14 ms·

Truckers Working Alongside Coders Trying to Make Driverless Trucks

144 points by sethbannon 9y ago

rfrank 9y ago
> This is a company that employs truck drivers, is how the talk begins. The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings. Truckers have very different ideas and different experiences from people like you, Seltz-Axmacher continues. Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters. They will say things that you may find startling. Not in a malicious way, but because people from, say, rural West Virginia talk differently than people from San Francisco. Can you handle that? It's good to see someone doing more than just talk about this sort of thing; both the employment aspect and the culture clash side of it. Compare that to say, how Google treats its ex-military drone contractors [1]. 1. http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-military-contractor-google-x-employee-collapsed-on-the-job-2017-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-military-contractor-google...
- cbanek 9y ago
  Excellent read - thanks.
- thatwebdude 9y ago
  With the amount of regulations in truck driving, I wouldn't be surprised if SV clashes with the culture and work ethic truck drivers have to endure. It's good to see this company hiring drivers themselves; those who are open to improving on this tech.
  - rfrank 9y ago
    I think people from most industries that are at the worst risk from automation are willing to help companies who make said automation products, as long as said company doesn't exist solely to put them out of a job and actually listens to them and their concerns. Those are the real rarity.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  And I love the counterpoint: > "We hire truckers," Seltz-Axmacher tells prospective drivers right before offering them a job. "But we also have a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley. Everything you’ve heard about San Francisco—it’s all basically true. There is something called raw denim, and in San Francisco people wear it, which means that some of your colleagues will pay up to $300 for a pair of blue jeans. They sometimes drink $7 lattes, too. Many of your co-workers will not be from the U.S. They will have accents. Can you handle that?" In my experience, the culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes. As a member of the latter, I take exception to this statement: > “We basically have people from two worlds, neither of which has ever talked to each other,” says Seltz-Axmacher, who grew up in suburban Maryland. “That’s kind of what’s wrong with this country.” Perhaps that's true of the founder's life experience, or true of the trucking industry, but most manufacturing jobs seem to be merging these cultures comparatively smoothly. I've been at a couple companies in the automotive industry, and been to hundreds of different plants, and everywhere you look there are blue collar technicians running the machines and white collar engineers building and automating the machines. The situation is not so bad as the article paints it outside the extremes of Ivy League PHD programs contrasted with the trucking industry.
  - rfrank 9y ago
    Hah, you're definitely right (I work at an EMS provider). In the context of the piece it seems to me like they're more focused on SF type startups than places like where you or I work. I agree very much with: > ...culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    I'm a software pro, not a trucker, and I have a problem with $300 jeans and $7 lattes. And what is all this I keep hearing about $20 avocado toast? The culture clash is Silicon Valley banging its own cymbals.
    - rfrank 9y ago
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings. That's nice to see, since the change-the-world spiel is almost always howling bullshit.
jimbobob 9y ago
This is an interesting approach in the short term and could help bootstrap Starsky's business before the conversion to fully autonomous driving. I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so. There's just too much money riding on this problem, and logistics companies are fairly ruthless about efficiency.
- zdean 9y ago
  "I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so." I hope so. Trucking is one of the toughest professions for a person to endure that I've ever seen. It destroys a person's body and mind...and you're lucky to end up making minimum wage when you account for how many hours they spend working.
  - mc32 9y ago
    And what job alternatives will you provide them, think specially about current long haul drivers, not future candidates you can discourage and divert to greener fields.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - eduren 9y ago
      Economic assistance. Give them the resources to choose their new career path for themselves.
      - mc32 9y ago
        From whom, the govt? I don't trust that would happen (see rustbelt industries). These automation startups? What's their profit if they have to train the people they help get laid off/made redundant?
        eduren 9y ago
thatwebdude 9y ago
> Most people in Silicon Valley subscribe to either the first or second school. Much of the rest of the country, including many truckers, favor the third. "I can tell the difference between a dead porcupine and a dead raccoon, and I know I can hit a raccoon, but if I hit a porcupine, I’m going to lose all the tires on the truck on that side," says Tom George, a veteran driver who now trains other Teamsters for the union’s Washington-Idaho AGC Training Trust. "It will take a long time and a lot of software to program that competence into a computer." Driverless trucks are a very interesting concept. Once they're on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. But getting through traffic congestions, busy multi-turn-lane intersections, and making sure you don't sideswipe someone who's hugging the line seems rather complex given the different trailer dimensions and blind spots, (un)marked lanes and everything else it takes to get to the highway.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Why would the automated system have blind spots though? If it is viable at $50,000 it is probably viable at $100,000 or $200,000 (automated trucks will roughly double the efficiency of driving because of more hours on the road). I would think that a physics model would also give a reasonable automated system superior control over where the trailer is at a given moment (and to account for different trailers).
- timemachiner 9y ago
  > Once they're on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. That's assuming nice weather conditions. Mudslides, flash floods, extreme code, ice, snow, etc. needs to be taken into consideration.
  - eduren 9y ago
    Of course those need to be taken into consideration but to be fair, aren't most of the conditions you listed dealt with by a human driver pulling over and waiting it out/calling for assistance? That's exactly what an autonomous system could do in those situations. And if there _are_ dangerous conditions that a human driver could navigate but an autonomous one would give up on, is that so bad? The industry is making enough efficiency gains to offset that.
mc32 9y ago
This looks like trucking's version of off-shoring. You get paid to train your replacements. If you don't train them, someone else will. It's a no win for them. They don't have pull or unions that commuter train operators have so it's not like they'll get to ride along and supervise the autonomous vehicle, in the long term. Instead, there may be an ops center somewhere in TX where operators intervene remotely when an irregular operating pattern pops up. Those will be fewer operators.
- infecto 9y ago
  I am not a trucker but from what I understood from other truckers is that this can be seen as a benefit to them. There is a lot more effort as a trucker in managing the cargo than the driving. Lots of paperwork at pickup, drop off and in between checks. There is effort to ensure the security of the cargo. I think the expectation is that wages would stay the same and truckers stop driving and start managing. Keep in mind wages are already fairly low.
  - eduren 9y ago
    Yup, end-of-the-line logistics would be an easily transitioned to stopgap measure. Some former truckers would be able to stay local and handle loading/unloading. Not as many as are currently on the road, but every little bit of transitioning helps.
  - vkou 9y ago
    Wages might stay the same, but half of them would lose their jobs. Wages are a trucking firm's biggest expense. Why would a firm go out and buy a bunch of expensive self-driving trucks, so that they could pay the same number of people the same wages.
    - mertd 9y ago
      You assumed that the trucking volume will stay the same when the cost goes down significantly.
      - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
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dsfyu404ed 9y ago
As much as the devs probably hate riding with truckers it's good for them
- kstoneman 9y ago
  Probably really hard on the truckers, though.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
  Why do you think they'd hate it?
  - cakedoggie 9y ago
    I would hate it.
    - randyrand 9y ago
      Why would you hate it?
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Don't hold your breath for semi-driverless trucking. Automated systems to aid in backing of doubles and triples isn't even a common thing yet.
postnihilism 9y ago
This is eerily like a scene from Player Piano, Vonnegut's first novel. Some smart engineers find the best machinist at a factory, use some machines to record his movements and process and then use them to program the robots that replace him, and everyone else in his position at the factory. For those that haven't read it, the book is an interesting and prescient story about what the future of America looks like when nearly all human labor has been made obsolete.
bluedino 9y ago
If I was a trucker I'd be learning diesel tech, not training my replacement drivers
- lhuser123 9y ago
  I'm actually learning to code. I drive over-the-road and live in the truck cab. Hopefully someday it will help me get out of here.
  - bluedino 9y ago
    You know I read an article a long time ago about two guys who drove truck and took turns coding (team drivers so the person not driving would write code) and wrote shareware this way - it might have been a game published by Epic or Apogee in the early 90's or I might be imagining the whole thing
    - lhuser123 9y ago
      That's a good idea. For now I'm solo, so there's not really much time.
apapli 9y ago
I know it is novel to talk about blue collar workers working alongside phd grads who are specialists in this field... but surely any good system which needs to deliver a quality outcome needs to be built with domain expertise, in this case driving trucks. I just don't see why this is that exciting. I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this.
- lhuser123 9y ago
  > I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this Me too. There's so much more than just driving. Just as an example, we truck drivers learn to anticipate possible problems based on other people's behaviors. Why anticipate? Because 80,000 lbs can take too long to stop, and people can die.
gwern 9y ago
> But ultimately, Seltz-Axmacher believes, the tools he’s developing will be good for truckers. He cites a new book by Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking, in which the chess great observes that middling chess players who play with the help of a standard computer are reliably better than either grandmasters or supercomputers by themselves. “I think humans and technology working together are always going to be better than either one alone,” Seltz-Axmacher says. “But maybe that’s just because I like humans.” This is amusing because this stopped being true a long time ago. Even by 2007, it was hard for anyone to improve, and after 2013 or so, the very best centaurs were reduced to basically just opening book preparation (itself an extremely difficult skill involving compiling millions of games and carefully tuning against the weakness of possible opponent engines), to the point where official matches have mostly stopped (making it hard to identify the exact point at which centaur ceased to be a thing at all).
- driverlessjihad 9y ago
  Driverless Trucks, and to a lesser extent, driverless cars, have got to be the 21st century Jihadi / Islamic "Fighter"'s wet dream. I don't think the day is far off, when a Jihadi will remote control a Driverless Truck loaded with explosives, and plough it right into a Concert / Festival gathering...
- danielbarla 9y ago
  I've never really understood Kasparov's pro-biological opinion along those lines. I suspect it's a combination of an observation that was true at that time (that humans are better are intuition), and his own comment “But maybe that’s just because I like humans”. If you think about it, AIs have a significant advantage in that their evolution is completely artificially guided. They can be focused on tasks in isolation, and the results can be observed and improved upon. Biological evolution does not have this luxury, overall the entire organism has to "work", and survive long enough to reproduce. Sure, current technology is in its infancy, but extrapolating into the far future, things are interesting.
  - gwern 9y ago
    I think it's a mix of outdated information, wishful thinking, and the contrarian appeal. It was true for a few years that a grandmaster or a random chess player with good 'mechanical sympathy' could crush a solo chess engine (which is why discussions of this tend to stop in 2007 despite being a decade ago), it would be very convenient if AIs required humans for the best performance (https://github.com/JackToaster/Reassuring-Parable-Generator/tree/master https://github.com/JackToaster/Reassuring-Parable-Generator/... 'A computer will never play the best chess in the world'), and it provides a meta-contrarian (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...) take on AI risk/technological unemployment which is clearly Tyler Cowen's main motivation in popularizing it (object: 'AIs will never be able to do X better than humans as they have no soul'; contrarian: 'they totally will, just look'; meta-contrarian: 'ah, but the human element is still critical for a last bit of performance due to the creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit!'). It's also interesting in that it demonstrates that there's at least two levels of 'superhuman' performance in chess and other domains: there's superhuman in being able to beat any living human one on one (Deep Blue, Sedol AlphaGo), and superhuman in being unable to be improved upon by a human collaborator (post-2013 chess engines; AlphaGo Master?). I'm not sure this gap was really expected, but though it only lasts a few years (or months), it's still interesting to note.
randyrand 9y ago
> Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters....Can you handle that? I hope this is a joke. If someone literally cannot handle working alongside someone who voted for Trump, that is so sad.
driverlessjihad 9y ago
Driverless Trucks, and to a lesser extent, driverless cars, have got to be the 21st century Jihadi / Islamic "Fighter"'s wet dream. I don't think the day is far off, when a Jihadi will remote control a Driverless Truck loaded with explosives, and plough it right into a Concert / Festival gathering... This alone is reason #1 to ban driverless vehicles.
shiftoutbox 9y ago
No their not . People feed up with some asshole from Silicon Valley; talking about destroying their jobs are trying to make money before they don't have a job .

144 points by sethbannon 9y ago

> This is a company that employs truck drivers, is how the talk begins. The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings. Truckers have very different ideas and different experiences from people like you, Seltz-Axmacher continues. Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters. They will say things that you may find startling. Not in a malicious way, but because people from, say, rural West Virginia talk differently than people from San Francisco. Can you handle that? It's good to see someone doing more than just talk about this sort of thing; both the employment aspect and the culture clash side of it. Compare that to say, how Google treats its ex-military drone contractors [1]. 1. http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-military-contractor-google-x-employee-collapsed-on-the-job-2017-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-military-contractor-google...

cbanek 9y ago
Excellent read - thanks.
thatwebdude 9y ago
With the amount of regulations in truck driving, I wouldn't be surprised if SV clashes with the culture and work ethic truck drivers have to endure. It's good to see this company hiring drivers themselves; those who are open to improving on this tech.
- rfrank 9y ago
  I think people from most industries that are at the worst risk from automation are willing to help companies who make said automation products, as long as said company doesn't exist solely to put them out of a job and actually listens to them and their concerns. Those are the real rarity.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
And I love the counterpoint: > "We hire truckers," Seltz-Axmacher tells prospective drivers right before offering them a job. "But we also have a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley. Everything you’ve heard about San Francisco—it’s all basically true. There is something called raw denim, and in San Francisco people wear it, which means that some of your colleagues will pay up to $300 for a pair of blue jeans. They sometimes drink $7 lattes, too. Many of your co-workers will not be from the U.S. They will have accents. Can you handle that?" In my experience, the culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes. As a member of the latter, I take exception to this statement: > “We basically have people from two worlds, neither of which has ever talked to each other,” says Seltz-Axmacher, who grew up in suburban Maryland. “That’s kind of what’s wrong with this country.” Perhaps that's true of the founder's life experience, or true of the trucking industry, but most manufacturing jobs seem to be merging these cultures comparatively smoothly. I've been at a couple companies in the automotive industry, and been to hundreds of different plants, and everywhere you look there are blue collar technicians running the machines and white collar engineers building and automating the machines. The situation is not so bad as the article paints it outside the extremes of Ivy League PHD programs contrasted with the trucking industry.
- rfrank 9y ago
  Hah, you're definitely right (I work at an EMS provider). In the context of the piece it seems to me like they're more focused on SF type startups than places like where you or I work. I agree very much with: > ...culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  I'm a software pro, not a trucker, and I have a problem with $300 jeans and $7 lattes. And what is all this I keep hearing about $20 avocado toast? The culture clash is Silicon Valley banging its own cymbals.
  - rfrank 9y ago
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings. That's nice to see, since the change-the-world spiel is almost always howling bullshit.

jimbobob 9y ago

This is an interesting approach in the short term and could help bootstrap Starsky's business before the conversion to fully autonomous driving. I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so. There's just too much money riding on this problem, and logistics companies are fairly ruthless about efficiency.

zdean 9y ago
"I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so." I hope so. Trucking is one of the toughest professions for a person to endure that I've ever seen. It destroys a person's body and mind...and you're lucky to end up making minimum wage when you account for how many hours they spend working.
- mc32 9y ago
  And what job alternatives will you provide them, think specially about current long haul drivers, not future candidates you can discourage and divert to greener fields.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - eduren 9y ago
    Economic assistance. Give them the resources to choose their new career path for themselves.
    - mc32 9y ago
      From whom, the govt? I don't trust that would happen (see rustbelt industries). These automation startups? What's their profit if they have to train the people they help get laid off/made redundant?
      - eduren 9y ago

thatwebdude 9y ago

> Most people in Silicon Valley subscribe to either the first or second school. Much of the rest of the country, including many truckers, favor the third. "I can tell the difference between a dead porcupine and a dead raccoon, and I know I can hit a raccoon, but if I hit a porcupine, I’m going to lose all the tires on the truck on that side," says Tom George, a veteran driver who now trains other Teamsters for the union’s Washington-Idaho AGC Training Trust. "It will take a long time and a lot of software to program that competence into a computer." Driverless trucks are a very interesting concept. Once they're on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. But getting through traffic congestions, busy multi-turn-lane intersections, and making sure you don't sideswipe someone who's hugging the line seems rather complex given the different trailer dimensions and blind spots, (un)marked lanes and everything else it takes to get to the highway.

maxerickson 9y ago
Why would the automated system have blind spots though? If it is viable at $50,000 it is probably viable at $100,000 or $200,000 (automated trucks will roughly double the efficiency of driving because of more hours on the road). I would think that a physics model would also give a reasonable automated system superior control over where the trailer is at a given moment (and to account for different trailers).
timemachiner 9y ago
> Once they're on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. That's assuming nice weather conditions. Mudslides, flash floods, extreme code, ice, snow, etc. needs to be taken into consideration.
- eduren 9y ago
  Of course those need to be taken into consideration but to be fair, aren't most of the conditions you listed dealt with by a human driver pulling over and waiting it out/calling for assistance? That's exactly what an autonomous system could do in those situations. And if there _are_ dangerous conditions that a human driver could navigate but an autonomous one would give up on, is that so bad? The industry is making enough efficiency gains to offset that.

mc32 9y ago

This looks like trucking's version of off-shoring. You get paid to train your replacements. If you don't train them, someone else will. It's a no win for them. They don't have pull or unions that commuter train operators have so it's not like they'll get to ride along and supervise the autonomous vehicle, in the long term. Instead, there may be an ops center somewhere in TX where operators intervene remotely when an irregular operating pattern pops up. Those will be fewer operators.

infecto 9y ago
I am not a trucker but from what I understood from other truckers is that this can be seen as a benefit to them. There is a lot more effort as a trucker in managing the cargo than the driving. Lots of paperwork at pickup, drop off and in between checks. There is effort to ensure the security of the cargo. I think the expectation is that wages would stay the same and truckers stop driving and start managing. Keep in mind wages are already fairly low.
- eduren 9y ago
  Yup, end-of-the-line logistics would be an easily transitioned to stopgap measure. Some former truckers would be able to stay local and handle loading/unloading. Not as many as are currently on the road, but every little bit of transitioning helps.
- vkou 9y ago
  Wages might stay the same, but half of them would lose their jobs. Wages are a trucking firm's biggest expense. Why would a firm go out and buy a bunch of expensive self-driving trucks, so that they could pay the same number of people the same wages.
  - mertd 9y ago
    You assumed that the trucking volume will stay the same when the cost goes down significantly.
    - 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

As much as the devs probably hate riding with truckers it's good for them

kstoneman 9y ago
Probably really hard on the truckers, though.
HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
Why do you think they'd hate it?
- cakedoggie 9y ago
  I would hate it.
  - randyrand 9y ago
    Why would you hate it?

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

Don't hold your breath for semi-driverless trucking. Automated systems to aid in backing of doubles and triples isn't even a common thing yet.

postnihilism 9y ago

This is eerily like a scene from Player Piano, Vonnegut's first novel. Some smart engineers find the best machinist at a factory, use some machines to record his movements and process and then use them to program the robots that replace him, and everyone else in his position at the factory. For those that haven't read it, the book is an interesting and prescient story about what the future of America looks like when nearly all human labor has been made obsolete.

bluedino 9y ago

If I was a trucker I'd be learning diesel tech, not training my replacement drivers

lhuser123 9y ago
I'm actually learning to code. I drive over-the-road and live in the truck cab. Hopefully someday it will help me get out of here.
- bluedino 9y ago
  You know I read an article a long time ago about two guys who drove truck and took turns coding (team drivers so the person not driving would write code) and wrote shareware this way - it might have been a game published by Epic or Apogee in the early 90's or I might be imagining the whole thing
  - lhuser123 9y ago
    That's a good idea. For now I'm solo, so there's not really much time.

apapli 9y ago

I know it is novel to talk about blue collar workers working alongside phd grads who are specialists in this field... but surely any good system which needs to deliver a quality outcome needs to be built with domain expertise, in this case driving trucks. I just don't see why this is that exciting. I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this.

lhuser123 9y ago
> I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this Me too. There's so much more than just driving. Just as an example, we truck drivers learn to anticipate possible problems based on other people's behaviors. Why anticipate? Because 80,000 lbs can take too long to stop, and people can die.

gwern 9y ago

> But ultimately, Seltz-Axmacher believes, the tools he’s developing will be good for truckers. He cites a new book by Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking, in which the chess great observes that middling chess players who play with the help of a standard computer are reliably better than either grandmasters or supercomputers by themselves. “I think humans and technology working together are always going to be better than either one alone,” Seltz-Axmacher says. “But maybe that’s just because I like humans.” This is amusing because this stopped being true a long time ago. Even by 2007, it was hard for anyone to improve, and after 2013 or so, the very best centaurs were reduced to basically just opening book preparation (itself an extremely difficult skill involving compiling millions of games and carefully tuning against the weakness of possible opponent engines), to the point where official matches have mostly stopped (making it hard to identify the exact point at which centaur ceased to be a thing at all).

driverlessjihad 9y ago
Driverless Trucks, and to a lesser extent, driverless cars, have got to be the 21st century Jihadi / Islamic "Fighter"'s wet dream. I don't think the day is far off, when a Jihadi will remote control a Driverless Truck loaded with explosives, and plough it right into a Concert / Festival gathering...
danielbarla 9y ago
I've never really understood Kasparov's pro-biological opinion along those lines. I suspect it's a combination of an observation that was true at that time (that humans are better are intuition), and his own comment “But maybe that’s just because I like humans”. If you think about it, AIs have a significant advantage in that their evolution is completely artificially guided. They can be focused on tasks in isolation, and the results can be observed and improved upon. Biological evolution does not have this luxury, overall the entire organism has to "work", and survive long enough to reproduce. Sure, current technology is in its infancy, but extrapolating into the far future, things are interesting.
- gwern 9y ago
  I think it's a mix of outdated information, wishful thinking, and the contrarian appeal. It was true for a few years that a grandmaster or a random chess player with good 'mechanical sympathy' could crush a solo chess engine (which is why discussions of this tend to stop in 2007 despite being a decade ago), it would be very convenient if AIs required humans for the best performance (https://github.com/JackToaster/Reassuring-Parable-Generator/tree/master https://github.com/JackToaster/Reassuring-Parable-Generator/... 'A computer will never play the best chess in the world'), and it provides a meta-contrarian (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...) take on AI risk/technological unemployment which is clearly Tyler Cowen's main motivation in popularizing it (object: 'AIs will never be able to do X better than humans as they have no soul'; contrarian: 'they totally will, just look'; meta-contrarian: 'ah, but the human element is still critical for a last bit of performance due to the creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit!'). It's also interesting in that it demonstrates that there's at least two levels of 'superhuman' performance in chess and other domains: there's superhuman in being able to beat any living human one on one (Deep Blue, Sedol AlphaGo), and superhuman in being unable to be improved upon by a human collaborator (post-2013 chess engines; AlphaGo Master?). I'm not sure this gap was really expected, but though it only lasts a few years (or months), it's still interesting to note.

randyrand 9y ago

> Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters....Can you handle that? I hope this is a joke. If someone literally cannot handle working alongside someone who voted for Trump, that is so sad.

driverlessjihad 9y ago

Driverless Trucks, and to a lesser extent, driverless cars, have got to be the 21st century Jihadi / Islamic "Fighter"'s wet dream. I don't think the day is far off, when a Jihadi will remote control a Driverless Truck loaded with explosives, and plough it right into a Concert / Festival gathering... This alone is reason #1 to ban driverless vehicles.

shiftoutbox 9y ago

No their not . People feed up with some asshole from Silicon Valley; talking about destroying their jobs are trying to make money before they don't have a job .