Has the Autonomous Trucking Revolution Arrived?(phenomenalworld.org) |
Has the Autonomous Trucking Revolution Arrived?(phenomenalworld.org) |
The roads on the ground are vastly more complex than the highways in the sky, and the density of human pilots a few feet away is vastly higher. At the same time ground transport is handling ~600x more tonnage and ~6x more drivers per ton. To say the death difference is simply regulation ignores a lot.
I feel like given the danger these vehicles represent that their location should be published publicly so that humans can avoid the highway when they are near and possibly plan alternative routes.
Also, I believe that part of the "plan" is to eventually once the technology hits it limit of effectiveness (cant get any better but is still deadly), flood the highways with enough of them and autonomous cars to scare humans off the roads. There will be a tipping point where humans wont feel safe driving on the roads with these vehicles in large enough numbers (because they arent).
At that point we will be paying taxes for robot highways, and to fund liability protections for tech companies.
> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.
"No one really thinks Level 5 autonomy (full autonomy in all situations with no remote assistance) will happen any time soon"
Level 3 or 4 is more than enough to get most of the commercial benefits.
I never did this myself (except while learning how to drive). And I don't think I've heard about my friends doing this either. Turn around because the road was impassable? Sure. Pass the wheel to someone else? nope.
That means a lot (most?) human drivers are "level 5 autonomous".
For autonomous trucking, you’re grossly underestimating 1) how dangerous these trucks are. A small rear end accident with a car does some damage, a small rear end from a tractor with 80k pounds of cargo kills people. 2) They are hard to drive, hard to navigate in cities, require inspections constantly for roadworthiness and safety. Sure having a tractor pull a load on a few hundred miles of straight empty highway in Texas is doable today, having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers. 3) Plus no one knows how to legislate or regulate these things. If a robot tractor kills someone, who is at fault? The vehicle maker? The autonomy software maker? The carrier? There are already nuclear verdict lawsuits for these types of situations with human truck drivers that can be tens to hundreds of millions of dollars I.e. shut down a carrier bad. You think a bunch of octogenarians in congress know what the hell to do with any of this stuff?
I say all of this while also fully agreeing that consumer autonomy seems to have been solved or is on its way to being solved, I’d bet in 5 years it will be weird to get an uber and there’s a person actually driving. Commercial heavy duty trucking is a whole different class of problems that goes well beyond “can the software do it”.
Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers
those drivers could spend their lives working locally (and sleepin at home), develop deep regional expertise, and be able to handle the hardest part of the job without the fatigue from a cross-country drive.