Driverless lorries to be trialled in UK
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Either way, automated lorries will be better. Unless the designers + lawmakers say: hey they don't get into accidents see, now we can improve throughput by letting them go faster...
By that logic we should all be driving cars around at horse speeds.
A car cruising on a highway at 50 mph (80 km/h) may require only 10 horsepower (7.5 kW) to overcome air drag, but that same car at 100 mph (160 km/h) requires 80 hp (60 kW).[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)#Drag_at_high_ve...
That is called defensive driving, and you should be doing that.....
One more low-skilled job disappearing without replacement.
I'm curious - if you think this is a bad thing, are there technological innovations which have already happened which you would want to undo? How many jobs do you think it would create? GPS could provide be a good thought experiment.
some of us, anyway
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/census-data-half-of-us-poor-or-low-income/
It doesn't follow that by prohibiting technological progress things would be more equal. I'm not sure what the relationship is between income distribution and progress; I think there are probably arguments both ways.
For example, would income inequality be rising even if technological progress was not happening? Probably yes, from my reading of Pikkety. Those with capital would probably continue to accumulate more. But it would affect returns to capital so perhaps it's not so clear cut.
Is income inequality increasing as a result of technological progress? Maybe, I guess? I'd be quite interested to see some real evidence either way because I don't think the answer is intuitive either way.
Will you not think of the Blacksmith when you replace your horse with one of these new motor vehicles....
Through out history we have had industries decimated by new technology, do you want to stop progress simply to protect jobs? At what point in history should we have done this? or why is today any different than at any point in our past? Should we time travel all the way back and kill that bastard that invented a way to control fire? Or the Guy that invented the wheel?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/25/lorry-driver-sh...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSSO_QPgQTw [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r11X-zMF_pc [3] http://www.cargosousterrain.ch/de/
Building tunnels is really expensive. Barring radical longevity improvements, I don't think I'll live to see an underground transportation network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway
I used to work in Royal London House in Finsbury Square and the lowest subterranean level was sealed up but Royal Mail branded; given that it was a stones throw away from Mount Pleasant, I always wanted to gain access and see if it had access to Mail Rail or was even a station.
Not having a driver in the cab supervising the robot is safer? I don't see any call to remove pilots from airplanes. And I doubt the extra 200lbs of driver makes much different given these are trucks.
I would add that allowing multiple trucks to operate this way will require some changes to the law. And the redesign of many roads. Imagine trying to merge into traffic or onto a bridge when some vehicles are longer than merging lanes. It sounds like a great idea but isn't practical.
Because computers have much faster reaction times and coordination mechanisms than any human and so can drive proportionally closer together.
As well as that there's the lack of visibility.
[five]> [four]> [three]> [two]> [one]>
> Imagine trying to merge into traffic or onto a bridge when some vehicles are longer than merging lanes
i) When the lorries pass approach a merging lane they either add some space between each truck, or they use a different lane of the motorway (because this article is talking about England) which allows people to move from the merging lane onto the motorway.
ii) Lorries will already drive in an informal ad-hoc convey. They'll keep a safe distance from each other. That safe distance isn't enough for a car to get into if the car is trying to merge from the entrance ramp. So if this isn't already a problem I'm not sure why it would be a problem with robot drivers. What's changed that suddenly makes it a problem?
Right now you have truckers driving for 18+ hours at 10-15mph over the legal limit. I'd much rather the road be trucked by software that won't speed and will defer to the side of safety always.
The fact that it is carrying freight, too, is a plus, as the truck driving software can always make the decision in favor of the other drivers on the road (whereas passenger self-driving cars will be focused both on the safety of the car itself and other drivers, a much more difficult decision tree).
e: my references to law are to US law, which isn't exactly applicable to this specific story, but the arguments stand (I'm sure there is a similar max-speed limit for trucks in the UK)
That doesn't need robot drivers. That is and can be deployed today. Why it isn't ... that's an open question.
>>> "the truck driving software can always make the decision in favor of the other drivers on the road"
I've really wondered about this. Wouldn't software that acts like a jerk (ie not letting people in etc) be more valuable if it gets from A to B faster? Why think that the same pressures that force drivers to act like jerks won't also be applied to software?
Was lowered to 56mph (90 kmh) to match speeds with Europe at some point.
You're right, it needs robot enforcers :)
> Why think that the same pressures that force drivers to act like jerks won't also be applied to software?
They will; but a human can improvise and lie, whereas software can (in theory) be audited and tested. The software will be built by manufacturers, not lorry owners; and they don't want to end up on the wrong side of car regulators -- see the recent VW affair.
You mean shrewdly duping regulators year after year so they can sell more cars, make more money, enrich shareholders, and become a market leader?
No matter what the cost today, I think VW shareholders would rather they have done what they did as opposed to giving up the market to competitors. (They all seem to have been playing tricks imho.)
Wouldn't software that acts like a jerk (ie not letting
people in etc) be more valuable if it gets from A to B
faster? Why think that the same pressures that force drivers
to act like jerks won't also be applied to software?
Check the fine print on your windows license. Then check the fine print on any aerospace autopilot. They disclaim everything. It's always the operators responsibility, never the manufacturers unless of a serious defect.
>> no way the contents of a truck are going to be worth more than the cost of paying out $x millions in the case of killing a human.
If that were true all sorts of other safety devices would already be on trucks, starting with gps-enabled speed regulators. There is always a cost-benefit analysis. That includes tradeoffs between utility and safety.
There are already safety devices on trucks, but since there is a human operator, much of the onus of using or installing those is on the human, not the truck manufacturer or trucking company; and again, you're missing my point that with no driver, the liability falls to the producers of the self-driving software.
Not really. The owner of the truck is also the operator. Trucking companies are sued for damages caused by their drivers every day. If a truck company chooses to use particular software, as they choose a particular driver, the trucking company will be liable. They are the one that decided to put the vehicle on the road. That's why they must carry insurance and why that insurance attaches to the vehicle regardless of who is driving it on a particular day. Swapping out an employee-driver for a robot won't change the situation.
Even a truck that is stolen, a truck driven by someone the operator doesn't want behind the wheel, can result in liability should the operator not have taken reasonable steps to guard against theft.
This makes me think of VW.
> Winterkorn blamed "the terrible mistakes of a few people," whom he did not name, for the international scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Winterkorn
Now, to be clear I am not saying that Google's or Alphabet's CEO should go to jail. Rather the CEO of the company who owns the fleet should. Claiming that they didn't know what their employees did should not be allowed as a defense.
Yes, I am still mad at VW for throwing their software engineers under the bus here. I don't know what the solution is but it can't be to just say "well, the software engineers knew what they were doing and they should have said no when told to implement something illegal" (this is what I understand Uncle Bob suggested).
Because the software
- Isn't getting paid by the time taken, so isn't more expensive to take longer
- Trucks can be more fuel efficient at slower speeds
- Most truck shipping won't be so urgent that time matters beyond "Predictable arrival time".
It is somewhat complex (https://www.gov.uk/drivers-hours/overview) but the gist is we take human factors into account.
The driver is personally liable and the fines could easily be more than income from the day's driving.
A lot of lorry companies do this, unfortunately, to "comply" with the driving hours (or beat competition). So to ensure their drivers get further, they install magnets on their transmissions to prevent the Tachograph (and thus the limiter) from correctly reading the lorry's speed.
Indeed, this tactic is also used to trick the Tachograph into thinking the driver is taking a rest while he is actually driving. The driving hours are strictly enforced by police across Europe, and if the printout doesn't match the law, the driver and his employer stands to pay a huge fine. And both may also stand to lose their licence, depending on the scope of the crime.
(If they find magnets on the lorry, you can bet they are losing their livelihood.)
In most European countries, lorries are limited to 80 km/h on motorways, with a few (including the UK) going fully to the limiter. Technically, the speed limit for lorries is 96 km/h on UK motorways, but newer lorries won't be able to drive that fast because of their limiter.
Just have humans be available to go deal with the trucks. Fine companies (a lot!) if they are too slow to deal with their trucks. This will encourage them to have arrangements in place.
As far as navigation, it's a technology product. They tend to get better over time, at least until some point where improvement becomes difficult is reached.
Not specifically. Those concerns are to do with a driver-free truck, not necessarily one that is just driving itself. Autopilots still have pilots. I'd be all for an autopilot unit for a car/truck/plane alongside the driver. The difference is that these trucks seem to rely on the autopilot, at least to the extent that they are very distant from any human supervision. So the only real issue between autopilot+driver and autopilot solo is cost.
Planes don't really have so many things to collide with, so I don't think the choices made about autopilot there are instructive.
Lorries drive up each others asses anyway, usually you just pull alongside and indicate and they'll make a little space for you to pull through. So pretty much business as usual.
HGVs regularly have blow outs and there are parts of the network where they're frequently rolled by high winds.
It's bad enough when that happens to a single truck. If it takes up to nine others with it, it's going to be carnage.
Convoys may not be the best way to make automation happen.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5096714,-2.515484,3a,75y,1...
Now imagine you're in a continuous stream of rush-hour traffic and there are 10 contiguous lorries in the way. Actually even the existing lorries have to pull out into the middle lane there.
It must really suck to lose your livelihood like that, but its kinda inevitable. On the flipside, there will be jobs created for people to fix these machines, write the programs that run them, all the sensors and safety features that will be required before they can hit the road.