"Safer than human drivers" all too easily becomes "we can't control when these robot trucks my crash into a mother driving her kids to school," when you put it into the political regulation arena.
And the emotional appeals cut both ways. How long before the parents of a child killed by a drunk or sleeping truck driver say "Why was he driving anyway? Why wasn't he replaced by a machine that wouldn't drink a six pack and nod off while at the wheel?"
In non tech circles - the vast majority of the world - people are pretty famous for measuring risks by perception and not statistics.
The idea of a robotic truck taking away jobs while also being a risk to life? America would take up mass transit before it buys into that system.
Man I can see the headlines and political/ emotional arguments now. Godless SV tech priests rob Americans of the last few jobs they have. 1% and automation, no job left behind.!
It's useful to remember that People refused seat belts until the argument was irrefutable. Hell doctors didn't wash hands regularly until it was drilled into their heads that they were infecting patients.
And when it come to automated personal care - I bet that People will utterly, vociferously, oppose the loss of their agency in controlling their means of movement.
People have romanticized the man and the horse, the man and the bike, the car - but it's because it's a matter of controlling that power.
Selling that to the American public and the world at large is a multi generational effort.
And then, the rest of the world will have to follow so as not to be left behind an industrial revolution...
As for individuals, the government might gives tax breaks or ban the things. I think it is most that likely early adopters will use them and brag to everyone how much they save on fuel and airline tickets and how more (work, reading, video games, etc... ) they can do while travelling. Of course there will be holdouts, but they will be quickly outnumbered.
Eventually so few manual drivers will be on the road that they are the exception and 99% of the accidents will be their fault. Then states will start banning driving manually.
And why would I want more places I can work, at least when I drive I am not expected to be working.
Also Monsanto has nothing to do with anything here, unless you care to explain.
The ultimate point being that the answer might be "decades." It might take that long for the prevailing opinion amongst the public and/or politicians to change that way. And it is affected by the actual accidents involving automated vehicles in the short term.
Nah, it'll be much cheaper than what they pay for humans since the bots will be in far fewer accidents and insurance companies actually care about statistics.
I don't think that's true at all. Recalls are a manufactures problem, the local trucking company is just going to have normal auto insurance just as with his human drivers.
I mean surely this happens now, how do they solve this problem?
The same will be true of automated trucking, parts will be recalled, and companies will have multiple different trucking manufactures to choose from so the notion that all the trucks will be recalled just isn't realistic.
Admittedly, deaths are very rare, especially per-trip, 27 per year or 0.00000015% per trip -- self driving cars should be able to get into that level of safety, current automotive fatality rates are around 1 in 100M (or .000001%/mile)
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/15/news/la-heb-elevator...
Driver's union versus transportation industry. I have a hunch which way the politicians will sway.
In your example that one drive is taken off the road. That drive is not a problem, and people assume that the remaining drivers are, for the most part, fine and unlikely to make the same mistake.
In the automated truck example you can't take that one driver off the road because barring equipment failure they are all the same driver and just as likely to make the same mistake.
If one human driver kills in such a manner, people will distrust that one human driver (or at worst that one trucking company, if bad training or other compliance issues are suspected), if one automated truck kills in such a manner people will distrust all automated trucks.
This is precisely the goal of IBM's Watson if you will remember, an individual doctor only has their own experience - Watson can aggregate data from a virtually infinite number of data points and that knowledge and experience is shared across the network.
Will accidents happen? Yes. But we can learn from them and the collective as a whole benefits, not one individual instance.
Probably a lot like software development today except with a lower threshold for error, and hopefully the appropriate increase QA.
Now convince the herd that is the general public, who don't really understand the technology, don't have time for a long explanation, and tend to react with instincts and emotions that haven't had much by way of firmware upgrades for quite a few generations.
No, safer than humans is the bar.
Beyond a mandate from the government, I have a hard time seeing the trucking industry giving all their profits over to google, tesla, gm, mercedes, and co.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112882857/new-scanning...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231041901_Portable_...