Trucks often drive mostly or only on major thoroughfares and often on extremely long and tedious routes. A self driving truck that could drive 50 hour stretches without getting tired or making mistakes would be a huge improvement in efficiency.
Self-driving taxis, OTOH, feel like they've got a much longer way to go before they can generate any real profit.
Plane autopilot only works because air is so empty and flying in the same direction at constant elevation is unlikely to result in any problem. There are repeated examples of both pilots falling asleep and planes over-shooting destination airports, for example.
I think the idea we’ll attain this in the next decade or two is borderline delusional, but to each their own.
Commercial aviation is one of the safest transportation mechanisms in the world; aircraft can go runway to runway in mostly automated fashion (auto throttle/TOGA [take off go around] for takeoff, autopilot for cruise, autoland for landing). We (customers and regulators) still require human attention the entire time.
Source?
At that point you're getting no more bang for your buck, since the operator is going to be subject to the same limits on time behind the wheel as a driver of a non-autonomous truck. And you're not getting any more safety, because, as Uber and Tesla have been illustrating for us so vividly, a self-driving system that needs a human overseer can't drive safely, and a human who isn't physically in control of the car at all times can't oversee safely.
(Edit: This is, naturally, not accounting for the need for a transitional period while getting the technology bootstrapped. But that's time invested in developing the tech, not time where the tech generates any profit.)
Human lives and property loss are expensive. The average cost of a fatal crash is well over $3 million. The average cost of a large truck crash that does not involve a death is approximately $62,000. Settlement payouts due to big rig accidents are roughly $20 billion per year.
You don’t need to replace the driver to see significant upside.
Long distance highway driving except that one highway exit on 101 that kills you. I'm just saying that when human lives are at stake, bottoms up approach may not be as feasible as with web software.
It just has to be better than the average driver.
How many people do _you_ know that consider themselves below-average drivers?
Much of the process of getting close to this point can be done with the latest A.I. tools, but I have this nagging feeling we're going to need humans to fine tune a whole lot of 'last mile' stuff.
The conversations on the topic that I've heard involve building special, dedicated exits, sort of like truck weigh stations. And having them live not particularly close to urban centers.
So it a bit more of a holistic approach than bottom up, and something that will take a while to implement since you're not able to roll it out everywhere at once.
Not to say that there still won't be issues. I'm sure there will be. And I'm sure there's a long way to go still. But its also not a black and white issue.
Driving on the open road requires real intelligence. Not the pretend intelligence that modern AI gives, but real understanding of situations and terrain. Before that happens (which is basically skynet, and a very very long time away) all you have is a bag of tricks cobbled together. Those tricks will miss things and get confused and make mistakes. Maybe not very often but definitely in strange ways that are frightening.
The unknown is scary. Drunk drivers, tired drivers, old drivers, et al. are plenty dangerous, but they still behave in ways that can be understood. AI mistakes will be / are / have been strange unsettling things that can't be reasoned about if you're a person in the area of the misbehaving vehicle.
I agree -- but it's even worse. Even if robots do make human-like mistakes, that doesn't mean humans will be forgiving of the same mistakes. For one thing, I might forgive a human being unable to react due to a 1/2-second reaction time, but I sure as heck wouldn't be that forgiving for a robot. I would expect and demand an order of magnitude better. For another thing, people have more tolerance for mistakes made by "closer kin", if you will. (e.g. if my own child steals from me, even 10x as much as a random thief does, that doesn't mean the thief can expect more lenience than I had for my kid.) Self-driving cars pretty much have to be strictly _and_ significantly better than more than the majority of humans for people to trust having them around. Merely being better than average, even if it's in all respects, isn't necessarily enough to cut it.
People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do better than people.
In my college town, some pedestrians got ran over by a driver who later pled insanity due to "caffeine-induced psychosis". I think you're seriously overrating the predictability of human failure modes.
And they were right, until they were eventually wrong. There will be this phase for automated vehicles too.
Even if that’s true (and I doubt it is), there is ample precedent (AI winter) for the industry dramatically overestimating what computers can do.
I bet if you time traveled and showed Siri/Cortana to an AI researcher from 1960 they’d be incredibly disappointed.
Weight ~1 ton, cost ~1 million dollars inflation adjusted, non toxic, delivery date ~1990. What did they want? A 1 GB random access HDD.
A 32 gigabyte micro SD card for 10$ would have blown their mind let alone a smartphone.
Reading stuff written in the 1960s about what today would be like, what strikes me is that technology is so incredibly not mind blowing compared to what we had back then. Even in the area of computers. Hell, we haven't even come up with an input device that beats keyboards, which were invented in the 19th century (electro-mechanical keyboards, not typewriters).
Just continuing with the storage example, for decades now we've all been witness to data storage sizes growing massively, while the housing of said data storage has shrunk in size tremendously - as has the cost.
So when a couple MB of incredibly slow storage weighs thousands of pounds and costs millions of dollars, I do think the concept of tens/hundreds of GB of super fast flash memory contained within an object the size of a thumbnail would be mindblowing, whereas your example of
>a 100 petabyte drive using, say, magneto-resistive memory (or something else based on anticipated, if not fully developed physics)
wouldn't, just because we already all know how far technology has come since the 60s.
1980: IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs $40,000.
That’s ~1/10the the cost and 1/4 the weight they where looking for. You really could do vastly better in 1990. For ~2,300$ you could get a 700 MB HDD buy 3 and your talking 1.4 GB with redundancy for ~1% of his budget.
PS: If I extrapolate current trends and say we might get a self driving 400 HP Honda Civic in 2050. Then someone says sort of a Tito costs 3,000$ has 50,000 HP but nobody drives that under powered piece of crap. It would be a shift in how you think about things.
> This note speculates about the emergence of personal, portable information manipulators and their effects when used by both children and adults. Although it should be read as science fiction, current trends in miniaturization and price reduction almost guarantee that many of the notions discussed will actually happen in the near future.
The paper is a great read. He basically imagined that in the future we'd develop the iPad and some high quality educational software for children. Forty years later, we can proudly say we've successfully developed half those things.
It's a common misconception that the 1960s and 1970s were a time of unbridled enthusiasm in AI. In fact, there was a ton of pessimism back then too: for example, ALPAC [1] was so pessimistic about the future of natural language processing that it got the US government to pull most of its funding.
I think if you were to show Siri, Alexa, etc. to some of those folks they'd be pleased that we've gotten as far as we have, while acknowledging the obvious fact that there's plenty more to do.
>> if you time traveled and showed Siri/Cortana to an AI researcher from 1960 they’d be incredibly disappointed.
Did they though? Think about things that computers can do better than people: they're mainly things that we completely predicted computers would be better at (arithmetic, precision manufacturing, drafting, telecommunications routing). Beyond that, you're left with things computers are only better at dependent on priority, the canonical example being service jobs where economics trump's QoS; computers are much worse than a cashier, but comparatively cheaper by a margin that makes the quality compromise worth it.
The only possible exception I could think of that's come up in recent discourse is diagnosing patients, but even that, while encroaching on a role that has traditionally been revered as a career, is still something that seems at least on the surface to be quite predictable given the nature of what's required to make diagnoses (simultaneous access to a trove of data and knowledge).
Beyond the above, I think it's pretty reasonable that there's a broad range of things computers will not be better than humans at for a very very long time, if ever.
Rather, I suspect, tasks which computers start outperforming humans in we reanalyse as "completely procedural". Nobody called chess procedural in the middle of last century.
Historically AI chess (e.g. "Deep Blue" or Stockfish) is played by machines using one heuristic to estimate how "good" positions are without truly knowing, not so dissimilar from how humans evaluate a chess position. and then another heuristic to try out moves to get to further positions. The machine considers possible plays and how they affect the heuristic "value" of the board, preferring those with more value. Human Chess AI authors design the two heuristics used, though they often aren't very good at actually playing chess because it's a different skill.
Google's AlphaZero AI plays chess differently again, it had no preconceptions of how to play Chess, instead it learned through self-play - it knows the rules of the game but began with no idea what's a good or bad move, it adapted its own heuristics based on how well they'd won or lost. It actually recapitulated most of human chess theory history over its incubation period of thousands of games, discovering ideas like the Sicilian Defence for itself, new attacks would at first see overwhelming success, and then, playing versions of itself that had seen these attacks, they'd be defended more effectively.
Alpha Zero plays a radically "more human" style of chess than most modern human Chess grandmasters, huge multi-move strategies in which pieces are sacrificed to take positional advantage. It looks like something humans were doing last century - except Alpha Zero does it much better than they ever did.
The problem is that you lack an evaluation function. Let's consider two of those 100 possible moves. Your rook could take this opposing pawn, or, your own pawn could move forward one space. Which is better? Why? Neither of them immediately wins the game, but we must pick something. In a smaller, tighter game, like Tic-Tac-Toe we could crank our exhaustive search until we discover that this opening move leads to a possible win... but the search space in Chess is categorically too enormous for that.
Both Google's Alpha Zero and simple human play encourages the belief that a good evaluation heuristic is essential. The evaluation heuristic looks at a board position and it doesn't recommend a move it says something like "I rate this position 0.418" where 1.0 is "I'll definitely win on my turn" and -1.0 is "My opponent wins on their turn". Google's engine contemplates relatively few possible moves (for a computer) but the results are striking because it's looking at _good_ moves more of the time rather than wasting a lot of time thinking about moves that are a bad idea.
This seems obvious, but, well, learn chess and see for yourself.
Here's an example of a simple chess engine that is good enough to beat amateur human players at least some of the time:
And I don’t think the problems computers have proven themselves useful in solving have been what most people expected. Chess, Go, facial recognition, Jeopardy, image classification (hot dog or not), captchas (clearly, since they’re designed specifically to resist computer solutions), etc. seem to me to be things that, before computers proved to be decent at, would have been widely considered to require intelligence on the level of humans.
But there aren't any formally-specified rules for driving cars, and this isn't obvious.
Nope, despite a myriad of road codes, the actual traffic doesn't follow a set of formalized rules: a chess rook can't just decide that it will start disintegrating all of a sudden, as opposed to a vehicle. You could probably approximate the ruleset if you made it self-modifying...which will then demolish your second point about near-exhaustively searching the state space - good luck doing that before the heat death of the universe, as you're essentially simulating the whole environment. Oh look, there's also weather. How's that exhaustively searchable? Asking for the Nobel Prize committee.
For the sake of discussion, let's say that a miracle happens and you managed to do all that - but sorry, it's useless again, the few seconds have already elapsed and you need to do it again. And again. And again, ad infinitum.
Now, I could envision "by our current technology, we can't yet, but we're hoping for a miracle in this specific spot" - but "assuming a massive miracle happens every few seconds, for each vehicle" is completely removed from reality: why not have teleports, if we're in magical wish-granting land already?
For highway driving Waymo had 6 disengagements in 2017, street: 57.
Total driven: 352000 miles
1 disengagement for "a recklessly behaving road user" 5 for "incorrect behavior prediction of other traffic participants"
Seems like predicting other people is almost perfect, the others were more internal problems.
Driving a car when a weird thing happens isn't that complicated: You stop, braking at the minimum amount required to do so safely, to avoid cars behind you hitting you
(In other words, yes, it might be eventually possible to have self-driving vehicles, but pretending that the search space is bounded, or even near-exhaustively searchable a la chess - that's just pure technobabble)
Anyway, self driving cars will only get better, and the more of them there are the better they will be, because no humans around doing weird things who don't talk over the SDC network to explain where they're going
But computers can't do it better than people! That's what drives me nuts about this debate -- it's just accepted as a premise that either the self-driving cars are much safer than human drivers, or the path to getting them there is very close and no serious obstacles remain. Neither is true and it's not clear they will be. https://blog.piekniewski.info/2017/05/11/a-car-safety-myths-...
Which is an odd phenomenon to me. I can't even get Google Assistant to understand me 3/4 of the time, yet I'm supposed to take it on faith that autonomous cars are inhumanly safe?
In other words, much of the autonomous robot debate here is based on handwaving, wishful thinking and No True Autonomous Scotsman (...would run over a human).
Let's say we have a self-driving car that is as safe as the 20th percentile human driver. Do we allow that self-driving car on the roads? Do we selectively revoke licenses from 1 out of every 5 drivers and replace them with a car that's at least as safe as they are if not probably safer? Do we replace breathalyzer interlocks for drivers with DUI convictions with an AI driver and just revoke their licenses permanently?
There isn't a trivial solution to this problem. At some point, some AI driver is going to cause an accident that would not have been caused by a 95th percentile human driver. At the same time, human drivers do shit like this all the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oidHSzukSss
Who were those people, who said those things (i.e. where they AI researchers, or computer scientists?). And what exactly did they say?
There have always been strong criticisms of AI (e.g. [1]) and opinions dismissing computers voiced by people who did not have an adequate understanding of computers.
The interesting thing is to see what the people in the know actually thought over the years and what they think right now.
Edit: to clarify, what AI researchers usually do is overhype the capabilities of their systems and claim they can achieve things that they never manage to show they can- completely the opposite than saying that "computers can't do that".
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[1] "What computers can't do" by Hubert Dreyfus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...
And, with respect to freight, a lot of the easy automation is handled by trains. A huge amount of truly long distance freight in the US (including but not limited to bulk cargo) goes by train for much of its overland transport.
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2bc514ba621d41419fabd6...
Drop the "robot" -- it's cleaner.
"But we should let it out on the road, it drives on par with an insane, legally blind and completely drunk driver" is not a very convincing proposition.
Don't get me wrong, I find aircraft automation impressive. But there is a massive human workforce that makes it possible for the cabin crew to run planes on autopilot. There's a mountain of rigid regulations, licensing and certifications that control every part of that workforce. Every part of each aircraft. Every piece of communication.
That's not how the roads work.
We just don‘t place them inside the aircraft.
I would also add that aircraft are monitored by ground control stations, while cars are controlled by the driver alone.
That's only if nothing goes wrong. On the other hand, if the airplane I'm in loses both its engines and has to land on the Hudson River[1], I'd much prefer to have an experienced pilot and copilot in the cockpit.
(Note that it's not fully autonomous, the pilots still need to do quite a few things like lower flaps, extend the landing gear, ....
Are you trying to make people make fun of us?
https://amp.businessinsider.com/the-staggering-statistics-be...
1. (As others have mentioned) a lot of freight is intermodal so containers in particular shipped for long distances by train also travel by truck for the first and last X miles.
2. A lot of freight is relatively local in nature, so it makes more sense for it not to be intermodal.
That may be in large part due to the substantial government subsidation of car/truck traffic through public roads, not the merits of one against the other.
http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2011/06/05/colla...
https://mises.org/library/crony-capitalism-and-transcontinen...
https://www.bts.gov/content/weight-shipments-transportation-...
Self driving cars and trucks is a very hard topic.
With the today's technology, it might work only on hypothetical straight and perfect roads and during the day. Work in progress, floods, snow, holes, traffic and /r/IdiotsInCars are factors not taking into account for today's algorithms, because the data and the tests are missing.
I see that the automated trucks might be the vehicles of the future, but a driver (or "operator") should be always present onboard, just like it happens for planes and ships
You could have multiple cameras on the load using computer vision to detect movement. You could have weight sensors sending feedback to the system. I'm sure there are many ways to do this, and any of them would beat a human behind the wheel.
You're right in that there are many ways to do this, but none have come even close to beating a decent human behind the wheel.
Why do you think we need to get to the level of top 10%-20% of commercial drivers? How do you come to that cutoff point? If we had automated trucks that could move freight 24/7 with even 5% better than average accident rates (for example) would be a huge win.
You should be asking "can a robot drive for 12+ hrs without fatigue?" or "can we eliminate the restrictive, expensive and often gamed system of keeping drivers within their hours?" This is were long-haul transport could be "disrupted"
I'm not sure you understand what a "brake check" means. It isn't checking the brakes for current functionality. It means a visual inspection of all the brake parts to ensure they aren't going to stop working somewhere literally down the road. It is checking for pins, debris, excessive or unusual wear, or leaks. It would require 3d vision backed up by some serious AI to understand what is going on. And you would probably need some sort of robotic actuator to remove any debris blocking inspection areas.
When you see a truck stopped by the road with the driver walking around the trailer, he is probably doing a legally mandated "brake check". It isn't just pumping the brakes to see they are still there.
Computers can check if a brake is working or if the cargo is well balanced better than a human. One could do those today with cheap (on the 100's of dollars) electronics and few lines of code. Nobody does this because it's 100's of dollars more than letting the driver do the same.
I think truckers would absolutely love it if this was the case. It would save them so much time waiting on loading/unloading, which decreases their pay.
> Human truck drivers already have regular accidents due to fatigue.
Fatigue accounts for 13% of truck driver-caused accidents according to DOT[0]. Fatigue is coded twice as often for passenger vehicles as it is for commercial truck drivers.
Moreover, the rate of commercial rigs involved in accidents with passenger vehicles is quite low. The rate of single-vehicle accidents is also lower among commercial trucks. Commercial trucking continues to grow increasingly safer every year since we’ve been keeping track in the 70s[1].
[0]: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/research-and-analysis/large...
[1]: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/large-trucks/fatalityfacts...
Maybe relevant disclaimer: my father is a truck driver and we regularly talk about this stuff. His experiences have led me to do a bit of research and study on the matter. I don’t work for or on anything trucking-related.
My understanding is that the industry (and maybe this has changed or was not good anecdata to begin with) is rife with gaming of the regulations, which in my opinion are already grueling. A human being, no matter how accustomed they are to driving, should not be asked to sit and drive down long mundane stretches of road at a high degree of alertness for 11 hours per day, multiple days per week. I understand that the new time tracking systems will reduce the ability to game the system, but I feel the fact that regulators are calling for these devices and driver awareness monitoring devices should be an indication that maybe we can find a solution that doesn't involve a human.
"A total of 3,986 people died in large truck crashes in 2016. Seventeen percent of these deaths were truck occupants, 66 percent were occupants of cars and other passenger vehicles, and 16 percent were pedestrians, bicyclists or motorcyclists. The number of people who died in large truck crashes was 27 percent higher in 2016 than in 2009, when it was the lowest it has been since the collection of fatal crash data began in 1975. The number of truck occupants who died was 47 percent higher than in 2009."
Do you have numbers for dead truck occupants per mile driven? It could be that this is due to truck traffic being lower overall during the 2008/2009 crisis.
Having known a few truck drivers myself—including my father—and having a very good friend who was permanently paralyzed by another friend driving a standard car, these things don’t influence each other. The trucking industry is far safer than your average driver[0].
> The ratio of big rigs to commuter cars is presently out of control!
The numbers disagree with you. That ratio is currently about 1:135[1].
[0]: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/large-trucks/fatalityfacts...
[1]: a couple quick searches place big rigs at about 2M in 2017 compared to nearly 270M registered passenger vehicles in 2016.
I never implied that these were hard facts they were my opinion. What is your opinion? We need more trucks on the road? To me 1:135 is out of control- that's my opinion.
Given the facts available on safety records of licensed, commercial truck drivers vs normal drivers—the latter of whom outnumber safer drivers 135:1—it seems sensible to me to form an opinion that the 135 less-safe drivers need to be dealt with before we get too worried about the 1 safer driver. The overwhelming majority of multi-vehicle accidents with big rigs find the passenger car driver to be at fault—we’re talking from 70-90%, based on types of crashes. Non-truck crashes outnumber truck crashes by roughly 3:1 per 100M vehicle miles traveled.[0] This seems to indicate non-truck drivers pose the greatest threat on the roads to public safety.
So sure, form any opinion you like. But maybe be more careful to share them as obvious opinions that aren’t implying they are actually fact-based—by stating you know something is true or declaring the ratio of something is out of control—or someone is likely going to call out those statements as being questionable when compared to the facts of reality. There’s no clear evidentiary basis for arriving at an opinion on a correct ratio of trucks:non-trucks, other than the data we have seems to indicate that fewer passenger cars on the roads is the surest way to increase public safety.
[0]: For a new link summarizing various studies—http://www.trucking.org/ATA%20Docs/News%20and%20Information/...
Whisper asphalt is also still somewhat rare and doesn't solve the problem entirely.
Who cares? That's how trucks are different. Somebody at the company just calls the fuel station and say "Hey, I want to refuel my trucks there, when they get there, you refuel them, and I pay you at the end of the week. Deal?"
> React to a load that becomes unsecure mid route?
How common is that? You basically have the truck phone home and send somebody there to solve the issue. Depending on the likelihood it can be a major cost by hiring people every so distance, or a delay you just deal with to something that is solved by dispatching people by plane.
> How will it deal with a stowaway?
Most likely, it won't.
> Brake inspection before a big hill?
By braking and checking the acceleration, just like a human. In two axes and paying attention to frequency responses, what a human can't do.
And your robot just lost is license for not performing a proper pre-hill brake check. Large trucks are not cars.
https://www.drivesmartbc.ca/sites/default/files/images/brake...
Then look in this pdf for "En route inspections"
https://www.icbc.com/driver-licensing/Documents/drive_commer...
From Alberta:
A vehicle inspection at a rest and check stop should include the following: • All lights are clean and in working order. • There are no air leaks. • All the wheels are secure, and tires are properly inflated and are not hot. • There are no broken or loose items on the vehicle. • The load is secure. • The dangerous goods placards are clean and secure (if applicable). • The trailer locking mechanisms are secure and in good condition. • The brakes are properly adjusted.
These procedures assume human eyes. A robot might be able to tick all the boxes via sensors, but that isn't going to be enough to constitute due care when something goes wrong.
> How common is that? You basically have the truck phone home and send somebody there to solve the issue. Depending on the likelihood it can be a major cost by hiring people every so distance, or a delay you just deal with to something that is solved by dispatching people by plane.
First off, how do you detect a load that has become unsecured? I saw bees on a flatbed getting hauled. How do you detect that the net is no longer tied down securely besides looking at it occasionally.
Hauling livestock is one of those difficult hauling items. If you accelerate or decelerate too fast, they die.
Or how about the tale of the worst load ever - Oregon Potato Chips to Texas ( https://www.dat.com/blog/post/my-worst-load-ever-hauling-ore... ). While that one has a "ok, this needs to be another factor in the routing" - local barometric pressure could cause a problem.
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Brake inspections are likely less of an issue than chains for that storm that just hit. The storm that dumps a foot of snow on I80 over the Sierras. That's not too much - but everything needs to chain up unless its a 4 wheel drive pickup trick. That includes the semis.
Or a wind advisory over the Mackinac bridge ( https://www.channel3000.com/news/mackinac-bridge-partially-c... )
> The bridge that typically enables travelers to pass over the Straits of Mackinac has been closed to all vehicles except passenger cars, passenger vans and empty pickup trucks, authorities said.
> Motorists permitted to travel across are advised to reduce speeds to 20 miles per hour and to be prepared to stop.
It would not surprise me if even with all of the extra fuel (which wouldn't even really be realistic because no one has a route from Seattle to Miami) if the weight difference was a wash between the two. At the very least so long as it can be loaded with fuel at the origin and destination it's not really a concern.