RE: What will happen to truck drivers when self-driving vehicles take over?

Bad Wigins wrote:

No, it doesn't. There is technology to augment human driving and make it safer, but there is no AI proven to safely direct a car in real-world traffic.

AI can already drive cars in all-automated situations. It is dealing with human drivers (and therefore error) that makes things problematic.

gold counter wrote:

I don't know if anyone understands how difficult it would be to do all the things a trucker does besides driving like, checking the load and vehicle, adjusting for weather, adjusting for accidents on the road, fueling up, mechanical failures, not to mention the paperwork with log books and manifests.

there is NO WAY a computer could do any of that....impossible.

What happens if the truck breaks down or needs a tire change? Does it fix itself?

Stick with eharmony wrote:

There will be a lot less idiots on the road because

1 truck drivers like to drive side by side to hold up traffic

2 they are slow and don't move over

3 they tailgate and speed excissively

How could computers possibly replace a human being who apparently has the ability to both drive slow and speed excessively at the same time?

jkjkjgf wrote:

What happens if the truck breaks down or needs a tire change? Does it fix itself?

It pulls over, and sends a call message to the closest garage to fix it. It would use this thing called the....internet....?

Still cheaper than paying a half-wit to drive it.

This has happened in so many industries.

"There is no way a machine could replace a bank teller!"

"You need humans to put those parts together on a car. It is too complicated".

"Without a human in the cockpit, airplanes are a deathtrap".

It goes on and on.

gold counter wrote:

Self driving semi trucks won't happen in my lifetime. I'm in my mid 40's. Think about it, the agriculture industry hasn't even perfected self driving tractors in fields where there is absolutely nothing to hit so how can you take an 80,000 lb vehicle and put it on an interstate with other drivers?

I don't know if anyone understands how difficult it would be to do all the things a trucker does besides driving like, checking the load and vehicle, adjusting for weather, adjusting for accidents on the road, fueling up, mechanical failures, not to mention the paperwork with log books and manifests.

You are looking at technological progress as if it's linear, as is natural to do. When you throw a ball it's very easy to predict it's path and so we can catch it. That is because the pull of gravity on it stays the same the entire time.

Now imagine that gravity increased exponentially, starting from nearly zero gravity. You would throw a ball that would look like it was just going to go up and over continuously, for miles and miles. Then suddenly it starts to level out, but continues going further from you. Then, unexpectedly, it goes straight down extremely fast. That is how technology advances.

In America alone, over 30,0000 people die in traffic accidents every year; virtually all of these are a result of human error. Now add to that the millions of injuries, accidents, and hours wasted in traffic, and you'll see the value of self-driving cars. Then consider all the people who can't drive, like the elderly and disabled, and think about what this technology would do for them. Then consider all the people with hour-long commutes, and how much they enjoy the "freedom" of spending 10% of their waking lives looking at a bumper.

Pretty much this. People tend to think it will take a long time to develop these new technologies, but that isn't how technology advances and many things that seem futuristic are achievable on a timeline of just a few decades.

One caveat though Ray Cursewhile...it's also possible technological advances operate on a logistic curve, and while technology will likely go gangbusters for a while that progress may slow again.

Just to think about, in the late 1800s we had very little in the way of technology. Some simple machines and that is about it. Then just 30 years later we have cars and already airplanes that can fly across the ocean. Had you asked anybody in 1890 if we would be able to fly across the world in their lifetime they would have looked at you like you are insane...god forbid you mentioned going into space and to the moon! Yet for a person born at the turn of those century those things did indeed occur.

If you look at things like processing speed, memory, number of transistors on circuits, etc. are all increasing at an exponential rate, doubling every 18 months or so.

The big question is whether or not technological advancement is exponential, or whether it is logistic; but either way it does seem we are just entering that inflection point of the curve and there will be change like never before in the next 50+ years.

Bad Wigins wrote:

The Guru Matt James wrote:

The technology already exists to make automative cars safer than human drivers.

No, it doesn't. There is technology to augment human driving and make it safer, but there is no AI proven to safely direct a car in real-world traffic.

AI fails not just for lack of creativity. People seem to think that it can function successfully as a complex decision tree controlling real-world objects. They don't realize that complexity itself leads to failure - too many things can go wrong, so something always does. This is one reason why highly autonomous robotic spacecraft have a high rate of failure. The longest-lived ones, Voyagers 1 and 2, are among the oldest and simplest.

Get a robot-battle programmer's game like T-robots and see for yourself. Successful AI sets a simple pattern and repeats it. Fancy code gets owned fast.

This is laughably incorrect. 'highly autonomous robotic spacecraft'? What do you think that means? Do you know what autonomous means? Do you think voyager's burns were controlled with a joystick and rudder pedals from the cape?

Also - autonomous cars are licensed already.

this is almost two years old.

Phacebook Phil wrote:

It pulls over, and sends a call message to the closest garage to fix it. It would use this thing called the....internet....?

Still cheaper than paying a half-wit to drive it.

This has happened in so many industries.

"There is no way a machine could replace a bank teller!"

"You need humans to put those parts together on a car. It is too complicated".

"Without a human in the cockpit, airplanes are a deathtrap".

It goes on and on.

What if the garage doesn't want to come out and fix it? What if something catches fire? How long before computers replace your job?

speak for yourself. google "t-robots" or "droidbattles," make your robot and see if it can defeat one of mine. Consider yourself called out.

It means a spacecraft with an onboard computer whose instructions can be modified remotely. I guess maybe you went to school too recently to know of all the course changes the voyager craft made.

You are almost two years old. Those licenses are for testing under these conditions:

Google proudly trumpets hundreds of thousands of miles driven, but declines to mention how many times its expert operators touched the steering wheel or brakes to override the automated controls. I expect it is a number greater than zero.

I challenge you and that other jerk to a droidbattles war. I will shatter your naive faith in technology.