate it.
Why would you hate it?
Don't hold your breath for semi-driverless trucking. Automated systems to aid in backing of doubles and triples isn't even a common thing yet.
No their not . People feed up with some asshole from Silicon Valley; talking about destroying their jobs are trying to make money before they don't have a job .
Driverless Trucks, and to a lesser extent, driverless cars, have got to be the 21st century Jihadi / Islamic "Fighter"'s wet dream.
I don't think the day is far off, when a Jihadi will remote control a Driverless Truck loaded with explosives, and plough it right into a Concert / Festival gathering...
This alone is reason #1 to ban driverless vehicles.