It feels like autonomous vehicles could become one of America's superpowers. We have so many miles of road and interstate highway. Autonomous vehicles could double down on that strength and flip the underinvestment in passenger rail on its head, making it much less of an issue.
This is statement is somewhere between ignorant and an outright lie. There's a bunch of rules governing how many hours truckers can work. And those regulations are mostly followed. And when they're not it's typically some local outfit delivering fuel or groceries, not the long haul mega fleets
https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...
Aviation the limits are much stricter than trucking.
True!
> And those regulations are mostly followed.
Very false, at least as of 5 years ago.
I worked with trucker biometric data which for a large company which runs trucks all over North America.
The company itself keeps its hands clean: they required drivers to keep strict manual logs and have strict rules about compliance with regulation. But at every step of the way, the incentives are for drivers to lie in these logs. Particularly, per-mile pay incentivizes driving a lot of miles at times when there's less traffic on the road (night). If your truck isn't moving, you aren't getting paid, and drivers want to get back to their families and hobbies, so they minimize time spent sleeping in their truck in a random location. Additionally, missed deadlines can significantly impact your pay, and deadlines are set at levels which cut very close to regulation, so that any delays force drivers to break regulation to meet the deadline.
Biometric data shows flagrant violations of regulation, which we can't share with anyone (including the company), because it's medical data protected under HIPAA. The manual logs are corroborated by an electronic black box on each truck, but these logs aren't checked unless something goes wrong, at which point the company can use to show the trucker was in violation of their stated policies to reduce liability.
I've only seen data from one company (which I cannot name due to non-disclosure) but it's my understanding that most of the company's driver incentives are structured similarly to the reputable parts of the trucking industry. Other companies have mile quotas (or inversely, mile bonuses) which further incentivize lying in logs. There are extremely exploitative owner/operator outfits which force drivers to work desperately to pay off their trucks, likely resulting in worse violations.
So sure, on paper, the letter of the regulations are followed, but that's definitely not what's happening on the road.
> And when they're not it's typically some local outfit delivering fuel or groceries, not the long haul mega fleets
Even if there were true (which it isn't), a head on collision with a sleeping local fuel delivery driver is just as deadly as a head on collision with a long haul trucker. This is irrelevant.
The book cooking happens when the company hires a sketchy firm out of eastern europe to provide the software who then cook the books on the back end. These carriers are a small minority (lest they become juicy targets for enforcement) and have high turnover.
> [T]hese logs aren't checked unless something goes wrong, at which point the company can use to show the trucker was in violation of their stated policies to reduce liability.
This doesn't prevent truckers violating policy in any way--truckers simply accept the risk that E-logs will be checked, because most of the time they won't be. And the companies are happy to not check the E-logs, because they get both faster deliveries and plausible deniability.
That's even assuming this is actually remotely profitable compared to just using humans. Like a lot of this sort of automation it probably isn't, and it's true purpose is to be used as a threat against workers so they'll be even more "compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines"
Why wouldn't it be?
> instead of improve their conditions
I wouldn't want to drive a truck. To be frank, I really don't want to answer Jira tickets and write plumbing code either. I sincerely hope that none of what most of us do today has to be a job in fifty years.
My debt is your asset, and vice versa. Tell me, what does the autonomous truck drink? Or eat?
The less you pay the driver the less money does driver have to buy whatever he is carrying.
That may pay almost the same, or it may not exist. It depends. It's never as simple as "we automated the job so the person is useless."
That the promise but is it the reality? Deaths of despair suggest it isn't.
Deindustrialization is an issue once you move supply chains overseas or to the robots, with it whole parts of country die. No truck drivers means less money spent on truck stops, motels (for sleep), and in their local economy (no pubs, bowling alley, etc.)
But the threat isn't just replacing drivers, it is replacing entire eco systems of jobs.
Say I’m building a company to ship self-driving trucks. I need hundreds of millions, maybe billions in capital.
I need to line up purchasers. My fixed costs are huge and marginal lower, so I need volume.
How, exactly, am I thinking about “threatening” existing drivers so they work longer hours and break more laws?
That’s the claim that was scoffing at.
What are all the costs involved, and not just costs to you directly?
I thought I was pretty clearly questioning the claim that the motivation of DreamCo is somehow to threaten truckers so they work harder, as opposed to (wisely or not) trying to sell trucks.
First step is to isolate the smart ones, which are the people with hazmat endorsements. Treat them well and praise effusively to build resentment. Then take the routes that are cost effective for robots, and offer premium pay and bonuses to the people, but with goals that can’t be met without cutting corners. Encourage reporting of rule violators.
Your goal is to create a toxic and miserable environment that pays just enough. Make them kill each other for a dwindling number of slots. You keep the people agitated and fighting each other, and they won’t notice their toys getting taken away.
I think it’s “funny” how corporate leaders in basically every industry are enthusiastically barreling toward a world in which they have no employed customers to buy their products created by their automated robot workforce.
Nobody in politics is coming close to addressing the societal problems that are incoming in the near future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
All of that unrest eventually resulted in the new deal. We have had relative peace in the postwar period thanks to a lot of pain being resolved over a long period of time, but that lack of friction is not guaranteed to last forever.
I would argue that America’s backslide into the election of a reactionary, dare I say fascist government is all about declining prosperity.
Politics isn’t pretending to address anything. We’re breaking the system to extract as much rent from the populace as possible. Caesar type stuff. Destroying the income tax means you’ll pay taxes based on consumption. We’ll be poorer. The overlords will be great.
Chinatown busses are the perfect example, they’d run routes designed to avoid federal jurisdiction and adopt routes and schedules to avoid weigh stations and routine inspection. Busses were unsafe and drivers unlicensed in many cases. Most were owned by Chinese mafia organizations and killed people. When they weren’t doing that, they were huge human trafficking operations.
The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned, so it’s a Wild West environment. The advice I was given was avoid the busy trucking corridors (I-81/85/95) at night.
When was that? And is there anything public we can read about these things?
Yes? We got rid of telephohe operators. We got rid of "computers" (people who compute). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) We effectively got rid of horse shoe makers, liveries, etc...
> Sure that won't have any negative repercussions...
Does it suck for the truck drivers. Yes. Does that mean we should give them busy work even though their job can be automated? No. We don't know what the reprocussions will be. We do know, from 100% of past experience, that automating something opened new opportunties that ultimately resulted in more jobs that before. Whether that will be true this time as well no one has any idea.
The usual example is textile creation vs fashion. The loom put people who hand weave cloth out of business. But the abundance of cheap cloth created 100x the jobs in cloth making and fashion. It's why you probably have more than 3 shirts in your house/apartment.
We should bring back elevator operators. And station a traffic guard on every corner instead of traffic lights. Let’s bring back tool booth operators. And let’s delete Google calendar and bring back secretaries while we’re at it.
I think the better point is that having jobs for everyone isn't the goal. Equitably distributing the results of our society's labor so everyone's needs are met is. If people are able to live in a house and put food on their table, they'll be less concerned with whether they have a job or not.
But that requires that you care enough about other people to not let people hoard unlimited resources, so I suspect most of HN will have some objections, and you'll never actually address what monkaiju is concerned about.
The problem is, there's no historical precedent for this, and we're still letting people who do almost no labor amass most of the results of other people's labor. If we follow the current trajectory, we'll have a society controlled by a few people who own the robots, and everybody else fighting over their table scraps.
The solution to this isn't rejecting automation to create artificial jobs: that's just fighting over table scraps by a different name. The solution is to stop rewarding generational wealth with more wealth, and distribute resources more equitably.