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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> An executive at Alaska West Express, another local trucking company, told me in May that such truck drivers can make $150,000 to $170,000 a year, in addition to benefits.

That's ~$200k/truck/year of incentive to replace them with auto pilots, when they're good enough. But those drivers do more than drive. Maybe they'll replace one driver per truck with one mechanic per convoy of self-driven trucks.

And an automated truck can spend a lot more time on the road, released from a meager human driver's duty cycle.

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It's one thing to get an economy car to drive a person around San Francisco, it's an entirely different thing to drive these trucks in these conditions.

It would be more reasonable to build a freight train line than to build self driving tricks that can do what 95% of human drivers can't

I'd make a long term bet on this. I think that it won't be very many years until auto-pilots are safer than any humans in any conditions, like chess software. Auto pilot senses and reaction times can be far better, and we're watching AI capabilities increase at an accelerated rate. And huge economic investments in the problems.

If you're a young person at least, don't plan on a long career driving a truck.

I agree, but I don't think we will remove the human.

New jet liners have had the technical ability to fly and land automatically, yet pilots still typically manually land unless there are bad visibility or other conditions. In those conditions they often autoland.

Why would this be any different?

I'd expect we see some kind of hybrid approach.

However much some people will resent it, I strongly suspect being able to drive a car is going to be a pretty essential life skill for people who aren't willing/able to restrict their travel to mostly urban cores for at least a few decades.

There are already a lot of people who can't drive for medical or other reasons, and probably more people who drive but shouldn't. Whether you think self driving is coming or not, our systems should be set up to support them.

Growing up in the UK I didn't get around to passing my driving test until I was about to move to California in my early 30s. Being able to drive in the UK is certainly useful but is definitely not necessary.

Living in San Francisco now I have pretty good access to nature by car but I still miss being able to take a train out to a stop in a tiny village, go walking in the hills, end up at a pub for a few beers and a meal and take a train home.

Driving provides a certain freedom (I really enjoy driving for pleasure in California!), but not having to drive provides a different sort of freedom.

"definitely not necessary"

If you live in any kind of rural area bus services are likely to be pretty poor and if you aren't next to a railway station then what do you do? Cars are as important in rural areas in the UK as much as any other country.

Edit: Of course, the proportion of people in this position in the UK is probably relatively low but they do exist - I'm one!

I find a lot of people adapt their lifestyles to their transportation options and vice versa. I know of people who live in Boston without cars and they're mostly just not inclined to leave the city as much unless they're doing activities with friends who have vehicles. On the other hand, all the people I know who do a lot of activities outside the city own cars--and even tend to move out of the city over time.

I used to live in central Edinburgh and I walked to work, my wife walked to work and our son walked to school. We did own a car but used it rarely.

Now we live in a rural area (which was our choice) and we now have two cars and pretty much have to use them to get anywhere - although I do drive to the train station to get the train into Edinburgh.

Bus coverage in rural areas of the UK is variable but it’s on a completely different level to the US where I now live.

The high school I went to growing up had people travel in from all over the county by public transport (train and bus). I certainly wouldn’t choose to live in a rural area without a car but people did!

"More than a quarter of routes in county and rural areas of the country have been lost in the past decade, with passenger numbers falling sharply."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/19/rural-bus-se...

NB I'm in Scotland but I doubt if its much better here.

Maybe it will be a compromise where the roads have special markers that are easy for machines to process.

They won't be good enough for at least a decade, if not significantly more. Too much can go wrong on such roads with such oddly weighted freight.

That time will be gone like a flash, and we'll be reading about how we can't afford to let humans drive trucks any more since so much can go wrong on such roads with such oddly weighted freight.

Have you ever driven on icy gravel roads?

I get that it's hard, but not why it's fundamentally harder than beating a grandmaster at chess.

Is the gravel loose or packed? Was there a wet spot that will cause a loss of traction later on when the water on the tire freezes? Is that rut solid or soft? That spot looks frozen but there's standing water around it. Can it eyeball how deep the mud may be in a spot to decide whether it's ok to cross or attempt to maneuver around? There's moose tracks here, be cautious. There is more to it than just "hey let's automate this"

Edit, more: tree down across the road, truck can't drive over it. Get out and wrap a chain around it to move it. Busted axle, how will it fix that? Flat tire? Mechanic used distilled water like a dumbass and it froze. Road sign was taken out by an accident, guardrail is missing, hope you arent using those to determine how to keep on track.

Yup, and you haven't even dealt with one other driver on the road yet.

That's a laughable statement. Chess is a perfect fit for computer problem solving.

Chess involves an opponent that's doing their best to cause trouble.

Driving on icy gravel, that's just a physics simulation, with no opponents.

The hard part of self-driving is vision, with hard constraints on real-time and power supply — how long that takes (especially given the enormous pile of scenarios we don't think about when trying to list them but do know how to deal with when we encounter them), I don't want to guess, as I think it could be anywhere from negative 6 months to positive 16 years.

I think the summer season this will be logical and doable. Everybody can do this driving. But the truckers get paid for the entire year. How would a self driven truck go when there is near zero visibility? They will stop and wait for a snow storm to stop. Human drivers however will just go on, knowing that if something is on their road it is impossible to avoid.

I do wonder why autopilot hasn't seen more trucking application yet, given (a) how much trucking is highway driving and (b) hours restrictions. A full-autonomous situation where the driver can sleep for the highway section while still handling the parking and loading issues at either end would seem very sensible.

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