According to the news self driving trucks are about to hit the road with no driver on board.
But according to this book that is not going to happen. The author says that the real purpose is to get rid of the skilled drivers and replace them with underpaid button pushers.
Will they really do that? What’s going to be the situation few years from now?
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I mean you could do that remotely, but there is a an assurance that someone is putting some meat on the line.
But eventually i think we are going to reach Onicron: Nomads Soul, territory. Where you rent a car service on call, there’s no parking and the cars are always running, and cycled out for cleaning and bullet hole filling.
In that case, would they be paid as skilled drivers or button pushers?
Likely skilled labour in the beginning so they can intervene and drive/manoeuvre if necessary, and as the tech matures just “button pushers” in the truck, then remote with a single person managing several trucks.
Then skilled technicians that come out to fix things, then the “button pushers” will get more and more responsibility without pay increases.
As someone who worked there previously, I can confirm that both of your statements are correct. (This has already been publicly shared by Aurora)
There will be nobody in (most of) their trucks. There will be button pushers remotely to help it in confusing situations or failures.
They’ve already been operating the trucks near-fully autonomously with safety drivers behind the wheel and copilots in the right seat monitoring the system. They plan to remove both operators from the vehicle completely, eventually.
(Now for some of my own speculation) Someone else mentioned mother goose, they may do a similar approach, however the follow trucks don’t need to keep up with the lead truck. It would be only for the lead truck to be an early warning for unexpected road conditions (new construction for example) that is handled by the safety driver, and info sent back to other trucks quickly on how to handle it or to pull over and wait for help (default action if it gets confused). It’s impossible to require that a convoy remains together in close formation, too many scenarios can split up the trucks even on the highway.
In a mechanical failure it would pull over and wait for a rescue team. The rescue team will probably include backup drivers in case it can’t resume driving autonomously.
Also, always take timetables with a grain of salt regarding anything related to autonomous vehicles.
My guess is the situation a few years from now will be that an inconsequential percentage of the US trucking fleet will be autonomous, a smaller percentage will have no safety drivers, and the remote operators will still be 1:1 ratio, maybe 1:2 (one operator for 2 trucks), but not the desired 1:10. This tech advances very slowly.
This tech advances very slowly.
Historically, anything that reduces cost of transporting goods has advanced extremely quickly. The best comparison, I think, is the shipping container.
It took about ten years for shipping containers to go from an invention nobody had heard of to one that was being used in every major seaport in the world and about another ten years for virtually all shipping used that method.
The New York docks for example, dramatically increased activity (as in, handled several times more cargo per day) while also reducing the workforce by two thirds. I think self driving trucks will do the same thing - companies/cities/highways that adopt AI will grow rapidly and any company/city/highway that doesn’t support self driving trucks will suddenly stop being used almost entirely.
Shipping containers were not a simple transition. New ships and new docks had to be built to take advantage of it. A lot of new trucks and trains were also built. Just 20 years to replace nearly all the infrastructure in one of the biggest and most important industries in the world.
I don’t disagree with you. There will be a rapid rate of adoption.
But how long before it’s capable enough to be adopted? We (as in anybody) don’t know. We just know that it’s been many many years and they’re still not there yet, and just because a few driverless vehicles are operating (in extremely ideal scenarios with lots of help) doesn’t mean it’s ready for the kind of hockey stick curve that the industry is looking forward to.
It will happen eventually, sure. My prediction was in regards to the OP’s question of what will things look like in a few years. I don’t think the tech will be ready for mass adoption in just a few years, neither does the author of the article linked.
My bet, fully automated with localized maintenance workers who can travel around and perform repairs to fix the trucks stuck in their areas.
IMO:
Bare bones skeleton crews, similar to Railroad workers. They will try to strike but then gov’t will make it illegal to do so ASAP.
Staying hopeful though, keep learning and teaching, while being involved at your local community!
The future of our jobs is not a mystery. It is the result of a transformation that started a long time ago. It is obvious, clearly understandable, but well hidden behind of curtain of confusion. This book starts from the most asked question: “will AI take over our jobs?” In order to show how misleading it is. Misleading are also all the alarms raised over the power AI, but the real dangers could have even more deleterious consequences, leading to an era where the masses could be trapped in jobs that are alienating, mind numbing and underpaid. Exposing the arguments in a manner understandable by the layman, The Age of the Button Pushers goes trough the fields of computer science, economics and media communication. The whole picture will be reconstructed taking into account the lessons from the past with the changes brought by the industrial revolution, the present with the consequences of automation, the near future with the risk of an economy dominated by monopolistic giants. Part of the book will be dedicated to all the fabricated stories that dominate the current narrative on the media, highlighting the flaws and the inconsistencies, showing how altogether these stories paint a picture that makes absolutely no sense.
It will likely be a mix. E.g. you might have 10 trucks on a particular run. You put a driver in the lead truck, as a human-in-the-loop safety. The rest play duckling to the mother duck.
What it will do is lower the skill level needed, and lower the stress. A driver having a nap isn’t a problem anymore. They just need to be able to get involved either if the autopilot has issues and has to stop, or if they need to fill out paperwork at the destination.
The duck-duckling model would probably work okay on the highway, but not so well once you arrive in a town or city. You can’t reliably get ten semis through a set of lights in traffic without getting split up. I guess they could have a depot outside of town where human drivers would meet the ducklings for the final leg of the journey.
I believe it’s common to have separate long haul trucks and last leg trucks. If the depot is right next to the motorway/highway, then it provides an obvious place for a handover. It also means drivers can stay in 1 area, and so go home each night.
Different companies have different plans. Arizona has had auto-driving trucks on freeways off and on for a couple years now as part of test programs. Always with a driver in the cab though.
A few years ago I would have though robo-convoys would be where things landed because three or four companies where working toward that. That’s where the front truck has an operator and all the other trucks follow that leader driverlessly.
Now I feel like I have no idea where any of it is going. Step 1 in driverless should have always been to adopt an industry-wide mesh-network for all vehicles with level 3 (or higher) autonomy. If I’m on the road with (or inside of) an autonomous vehicle, I want it to be able get help from every other nearby car if its sensors suddenly die or start feeding it bad data. Especially after they’ve been on the road, poorly maintained by their owners, for a decade or more. If there are autonomous cars where will eventually be autonomous jalopies that drive like a drunk toddler because they sees lidar echos.
If you’ve been injured by a self driving truck call our office right away as you may be entitled to compensation.
Can’t call anyone if you’re a stain on the pavement.
Well if you or someone you don’t like was injured give us a call.
Driverless trucks will get Jesse James’d until they have armed guards.
Just a motivated criminal, a signal jammer, and a driverless truck enter an area with no signal. Just a happy criminal leaves.
I’m hoping they’ll hit nobody on the road, with somebody on board.
They’ll keep someone in the truck for maintenance purposes. A self driving truck wouldn’t be able to change a flat tire for example and it would be more efficient to have the human driver change it than wait for someone to come out and change the flat.
