Will driverless trucks render human truck drivers obsolete? What will this mean for highway safety and for the economy?

except people are demanding higher wages and computers are becoming more efficient and cheaper

small businesses aren't going to touch it... for now

it's the same deal with self check out kiosks at grocery stores or fast food places

say on average they cost $10/hour for maintenance and whatever, you can easily hire a cashier and pay them $7/hour instead, but if you raise minimum wage to $15/hour all of the sudden... Well now it's cheaper to fire all the humans and put up the computers instead.

I'm all for raising the minimum wage because it means we'll be automating things sooner.

Did you just watch Logan?

>>buy a $225000 autonomous truck that lasts 5 years
Grossly overestimated.

Trucking wages have been the same since the 1980s. Adjusted for inflation drivers were making $100k a year in the 1980s. A flood of immigrants since deregulation and NAFTA have kept wages right where they're at, and rising fuel costs will keep them right there.

A conventional tractor is $150k bone stock off the lot. Start stacking on sensors and the $200k mark gets passed pretty quickly. Ask any diesel mechanic how long a modern wiring harness will last (a recent target of weight reduction) and they're not going to tell you more than 5 years unless they're fresh out of school.

Planes still have pilots, Trains still have conductors.

Both can fly and drive themselves.

Odds are the laws are still going to dictate that someone is onboard regardless of if it can drive itself or not.

Truckers already call service trucks when they have problems to come do roadside repairs.

5 million out of work truckers will undertake guerilla warfare and actively sabotage autonomous trucks.

It's not like they'd be hurting an actual person

>refueling a truck will still involve a human being

I have an idea ....

... service station attendants.

>meanwhile if this shit happened to a trucker
>instant call to police with details of crime and description of car

Autonomous trucks equipped with 360 degree cameras. Uploads images of violator to police faster than a human can dial 911.

Why do all these modern "innovate" vehicles have to look so... ugly?

It's a fucking truck.

Overweight middle aged men aren't doing shit but voting for more Trump.

interesting... i feel like when it comes to driverless trucks, they may not be ask big as driverless cars, simply because trucks sometimes transport hazardous materials, delicate materials, etc. so having it be driverless may not be worth the risk, what i DO think will become popular, semi-trucks with different fuel types, i.e. electric, hydrogen, the company Nikola (no relation to the company Tesla) has a half hydrogen half electric powered Semi-truck concept already made called the Nikola One and Nikola Two, (they also make an electric UTV called the Nikola Zero) here's the link if you wanna look into it: nikolamotor.com/one#NikolaMotor

>Uploads images of violator to police faster than a human can

technology can't beat a ski mask, and night vision cameras suck for determining a cars color, besides if you think it's always going to be better for a machine to be trusted to take a picture of a face and license plate vs a driver who at any point in time can navigate his vehicle in all different directions of I don't give a fuck anymore lol. good luck getting every hick town in america to integrate this into their systems to accommodate fancy new computer technology and universally be faster to respond or even take a call like this as serious as a conventional call.

oh and you forgot of a full proof method to stop people from stealing from the fucking trailer while it's moving, which btw runs on systems that inherently have weaknesses than thousands of people who work on and with the truck will become familiar with....

guess we'll just have to ban niggers then and we won't have these problems

guess you're gunna have to ad hominem more to try to win an arguement

why bother doing anything when a criminal could come by at any minute and fuck your shit up?

that argument not conducive to any kind of progress dumbass

yes because people leave automated factories unattended.

The crux here is when is replacing a job that is done by 1 human with no oversight suitable for a machine, in any real world, near infinite variable environment almost never.

The point you are missing is what company hangs their balls out without protection a and when is it ok to have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and product unattended, for almost all middle and small businesses it's nowhere near plausible.

btw, you're still gunna need more ad hominem that that

I don't know why the fuck cross country trucks became popular anyway. Don't we have a railroad for that shit.

Touche

>yes because people leave automated factories unattended.
Yeah.. they do. There's like 2 people for 1,000 robots.
You're being pedantic and it's retarded.

But keep inmind its easier to get it across country and straight to the buisiness then bu train, to the station, to this to that etc. They usually use trains for more industrial deliveries (Coal, steel, wood, oil) and not as much stuff like food, office supplies etc.

what if a tarp covers the windshield now.

what if the driver isn't armed now

most of these things will probably just trigger an alert that makes the truck pull over and wait for service. Even if all the shit inside got stolen on occasion it would be cheaper than paying hundreds of thousands of trucker's salaries.

how do insurance work??

retard

You see many niggers stealing shit out of trains now?

There's no cameras on them and the conductor is too far ahead to see the back cars unless it's on a perfectly flat straight section of track.

Now the government can cause you to have an accident if you are ever on the highway even if your car doesn't have a computer in it.

>2 people
>unattended

pick one

half the shit on the trucks gets stolen by employees or customers once it gets unloaded anyway

you can stick 1 person in a room with cameras and monitors to cover a fleet of driverless trucks easily

you do realize if you have insurance and keep fucking up they just keep raising your rates right....

not to mention as a consumer I would go with the company that has less fuckups regardless even if it's insured because A) don't want to have to possibly wait extra time and B) shipping rare items, if it's a one of a kind custom made engine part or a something rare that took a long time to acquire or even a fucking ebay item you got a killer deal on getting money back isn't always an equal trade

you people are simple as fuck.

>technology can't beat a ski mask

Actually, yes it can. Figure out how all the pervs on /r/ nudeshop clothed women and apply that to the problem.

>night vision cameras suck for determining a cars color

CHEAP night vision cameras do.

I won't bother asking your for sources for this information or questioning what degree, experience or certification leads you to believe this is true....

will that person have a zero latency wifi connection that always available and the legal ability to stop the truck from careening into a tree when a drunk driver swerves at them?

It's simple, if a trucker gets put into a situation where he can either A) have a crazy driver hit him, kill themselves and not fucking total the truck and be legally right or

B) total the truck to avoid any possible harm to a human and potentially damage the truck or kill himself

As long as he doesn't break the law he can let the other guy die so as to minimize company losses and always claim going out of his way to avoid an accident is hazardous to his own health.

A computer cannot assert it's right to "live" and will careen itself into a fucking tree not only because of that but also because it will be programmed to avoid loss of human life at all costs, and if you know how people drive like assholes around truckers well it will happen, and no fucking operator watching multiple trucks even 2 or 3 will be able to stop it fast enough thru any realistic non military grade, sub multi million dollar plus solution.

I am actually a photoshop expert, this is possible on SOME pictures because a white shirt is a thin piece of cloth, lots of light reflects thru, a ski mask is many times thicker less than 1% light reflects thru, if you don't believe me dummy go ask fucking whatever gay board does that shit to do a see thru of a girl in a ski mask, then ask them to do it of a girl in a ski mask 20 feet away from a dirty wide angle lens in the rain.

kys

>I won't bother asking your for sources for this information or questioning what degree, experience or certification leads you to believe this is true....

see >will that person have a zero latency wifi connection that always available and the legal ability to stop the truck from careening into a tree when a drunk driver swerves at them?

No, that's the truck's software to decide. They are just monitoring the trucks for insurance purposes and anomalies. They aren't going to intervene in the truck's operations. Just like factory workers, they let the machines do their thing unless something catches fire or the machine breaks...

driverless cars are made to abide by road laws, they don't make philosophical or moral decisions. If you start creeping up behind a driverless car it is not going to accelerate to avoid you bumping into it.

Truck drivers are already taught to run straight into things as opposed to swerving because you risk jackknifing or flipping the truck. Driverless truck would do the same thing. They aren't going to careen themselves into trees because it creates an overall more hazardous situation.

lol the fundamentals of basic AI technology disagree with you, as does most of humanity.

Everyone agrees autonomous vehicles with no human passengers legally do whatever it takes to stop the loss of human life. If a autonomous truck is going down the road and a person jumps from off the road in front of it, it will do anything to avoid hitting them even if it completely destroys the truck and had to fling it off a hill, a human has no legal obligation to do so.

Go do some research before you post

Safety might improve once the software is debugged. But there will be a lot of unemployed former drivers.

I won't bother asking your for sources for this information or questioning what degree, experience or certification leads you to believe this is true....

What's overestimated? The cost of the truck, or its longevity?

0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

technologyreview.com/s/542626/why-self-driving-cars-must-be-programmed-to-kill/

literally that problem has already been solved, you are so far behind you don't realize the real problem is whether a vehicle should prioritize occupants lives or others outside.

Replaceable things (not to mentioned insured) even if it's worth a million dollars < a single human life in the court of law and public opinion

Autonomous vehicles without passengers will be regulated to completely destroy themselves before purposefully harming a single hair on human, robots cannot be prosecuted but the people who build, approve them for use on the roads can, if you really think those people who are smart enough to be on the cutting edge of tech will bypass regulations and open themselves up to being prosecuted for murder you are actually retarded.

KYS

When a driverless truck causes an accident who will wear the law suit?
This is the rrweson there won't be driverless trucks for a loooong time

The irony of Asimov's laws is that in many of his stories he used examples of how those laws can be twisted and manipulated to work against themselves.

please if you have a better idea the scientific community is happy to listen

>buy a $30000 truck that lasts 5 years
wot? they start a lot higher than that.

One advantage I see with driveless trucking is that they can run 24h. Humans need sleep and rest periods.

when do small businesses buy trucks? Shit, even large multinational companies don't bother with trucks. That's why you have dedicated companies to handle this shit for you.

A driverless car will never cause an accident.

They don't get fatigued or distracted like humans.

They are also covered in cameras and sensors so someone else can't blame it.

A 1940's science fiction plot device isn't how real AI works.

youtube.com/watch?v=I9T6LkNm-5w

I hope you said that out of sheer ignorance.

Except one has already decapitated a person.

They can still be at fault. Algorithms are never perfect.

>A driverless car will never cause an accident.

youtube.com/watch?v=aNi17YLnZpg
youtube.com/watch?v=AsTxS6tg6xc
youtube.com/watch?v=QJQOFS4YIfw

Those dedicated companies are the small businesses typically.

Granted operations like Werner Schneider and others are big businesses but most of the Trucks on the road are Owner Operators that contract with the bigger companies, and they buy their own trucks.

>automation never fails
these pro-automation autists would be a lot more tolerable if they even knew a single fucking thing.

still waiting to hear how driverless vehicles are supposed to deal with anything besides smooth well-mapped highways/city streets.

I didn't say I did, just merely pointing out that those are not applicable laws, and themselves are imperfect.

Also it should be noted the "scientific community" did not come up with those laws, Asimov did.

>biting that weak ass bait

>youtube.com/watch?v=AsTxS6tg6xc
This one is extra funny because turns out the car didn't have the pedestrian safety option equipped. The sensors for other cars and for people is different and the people one is optional in that model.

except you aren't even grasping the real beast, the car didn't cause those accidents. Humans did, whether it was from badly manufactures parts or blind spots humans corrected ultimately humans caused the accidents. The basic AI in those cars is the same as in all others, the computer simply did not say here is a car, I know how to avoid it but let me hit it, regulations prevent humans from programming it that way. The worst way humans could "prosecute" a basic AI is to remove it from all cars on the road and outlaw it, and so far no product out right now or likely ever be out in a autonomous car with no humans inside will ever cause an accident. Only human error either thru hubris, irresponsibility or apathy caused these accidents.

Asimov put down on paper what any sane person realized a culture with robots or ai would do, and what is in fact the status quo, robots shouldn't ever harm humans, they should try to preserve themselves but never at the cost of a human life.

Please stop being retarded

>AI doesn't cause accidents becuase humans programmed it and humans are always at fault.

Do you have a point?

And before you say anything else, the video here Clearly shows the AI is at fault......

There will never be passenger vehicles made with out steering wheels, gas pedals and brakes.

The future for automated vehicles is large stretches of major highway/streets being 'sensored' and mapped, so that you pull onto the highway to go visit grandma, hit AUTODRIVE and sit back and relax until the car turns off and pulls into a lot near her house, when you then resume your drive through residential streets.

This of course, assumes the countries with this kind of development don't keep sliding downwards to shit, which is highly unlikely... your automated car doesn't work in a world where Mohammed and Trayvon are blowing up stretches of road daily during the Great Reverse-Crusade.

Dude you've clearly never read Asimov.

Its a fucking plot device, a good one granted that spurned out several good stories but, they're flawed laws.

You don't understand the legal definition of cause, if you cannot prosecute it in course it cannot cause an accident.

Cars do not have a will of their own, they cannot cause anything they were not programmed to do.

A human programmed them, a human has free will, humans installed the cameras, a human caused a car to have an accident.

If I am wrong try to explain to me how you would punish the car and not punish the person/company responsible for making it work. Then tell me why those who put autonomous cars on the road don't have any legal obligation to their actions and thus cannot be sued or prosecuted when their machine kills people no matter how shitty the programming or how bad the maintenance and application is.

So much retardation in this thread
>what if people vandalized it?!?!?! There would be no repercussions because there is no person!!!
What if someone vandalized a business? You know, those things that there are hundreds of thousands of, unattended at night, full of WAY more valuables than a truck? What if someone broke into your house?!?! This is why no house can exist without 24/7 armed security of course.
And this post takes the cake, if anyone can read this without losing brain cells I'd be shocked

yes because having an exception that only target a specific group as humans and allows genocide of non wanted is a flaw in the law not an alteration of it.

we aren't talking about how a sentient ai will kill off half the fucking population to save humanity from extinction because it has enough processing power to calculate the future, this is closer to making sure your automatic industrial paper shredder doesn't shred your hand

what if all those businesses pissed people off by a mass job loss for a majority of similar businesses because they are given a special permit to import Chinese people to work for a dollar a day. Then most of them would get vandalized at night.

>You don't understand the legal definition of cause, if you cannot prosecute it in course it cannot cause an accident.

One you're moving the goalposts, and two no one is discussing legal reasoning, no ones looking to punish anyone, just merely point out the cars are not perfect.

Holy shitballs dude, quit talking to the AI voices in your head.

Just further down the burger hole......

I think in 20 years, trucking driving will be 90% autonomous.

Can you imagine a fleet of trucks that doesn't sleep, doesn't bitch and whine, doesn't hit stationary objects? Yeah, the largest carriers are already on top of this shit. Truckers be ready to get btfo.

Airplanes and Trains have been able to operate themselves for last 3 decades at least.

Guess what they still have?

lol trying to disregard what you don't like, face it humans and the basic AI we build are fundamentally different.

If a human causes an accident they are legally responsible, if a basic driving ai could cause an accident they would be legally responsible. Your argument in essence allows me to tell a police officer that I didn't kill all those people the brick that I put on my gas pedal killed them.

Non-sentient AI are tools, tools can't cause problems.

Jobs have been outsourced to other countries or automation in nearly every sector, millions of jobs, especially low skill jobs like manufacturing and phone based customer service. How often to businesses get vandalized for this reason? Would you like to come up with some examples?

notice I said special license not every gets and notice I specifically said IMPORT

dumb bitch

>... service station attendants.

This is no longer the 1970's grampa.

...

Filthy 3rd worlder

yeah instead of driving trucks they'll fill them up with gas

I didn't notice anything because your posts are barely literate, completely uninformed, demonstrate 0 knowledge of how automation affects the job market, and have no basis in reality. What you seem to think will cause a huge panic is just nothing. People worried about the farming business during the industrial revolution since back then the majority of jobs were in farming. Same goes with every other step forward in technology. Try to use your brain for at least 10 seconds before attacking your keyboard with your fingers, might do yourself some favors.

You're not going to be able to reason with him.

He's a wizard.

farms aren't filled with assholes running in front of tractors or dunk people stumbling around, or children, I think everybody knows the road is a hive of scum and villainy where autonomous cars will regularly shit themselves trying to figure out what the fuck to do

absolutely

youtu.be/HrkfXWPk_vo

You're right, we can't trust cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors, and algorithms to deal with the road, we need a sack of meat with 2 eyes and 80 IQ to attack this difficult problem. That is the worst argument of all. Even in it's infancy autonomous cars are already proving to be safer than human drivers. Every fallacious argument points to some extreme scenario in which an autonomous car could possibly fail, while ignoring that there are tens of thousands of accidents a day caused by incompetent or incapable drivers in normal conditions. Autonomous cars don't have to be 100% perfect to be implemented, just significantly better than humans, which is hardly a challenge.

wrong, they have to be significantly better, publicly approved, and able to all this at a measurably cheaper price than humans.

if you think i'm saying autonomous will never replace majority of truckers scroll back up where I say it will take AT LEAST a decade.