Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers

the old timers are there too and some are there to pick up their partner as many long distance services have two drivers per cab. the old timers are a great source of information and if anything stands out its how many new drivers don't cut it. most leave on their own but others are pushed out for not being good drivers. good means not only a safe driver but properly courteous to everyone you meet.

quite a few get into it on the storied romance aspect of it, those stories that convey that there is something special in it, one with the road, etc. others because they don't understand the complexity of the job. it is not just driving.

so I am really curious how much work moves to dock yards and better yet, what processes are being put in place to handle all the interaction with local enforcement agencies because truth be told there are parts of this country where the locals stop trucks fishing for something to ticket and generate revenue on. how will self driving, no one aboard, eventually be handled?

BLS has the mean annual income for a truck driver at $43,000 (https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes533032.htm) versus ~ $22,000 for a personal care assistant (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/home-health-aides-and-per...).

That's a huge difference, especially in a country with the health care system we have.

If recent history is any indication of how this will turn out, it's not going to be pretty. The rich get richer and everyone else gets screwed.

I think this is you ceding your original comment. I think most people clearly understand this is merely a (potential) distribution problem.

[0] http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...

The pay of truckers has, in inflation adjusted terms, shrunk by more than half since the 80s. They mostly need to bring in more people because their turnover is ridiculous.

For reference:

Assuming a driver starts working at age 18 and retires at age 65, and given equal distribution of workers over all ages, you would expect 42% of workers to be 45 or older, and 10% of workers to be 20-24 years old (if you assume 21-70, then 51% should be 45 or older).

Just in case anybody else was wondering what those numbers mean. As an aside, this projection from the same presenation looks slightly suspicious: http://www.truckinginfo.com/fc_images/news/l-driverturnover-...

Is that really true? It seems electric trucks[0] quickly follow from autonomous trucks and from what I understand, electric vehicles are mechanically much simpler. That leaves truck operators with not much need for a greasemonkey wrenching on a transmission when there is a) little/no grease[1] and b) no transmission[2].

Tire & body shops are about the only maintenance jobs I can think of that won't be reduced/eliminated by the coming changes.

[0]https://www.tesla.com/semi [1]https://www.mckinseyenergyinsights.com/insights/impact-of-el... [2]https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/a120190...

There’s already an industry that performs these tasks so there’d be a small percentage of absorption of current truck drivers.

You also assume there’d be more trucks, but there’d likely be fewer, at least at first. Since a fully automated truck could operate substantially more hours than with a driver. Drivers have hours of service that restrict how much they drive per day and per week.

Also, on a macro scale automated trucks wouldn’t be adopted if they didn’t displace workers.

Supporting data: The writing has been on the wall in glowing neon ever since the advent of MOOCs.

MOOCS have many near magical attributes that we have long sought in education

1) The students regularly self select into the courses they want, as opposed to schools where you don't have a choice.

2) Courses are free

3) Courses are high quality, and improving with testing

4) Courses are media rich, and use multiple types of stimulation for stronger impact when studying

5) Honorary mention - gamification

6) Material is always available, at any time - you are not limited to teachers being available

7) You even have online communities you can reach out to, to discuss your work

And yet they have about a 10% completion rate.

Let me underline - thats a 10% rate with a self selected pool of interested applicants.

MOOCs are literally magic.

IF you are talking about re-training then you are missing the Big Picture: The re-training and skill up revolution has come and gone.

We should currently be seeing a large rise in the number of people who are self actualizing, and learning skills in a wider range of industries.

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In economic terms, the failure rate of MOOCs indicate that retraining attempts will result in very poor retrenchment of workers.

Most jobs lost will result in under-employment, increasing the concentration of capital in the hands of capital holders.

This will have a knock on effect on the America old style university system, as this will become the only path to a higher paying career over poor paying service sector work.

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The retraining model which will work will require people to be allowed to train non stop on material, and the ability to focus and work on a subject till they have gained the necessary mastery.

I doubt this will be possible, because a family earner cannot take weeks off to master a skill only to have to hunt for jobs in a market where younger students already abound.

Consider how many people want to get healthier, apply to gyms - and then stop going.

Re-phrase the retraining problem as an attempt to get all of humanity (or a slice of it) fit.

Also since the tools of technology allow for hitherto impossible levels of orchestration and conversation management, the barrier to outrage driven organization and outrage has been set much higher, which will lead to less negotiation power during the eventual distribution of wealth

Of course a major reason for that is that the US have (literally) tons of commodities, a significant plurality of the tonnage is coal. I expect roughly the same of Russia, China, Australia and India (the other members of the tonnage top 5, Australia notably haults extremely heavy stuff for very short distances as it's about on par with the EU for tkm but waaay ahead in total tonnage).

Hell one of the reasons passenger trains is shit in the US is that passenger rail does not get priority over freight and thus you get the country's lone "high-speed train" giving way to slow freight leading to an average speed of 130km/h, slower than some non-high-speed intercity service in Europe.

In comparison, the US rail network is slow and low quality, which makes freight operations extremely attractive but is absolute garbage for passenger operations. US rail freight competes well in its market niche, where it is faster than oceanic shipping but much cheaper than air freight.

Often, the flexibility and reduced latency of freight by truck is worth the increased per-mile cost.

Your point was that trains are "self-driving cargo". If you'd left it at that, this would have been a clever comment.

Instead, you look like someone who doesn't realize the US has massive, massive, massive amounts of train-hauled cargo because all he knows is we don't use commuter trains as much as other countries.

> The first part can be trivially automated and the second is just stupid. Truckers get paid per hour of work, less work == less money.

You could always pay them a salary and benefits, and hopefully UBI would exist at that point. Of course it’s unlikely for Uber to do that, because their strategy has been the exact opposite.

One can easily foresee a future where a self-driving truck has a driver in it who is only driving 'regulated' hours for a small portion of a trip (say during high traffic, highway entry/exit, etc). The driver could spend the rest of his time sleeping, reading, or coding - he'd basically be a passenger.

If a truck can haul for 20-30 hours without stopping for overnights, that dramatically changes the economies of fast freight.

This system seems to indicate that the automated trucks do the long hauls between cities and the human drivers do the shorter hauls within/around cities.

If that's the case, this is a good thing.

What does that add to the argument? Is there some inherited right to work in a specific line of work? Also, how many generations can that be? 3-4?

Many of my friends have told me they take those gas station "energy supplements" so they can stay up for 2-3 straight days to log more hours and make the trip.

Thats probably not healthy for their bodies, and certainly not safe for other people on the road, but if miles = money then its whats incentivized

If trucks could drive themselves with a passenger trucker to intervene in tricky situations, the passenger could have a much more healthy intake and sleep schedule

Such a trivial and stupid reason to guide the future of technology and the human conditions. Of course people want to be home with their families instead of driving for weeks on end.

I find it dizzying that we think we can automate all of the matter around us to do what pleases us, but the matter of changing the socioeconomic configuration to match it seems a bridge too far. Come on now.

The economy (and society) will change, and this dude can stay with his family. Sounds great.

Having done some cargo loading and unloading myself, good luck with that. It's a very heterogeneous environment and task.

Just enough of it that they can skirt the DOT hour rules about hours worked while still blaming the driver for any crashes or tickets would be my guess.

That's the obvious lowest hanging fruit as far as trucking is concerned. If you can automate enough of the long haul grind that the driver could possibly be sleeping then you have a massive competitive advantage over everyone else.

If you don't automate enough to be able to skirt the DOT time rules there's not much of a competitive advantage.

These companies aren’t slow-playing their hand to avoid layoffs, and it’s a race to see who can perfect the technology first.

They understand pretty well that they need to transition faster than their competition. Given that, they'll do it as slow as their competitors allow, because it's investment and they don't like doing that quickly.

How fast that means is anybody's guess. But they can't just stop and wait.

I don't know why (in Germany) a long-distance bus is much cheaper than a train (from/to the same city), but it is. We shouldn't be trying to shift traffic to rail unless there's a good reason beyond "it feels good" for it. If it is better for the environment, I'd like to see a "citation" (not in the form of research, but in the form of well-justified taxes/tolls/... that transform this into a matter of cost).

Part of the ease of hijacking truck is that you can drive off with it. What if the trailer locks its wheels and bricks itself, if it determines it's being hijacked, all while recording 360 video and sending immediate alerts to management and law enforcement?

Certainly better than a driver afraid for his life.

You seem to be working under the assumption the nobody has ever hijacked truck up to this point, and that for whatever reason self driving trucks would be left unlocked with no security mechanisms in place whatsoever.

So what's stopping people from doing that now?

Note: an automated truck can probably dial 9-1-1 as easily as a human.

https://xkcd.com/1958/

You probably won't be able to steal the truck and get away with it any easier than you could a human-driven truck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i729rZWTmDo#t=30m22s

I think for long-haul trucking it’s certainly pretty hard to stay fully tuned while driving for such long times. And for truck companies, they can save tons of money on labor when they don’t have to pay the driver for the hours on the road and just for the manual disconnect/connect docking. Maybe they can make it fully automated, but why haven’t any trucks done that already? It’s an easier problem to solve than self-driving.

* by convoy, I mean that one truck up front was driven by a human and then a few were automated to draft from directly behind to just follow the truck in front of them.

EDIT: Here's a source for the 90s, where this paper had a few authors from Volvo.

from: http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/ITFVHA15/...

>Additionally, different applications of automated driving for trucks have been demonstrated across the globe since the 1990’s. The focus has been on proof of concept for truck platooning due to the foreseen fuel economy and traffic flow benefits.

This is a tactic to avoid pushback from the public / truck drivers.

This is an attempt to control the narrative on what autonomous shipping is going to look like.

While you could develop a way to robotically latch those it seems like it would be easier to redesign the fitting.

It never becomes something like "lets destroy all the farming machinery, so we create more jobs plowing the land".