The first part can be trivially automated and the second is just stupid. Truckers get paid per hour of work, less work == less money.
AI-self-driving has arrived but to make the transition look "humane" as in the AD is crazy. Almost insults the intelligence of these guys who have been driving our cargo around for whole generations.
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.
More realistically, he can do the trucking office work from the truck.
They have to do paperwork like logging hours, doing a pre-trip inspection, etc. This is done during off-time while the driver isn't driving (for obvious reasons). Usually on the driver's seat with a clipboard on the steering wheel :D
but if they suddenly started sitting in a truck doing nothing all day instead of driving, it's a lot more likely that some office duties would be shifted to the truckers rather than the truckers taking on totally unrelated projects.
Problematic in at least two ways, probably three.
It brings a whole new meaning to the word “shipping”.
Eh. A truck cabin sounds better. You can have music without needing to wear cans, you don't hear jim's mastication or janice's burping you don't get assaulted by emily's lack of hygiene or randy's mix of aggressive cologne and smelly feet, you decide what temperature you're most comfortable at, you can work without pants, …
The main issue would be 'net connectivity.
Even removing the autonomous angle, I've thought about driving during the day and having laptop time for the same activities during rest periods. Probably seems weird, but I'd be in if I could make it work. I do my best thinking behind the wheel, and I've solved a number of engineering problems on road trips. It seems ideal.
I hear trucking causes quite a bit of fatigue.
That kinda already exists though, with team driving. Two pilots relaying gives ~22h of driving per 24h plus 2x30mn slack (under US regs, though there's still a limit of 70h/8 days followed by 34h rest per driver).
So at minimum labor costs could halve... Sounds like a huge productivity boost.
It's not a change in productivity at all.
Also
> Truckers generally get paid per mile, not per hour.
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.
Well, maybe not for the drivers who see 90% of their income earning opportunity automated away and all they get is the local driving on each end. Well, probably on one end -- the warehouse where the truck is loaded will be located where an automated truck can drive to it easily.
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?
Remember that the greatest advance to education was the internet.
You could now have good quality, always available, free, subject material, from reputed institutions, with interactive media, perfected explanations, testing and so on.
And despite all this - they have a 10% completion rate.
I have said this multiple times, and unless people are actively looking at this system they miss that re-educating and re-training people is extremely lossy and unlikely.
And now you have people out of a job, and they have to re-train, while also taking care of bills and family?
People tend to forget - our best training system is to take young humans with no responsibilities, mostly spare time and keep them in training centers for the vast majority of their day in childhood.
And even there we fail.
And finally - please come to India or any third world country. It should disabuse people of the idea of the fully autonomous self driving car.
The only way you get level 5 autonomy is by controlling the road and entry to it.
It's exceedingly easy to see a bunch of cows or protesters actively hamper fully alert human drivers.
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
this scenario has been mentioned a couple times in this thread, but if the automation isn't good enough to handle 100% of the journey 100% of the time, then it's really not good enough to allow the trucker to simply be a passenger. If the operator might have to take control in tricky situations, they can't be sleeping the rest of the time.
A tricky situation for a computer is often not a tricky situation for a human. 99% of it will be the AI getting confused by things that are simple for humans (e.g interpreting detour signs).
IE, for the 100 mile stretch of road in the desert, when it is sunny, it works great, and then when it gets to the city it tells the driver to take over.
The max per day is 11 hours, with a 70 hour cap for the whole week.
https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/new-hours-servi...
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.
> The economy (and society) will change, and this dude can stay with his family. Sounds great.
Given the productivity increases we've seen in the past few decades, this really hasn't been the case.
It is hard to stay home with family, when "home" and "family" means having many low-paying jobs to support both.
Having done some cargo loading and unloading myself, good luck with that. It's a very heterogeneous environment and task.
> 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.