10 ms·

Sending a truck down an interstate for 20 hours has to be the lowest hanging fruit for self driving vehicles. When was the last time an entire category of jobs

• PunchTornado 10y ago
  by acting rational and find another job
  • jnbiche 10y ago
    > by acting rational and find another job Some of them will. Some will become despondent, sink into depression, and never work again. Humans aren't always rational.
  • zanny 10y ago
    Because it is trivially easy for a 20 year veteran of an entire discipline obsoleted profession that despite having very harsh hours did pay a reasonable wage to just pivot into another career of similar merit? That is to even say there are ~4 million jobs in the US currently going undone, that would pay ~80k a year in effective income, that people are just not doing now because only the truckers have the work ethic to do them. That is not how economics works, and the only difference between this sea change and previous ones (the obsolesence of agrarian living being by far the largest) is that unlike those, you could not just "ignore" it until you are dead while your kids and future generations make the transition and just sell your farm after you die.
  • Loughla 10y ago
    That is so flippant and just the most immature thing. As an under 30 year old, highly educated individual, yep - just get another job. Move somewhere across country if you need to; you don't have kids or a mortgage. As a specialized veteran of a job that requires very few transferable skills, truck drivers are fucked initially, and we'll see massive unemployment from this. In many cases, the areas with high ratios of their economy supported by trade/transportation have very weak other sectors of the economy. Good luck working part-time retail, truck drivers. Hope you didn't like your benefits or salary. ALL of that being said, I support automation and can't wait for it in my life. I am honestly sorry for the anger, but really. Stop to think about this from someone else's perspective for a second. Just acting like they should just go get another job and that there aren't any hiccups is ridiculous. Look at Detroit, look at Gary, look at any of the large rust-belt cities. These things aren't without precedent. Acting like all these people need to do is apply themselves a little harder is just stupid.
    • lutefisk 10y ago
      What about stagecoach drivers? Bread makers? Blacksmiths? Switchboard operator? What did all these people do when their services were no longer necessary / greatly diminished? It's not like by Friday automated trucking will take over. You know it's coming, and if you don't start learning new skills or look for new work, then you're just ignorant to technology and will be out of a job.
      • bluedino 10y ago
        What happens as your list grows, as it will, and takes up every possible job? Eventually we could hit some sci-fi future where robots build other robots and AI comes up with new inventions on it's own.
      • Loughla 10y ago
        >You know it's coming, and if you don't start learning new skills or look for new work, then you're just ignorant to technology and will be out of a job. I didn't realize truck drivers were known for staying abreast of advances in technology.
      • Diederich 10y ago
        I think the key difference 'this time' is how quickly change is happening. Second, in the past, change was necessarily isolated in most cases, because society and business wasn't so highly connected as it is today. Concretely, at some point, a major trunking firm could replace most of its drivers with machines over the course of a couple of years, at most. More generally, the rate of change continues to increase. A few hundred years ago, a person could live their life and see no substantive technological change. Now we see those changes happen, in some cases, in a few years.
        • argonaut 10y ago
          I don't think the change is coming quickly, actually. I think truck drivers have a good 10 years before they're out of a job, both due to technology (self-driving cars won't be fully autonomous for at least 5 years), and due to regulation/adoption (add another 5+ years). This actually leaves them less of an excuse to start retraining now, but it's also a problem because it gives most of them an excuse to dismiss the tech.
• BooneJS 10y ago
  Municipal bus drivers aren't cruising the interstate. They've got a bit of time.
  • csours 10y ago
    Anyone care to back up their downvotes of Boone? Municipal and OTR driving are completely different beasts.
• nashashmi 10y ago
  Auto truck driving won't remove truck drivers from their jobs too fast. There is a ton of science involved in trucking and good training is key. For this reason, a person will still be required for local driving.
  • delecti 10y ago
    At any one time, what percentage of the total truck drivers would you imagine are currently on the road vs maneuvering the last mile. The last mile might be a significant portion of where their skill shines, but it's almost certainly not a significant portion of the time spent. If a driver spends 1 hour at each end of a 20 hour cross region trip, that could still be a 10 times decrease in the total number of skilled drivers needed. A handful of skilled drivers at each trucking destination could be sufficient.
    • pfortuny 10y ago
      You are not taking into account the risk of trouble (non-negligible)... Driving includes solving problems like lack of oil, crashes, etc...
      • toyg 10y ago
        Robberies should be question #1.
        • scarmig 10y ago
          Obviously the solution is to teach AIs how to use guns. (Do military drones already have this? Could trucking companies legally send in armed security drones when they detect a robbery in process?)
          • toyg 10y ago
            I doubt armed security can legally do anything beyond defending themselves as it is, let alone sending drones. I guess they'll just wire the truck to alert police and turn on lots of cameras. Police might respond quickly... at least until the number of false alarms (truck hits a hole a bit too heavy, alarm goes "ROBBERY!!!11!") stays low enough.
• Chathamization 10y ago
  Trains seem like pretty low hanging fruit, since they don't have to deal with nearly as much problems as vehicles on the road. Yet train automation still hasn't put train operators out of work. I doubt that self-driving cars/trucks, which lag far behind self-driving trains, are going to cause much unemployment anytime soon.
  • meddlepal 10y ago
    At least in the US, the FRA is a regulatory nightmare though and extremely red tape heavy. The lack of progress in train automation is partly caused by the heavy-handed rules the agency rights which push implementation costs through the roof. It'll be interesting to see if the DOT reacts similarly in time to vehicle automation.
    • parsnips 10y ago
      This. I worked in the PTC space in the early 2k's. The person that the FRA send to be their regulatory representative to our program did not trust transistors over electromechanical switches, because you couldn't see how the transistors were failing. As you can imagine, our progress was slow.
  • iofj 10y ago
    For trains, where 1 person directs 200+ cars, the reward just isn't great enough. For trucks, where one person directs 1 truckload, it's 200+ times as rewarding. Plus, almost every country in the world has stopped building infrastructure to allow trains to go where you'd want them to go. So trains are only useful for huge manufacturing firms and things like harbors. Goods trains don't even go to most airports anymore.
    • randomsearch 10y ago
      Bit of an aside, but I've often heard it argued that trains make more sense for passenger traffic. The reasoning is that you can shift a lot of people into one central station, and they then deliver themselves over the last stage of a journey through ambulation.
• ttcbj 10y ago
  It does, and I wondered why Google hadn't targeted it first. Its simpler,and there is a compelling business case. I wonder if their decision was driven by political savvy - self driving cars help the blind/elderly, and automate work most people are glad to see automated. Self-driving trucks are going to have a major employment impact which will likely draw political resistance.
  • headShrinker 10y ago
    I would say this is absolutely a political decision and a marketing decision. Google has gone to great lengths to help the public feel comfortable with autonomous cars, right down to the 'cute' buggy look of their vehicles. The trick is to move slow enough so people's interest out paces their fears. The implications for self driving cars is nothing short of an existential threat for so many people in this world. As we know, it's just the beginning. Similarly, Apple moved very slowly in introducing the iPad even though the under technology had been available for years. They started with the iPod, then advanced to the iPhone. At the time the iPhone caused a great amount of tribulation. People were very uncomfortable and large portions of the tech sector predicted it would be a monstrous failure. Their apprehension was cloaking a deep-seated unfirmiliarity (and maybe some fear). Once the iPad finally did arrive it was easily digested by the market. That was the mistake HP and windows made when they introduced the tablet in 2001. People had no concept of what a tablet is or how to integrate it in to their lives, so it was a miserable failure. The lesson is don't move so fast that you scare your ultimate market, the people.
    • viscanti 10y ago
      Is the premise here that Google could already have market ready self-driving car tech that they could be selling but they're going slower to make people comfortable? This is the first time I've heard such an argument. It's very interesting if true. Are there any data points to back that up?
    • 1024core 10y ago
      > Similarly, Apple moved very slowly in introducing the iPad even though the under technology had been available for years. Apple did introduce the Newton, many years earlier. Their slow pace for iPad may just have been due to lessons learnt.
• spenczar5 10y ago
  > When was the last time an entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough that laid off employees blamed the technology? Containerized shipping. Interestingly, it's in the world of logistics too. Longshoremen/dockworkers/stevedores used to be among the most common occupations in the US at the turn of the century, but now the industry employs a tiny fraction. A small group of a few hundred people can effectively run an enormous port like Oakland's. Yes, the employees blamed the technology, but so did local governments. Places like Baltimore relied pretty heavily on the docks to supply their population with jobs; when those disappeared quickly many cities (especially on the eastern US coast) had a really tough time economically.
  • unk 10y ago
    Source: The Wire Season 2.
    • spenczar5 10y ago
      Actual source: The Box by Marc Levinson. Highly recommended. First chapter is available online: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8131.pdf http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8131.pdf
    • fullshark 10y ago
      It always bothered me that they gave Sobotka the "We used to make shit in this country" line considering his entire job was importing stuff made in other countries.
      • gwern 10y ago
        You need to import shit to make shit. Whether the shit is local or international, water remains the cheapest form of transport.
      • remarkEon 10y ago
        That line felt to me to be more of a global critique of the decline of consistent blue collar employment in industrial towns, like Baltimore.
• tgb29 10y ago
  Maybe some jobs will be replaced, but the industry is facing a shortage of truck drivers. One of the most common job listings on Craigslist is for truck drivers with paid training. The lifestyle of a truck driver can be brutal and unhealthy.
  • dexterdog 10y ago
    Plus, who would want to get into that industry today when you know that it's going to be automated as soon as possible?
    • bobwaycott 10y ago
      People who need money today.
• yk 10y ago
  The interesting challenges on a interstate are pretty similar as the usual challenges of autonomous vehicles, so what happens if there is a construction site, or if there are people on the road. (But you have to deal with that at a lot higher speeds.) And Ars had a very interesting article on the validation of self-driving cars, the thing is humans are rather good at driving, to the tune of 10^8 km per fatal accident, so you need really huge statistics to validate self driving cars. I suspect that if you want to show that your autonomous truck is as save as a human truck driver, then you acquire another factor of 2 in the kilometers needed. (Actually I seem to remember that it is about a factor of 5, but that is entirely unsourced.) [0] http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/04/car-makers-cant-drive-their-way-to-safety-with-self-driving-cars/ http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/04/car-makers-cant-drive-th...
  • ghaff 10y ago
    It's a big step to go from interstate autopilots to having no human in the loop end-to-end. If autopilot systems improve safety and/or are autonomous enough that drivers can sleep and thereby make fewer stops, they'll certainly make sense. However, it may also make economic sense to keep a human on board to handle unanticipated issues or last mile tasks that may be harder to automate.
    • yk 10y ago
      If the driver can sleep, than the car needs to handle everything that can happen on the interstate, including deer or people on the road. So I would guess that a interstate autopilot has the same difficult challenges, but 'simpler' things like navigation may be easier. Basically my argument boils down to, it is easier to drive on an interstate on average, but for autonomous vehicles we are not interested in average and the hard challenges are similar to hard challenges for a fully autonomous car.
      • ghaff 10y ago
        >If the driver can sleep, than the car needs to handle everything that can happen on the interstate, including deer or people on the road. Interstates are less complicated overall. You don't get a lot of jaywalkers or bicycles doing unexpected things. Nor negotiation of left-hand turns, etc. What you do have is events happening at higher speeds but handling the car in front jamming on its brakes is probably easier in general for a machine that's always paying perfect attention. As a result, I do expect to see autonomous systems on limited access highways before I see them in a busy city. That said, I fully agree that once you have full automation you can't depend on human backup that can take over quickly. Whether or not people are supposed to, they will doze off, read, text, etc.--even more than they do today.
• wmeredith 10y ago
  An actual long-haul trucker commented at length about this on a reddit thread. I can't seem to find it. The TL;DR was that tyhe actual driving of the truck was a no-brainer to automate away, but that despite being a large portion of the job from a time perspective, it was a small portion of the job functionally speaking. The majority of a long haul trucker's job is interacting with legal authorities at weigh stations, dealing with loading crews, performing required truck maintenance on the road, etc... It was an interesting insight. I'm sure all of that could be automated away eventually, but no where near as quickly as the actual driving. I agree with other commenters in this thread that I see truck driving going the way of the train engineer quite soon, but that having truly driverless trucks is a bit further out.
  • calbear81 10y ago
    The train engineer analogy is a good one, you would imagine that a single "truckgineer" so to speak could be responsible for managing a convoy of let's say 10-15 trucks which would make it much more efficient. In regards to fueling, would you make that more efficient by adding a larger fuel tank or fuel car?
    • dgacmu 10y ago
      If you have that much stuff from the same source, destination pair, then you're probably better off using rail transport in the first place.
    • chefkoch 10y ago
      > In regards to fueling, would you make that more efficient by adding a larger fuel tank or fuel car. Or have someone at the gas station fill up the trucks like it was decades ago.
      • awesomerobot 10y ago
        or you know, automate it
  • ori_b 10y ago
• krschultz 10y ago
  It reminds me of when we added autopilots to airplanes and suddenly there were no more pilots.
• ksenzee 10y ago
  My parents owned a small business with ~4 employees repairing typewriters and adding machines. It did really well in 1982. By 1992 it didn't exist anymore.
• yuzi 10y ago
  > ... entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough... I don't see how this is an 'entire category' replacement nor do I see how it will happen any faster than say automated checkouts that also replaced droves of clerks. Sure people complain, but it happens so gradually (or gradually enough) that people will just eat crow like they always do.