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The approach that Starsky (http://starsky.io/ http://starsky.io/) is taking seems to be a promising one. They employ truck drivers as remote pilots for the "fir

The approach that Starsky (http://starsky.io/ http://starsky.io/) is taking seems to be a promising one. They employ truck drivers as remote pilots for the "first and last mile", i.e. the local roads and loading dock work that autonomous vehicles struggle with most. Other advantages include lower fuel costs (driving slower because AVs aren't subject to operator-hour limits) and probably also lower labor costs (you don't need to pay truckers as much if the job is safe and nearby to home). If the Starsky model ends up dominating, this could all add up to a case where the price of truck transportation drops so much that demand for truck drivers actually increases, possibly even counterbalancing the pressure of individual truckers being able to manage multiple vehicles at once. This would be an example of the "Jevons Effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

jobu 9y ago
> this could all add up to a case where the price of truck transportation drops so much that demand for truck drivers actually increases The problem is that local drivers average about half the pay ($30-40k) vs long-haul drivers ($70-80k). Even if there is more demand for local drivers it likely won't offset the wages lost.
- didgeoridoo 9y ago
  There are a lot of unknowns here. The factors putting downward pressure on trucker salaries are: - Remote operation of trucks is an easier lifestyle, so more people would be willing to take the job, driving down salaries - Fewer human truckers are needed per truck on the road, so for a given level of trucking activity, fewer jobs exist Some potential countervailing factors: - Price of trucking plummets, potentially jacking up demand (Jevons Paradox) depending on price elasticity of truck transportation - Managing multiple vehicles may end up being more cognitively challenging than driving a single truck, reducing the pool of available workers and driving up salaries The values of these parameters (and how they change over time) will be crucial to determining the net impact to trucker salaries and employment numbers. My intuition is that salaries will go down dramatically, employment numbers will go down modestly, and overall trucking activity will expand.
  - panopticon 9y ago
    > Managing multiple vehicles may end up being more cognitively challenging than driving a single truck, reducing the pool of available workers and driving up salaries Tangential to this point: If this mode of truck operation becomes prevalent, I could potentially see a path where warehouses/loading docks get employees certified (a la forklift truck certifications) to operate the truck on premises to handle the "last mile" (i.e. on-site) operations. Now you've completely decimated the number of trucker jobs.
    - firethief 9y ago
      I think you're drastically underestimating the difficulty involved in manuevering an eighteen wheeler around the premises of a typical business. There's no way it would be cost effective to train people for that so that they can spend most of their time doing something else.
- winstonewert 9y ago
  The wages aren't "lost", the "saved" money will still be paid to somebody to do something.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Profits kept by shareholders.
    - winstonewert 9y ago
      and spent by them as well.
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Maybe. Depends on tax law at the time. Going to need social safety net money, we might as well tax automation.
        kansface 9y ago
        Our tax code needs reform, but taxing gains in productivity is a perverse incentive.
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        > but taxing gains in productivity is a perverse incentive. Not at all. The end goal should not be productivity onto itself. If those gains are being scooped up by a sliver of the population, we change the rules to benefit all. One person, one vote. As automation automates away more jobs, the cohort of people without jobs grows, forcing regulations (through democracy) to change to move towards a citizen's dividend funded by a tax on automation. The system will reach equilibrium, or there will be a revolution. If you don't want your automation lifting the tide of all boats, someone else will come along and build it.
        djrogers 9y ago
tomjen3 9y ago
Even so, it will devastate the economies of the places they drive through.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Truck stops, motels, independent semi repair shops, CB radio and accessories, probably more I'm missing. Oh, yeah, the final death knell for DVD porn.
jabits 9y ago
I really don't see why autonomous vehicles couldn't handle the first/last miles soon after mastering the open road. I think only regulation would made this a requirement.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  For trucks that don't follow the same routes every day (e.g. FedEx/UPS/etc.), even humans frequently have a hard time getting it right. "Oh, no, it's the other side of that bridge that's only for light vehicles. Yes, you'll have to drive around for two miles in heavy traffic to get here. No, it's the entrance on the back facing the tall green building." Etc...
- moftz 9y ago
  Until AI for vehicles massively increases, humans are going to be better at navigating the truck through smaller roads, abiding by weight restrictions that may not already be known about, having local knowledge of the area that AI might not have. Every delivery location is going to be a little different so you would need a really general AI to understand how to just get the truck up to the loading dock (if you are that lucky). The long haul portion of the journey is much more suited to the AI of today, cars already have enough tech to get this done with pretty good results.
  - sigstoat 9y ago
    > Every delivery location is going to be a little different so you would need a really general AI to understand how to just get the truck up to the loading dock (if you are that lucky). or, as someone with a loading dock, i'd be willing to pay to have someone come out with a bunch of lidar gear and whatever to model up my dock and surrounding area, so i could just provide a big data blob about my dock to the shipping companies, and have their AI trucks pull in correctly every time. as opposed to worrying about the days when some new guy (with his local knowledge and general intelligence) shows up to deliver and comes in the wrong way and gets stuck for 2 hours. (there's a new job for you right there, folks, since the model will probably need to be updated every year or two as the shipping companies change their AIs, and changes are made to the surrounding buildings.)
WalterBright 9y ago
The long haul stuff should go on rails anyway. It's very wasteful to run it on the interstates. The majority of the fatigue damage to the highways comes from trucks, then there's all the rubber dust, fuel inefficiency, etc. The trailers should just be picked up and dropped on flatcars, and trucks used for intracity last mile stuff.
- zspade 9y ago
  This comment invariably pops up in these threads; If it was going to, it already would have.. It's too late now. Would it have been a better solution? Probably, but the investment required (laying down the rails, land buyouts, copious use of emanate domain, political greasing of the wheels, etc...) has always been prohibitive. The gains would be shared between many disparate groups that would need to fund this together, taking years to decades for any ROI - certainly a longer time-frame than most publicly traded, quarterly measured, corporations can afford. At the least this would have required some government subsidization. With driver-less tech around the corner, returns on this investment for any one company become even more dubious, and thus make it less likely to happen. I think the parent comment here will always get some up-votes, but that is as far as I see this going anymore. Maybe it'd go farther if we threw in words like 'Hyperloop' ;)
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    The rails are already there. When I drive down I5, you can see them. The reason this sorry state of affairs exists is because truck traffic is heavily subsidized (highways paid for with taxes) whereas rail traffic is heavily taxed (and the rail companies have to pay for the tracks). It could be improved by increasing weight taxes on trucks, and using the proceeds to subsidize intercity tracks.
    - alphaalpha101 9y ago
      Yeah the impact on roads increases with the fourth power of vehicle weight. Why doesn't the tax?
notatoad 9y ago
That's almost certainly a temporary effect though - if the trucks are being outfitted with the hardware necesary for full automation, full automation is only a software update away and the pilots will only have a job for the relatively short period where automation isn't good enough to handle that portion of the journey.
- felippee 9y ago
  It's going to be a one hell of a software update...
  - notatoad 9y ago
    that's how autopilot landed on current Tesla cars.
FussyZeus 9y ago
There are a few things I think you've overlooked: - For one, you're talking about human drivers covering first and last mile, which is a tiny, tiny fraction of the route that a truck covers which is why the Starsky model works well, in theory anyway. That means one given driver can do the work of probably a few hundred trucks in their last mile phase, even if they end up with some downtime in the middle, it's not even close to balancing. You're still talking about a possibly slightly larger market being overseen by a much smaller workforce. - Secondly, this completely ignores what could be the silver medal effect of truck driving becoming automated; the death of millions of small and large businesses that operate basing heavily on the incomes of truckers, everything from truck stops and diners, all the way to motels, specialty truck accessory companies, on and on and on. These are the ripple effects that many people aren't looking at when they're thinking about this, it isn't just trucking, it's one of the last jobs available to you with naught but high school under your belt that earns around $40k. And that's not even going into how many businesses do a ton of business with truckers that earn that wage, which is usually much higher than their neighbors are earning. - Thirdly, if all trucking is done from various Starsky-like operations, then truckers in general will be moving into more consolidated living conditions. Again trucking is one of the VERY rare jobs that requires minimal training, pays a comfortable wage, and is available pretty much anywhere in the States where there are roads and people who buy products. If you want to work as a software developer, chances are you'll have to move to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, etc. but if you're looking to be a trucker, you can go pretty much anywhere and have fairly solid employment opportunities. For now.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > Thirdly, if all trucking is done from various Starsky-like operations, then truckers in general will be moving into more consolidated living conditions. why? if the controls are network traffic, and one driver being right next to another driver doesn't add value, why not spread them across the country? it'll reduce control latency, increase reliability (can't have all deliveries stopping if the fiber to one building is cut), and make it easier to have drivers awake when the deliveries are tending to take place (certainly some locations might take deliveries in the middle of the night, but mostly they're going to happen when businesses and such have employees available to receive the materials.)
dforrestwilson 9y ago
Corollary - Why no driverless trains yet?
- xur17 9y ago
  The savings likely aren't worth it. Trains can pull a lot of cargo compared to a truck, so the marginal cost for a driver is a substantially smaller percentage.
  - dogruck 9y ago
    Yup, this is often the answer. Same with "why do we still have humans taking orders at McD?" Then it materializes when the cashier's minimum wage pops up -- in comes the kiosks.
    - Johnny555 9y ago
      I don't think it has anything to do with cashier wages, and more to do with customer perception. Kiosks are already cheaper than people. With minimum wage at $7.25/hour, and a Kiosk being able to replace 2+ shifts (16 hour days 7 days a week), that's $30K/year in savings, which would more than pay for a kiosk and maintenance. Developing the software to run them isn't free, but spreading $15M in development costs among 14,000 restaurants is only $1K each. But many customers would balk at having to order at a kiosk, so McDonalds will still hire humans.
      - Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
        > But many customers would balk at having to order at a kiosk, so McDonalds will still hire humans. A lot of locations around me have both kiosks and staffed registers. I used the kiosk once and thought it was annoying to work through. If you have a simple order like "A medium #3", then its an order of magnitude faster to order through a person. On the other hand, if you like to customize your burger, or order a several things a la carte, the kiosk might be better depending on the competence of the human at the cash register. (Of course, whether or not your customized burger or list of a la carte items gets made correctly by the kitchen staff is an entirely different conversation...)
sly010 9y ago
> They employ truck drivers as remote pilots for the "first and last mile" It would make even more sense to employ a "local" pilot with local knowledge for the first and last miles, kind of how tug-boats help large container ships in and out of ports.
- caf 9y ago
  Harbour pilots actually drive those large ships in and out of port from the bridge.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Parallels also to the rise in the demand for horses after the introduction of the railroad. The availability of long-haul transport increased transportation volume, but the "last mile" connection from origin/destination to the railroad depot couldn't be accomodated as readily. So: horses and carts. Variously: Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Vaclav Smil, Energy and World History -- of which there's a heavily revised edition out this year, Energy and Civilization.
foxylad 9y ago
If Uber is right about it's autonomous taxis, and Tesla's cars really will be able to come when you whistle, then last mile driving and docking are surely solvable problems. I'm generally an optimistic person, but I think autonomous driving is going to seriously disrupt our societies. I simply cannot see where the huge workforce of unskilled males driving trucks and taxis is going to be soaked up. The industrial revolution did it last time, but anything you can suggest as a potential equivalent (colonising Mars?) will be demanding smart flexible people - and an awful lot of automated systems. I'm picking the mass unemployment will lead to civil war in the US (where all those unskilled males have semi automatic guns) and universal basic incomes in more civilised countries.
- catbodi 9y ago
  You're fucking crazy
  - ada1981 9y ago
    Exactly. Truckers with AR-15s aren't going to stand a chance against the robotic police force...
    - ada1981 9y ago
      Come to think of it, this would make a good comic or sci-fi film. A mob of former truckers, farmers and Uber drivers armed with bump-stocked AR-15's wearing Make America Analog Again hats and fueled on pillaged Soylent trying to overtake Silicon Valley and having to fight through an army of Teslas, Otto, Boston Dynamics, Weaponized Amazon Drones, etc.

jobu 9y ago

> this could all add up to a case where the price of truck transportation drops so much that demand for truck drivers actually increases The problem is that local drivers average about half the pay ($30-40k) vs long-haul drivers ($70-80k). Even if there is more demand for local drivers it likely won't offset the wages lost.

didgeoridoo 9y ago
There are a lot of unknowns here. The factors putting downward pressure on trucker salaries are: - Remote operation of trucks is an easier lifestyle, so more people would be willing to take the job, driving down salaries - Fewer human truckers are needed per truck on the road, so for a given level of trucking activity, fewer jobs exist Some potential countervailing factors: - Price of trucking plummets, potentially jacking up demand (Jevons Paradox) depending on price elasticity of truck transportation - Managing multiple vehicles may end up being more cognitively challenging than driving a single truck, reducing the pool of available workers and driving up salaries The values of these parameters (and how they change over time) will be crucial to determining the net impact to trucker salaries and employment numbers. My intuition is that salaries will go down dramatically, employment numbers will go down modestly, and overall trucking activity will expand.
- panopticon 9y ago
  > Managing multiple vehicles may end up being more cognitively challenging than driving a single truck, reducing the pool of available workers and driving up salaries Tangential to this point: If this mode of truck operation becomes prevalent, I could potentially see a path where warehouses/loading docks get employees certified (a la forklift truck certifications) to operate the truck on premises to handle the "last mile" (i.e. on-site) operations. Now you've completely decimated the number of trucker jobs.
  - firethief 9y ago
    I think you're drastically underestimating the difficulty involved in manuevering an eighteen wheeler around the premises of a typical business. There's no way it would be cost effective to train people for that so that they can spend most of their time doing something else.
winstonewert 9y ago
The wages aren't "lost", the "saved" money will still be paid to somebody to do something.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Profits kept by shareholders.
  - winstonewert 9y ago
    and spent by them as well.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Maybe. Depends on tax law at the time. Going to need social safety net money, we might as well tax automation.
      - kansface 9y ago
        Our tax code needs reform, but taxing gains in productivity is a perverse incentive.
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        > but taxing gains in productivity is a perverse incentive. Not at all. The end goal should not be productivity onto itself. If those gains are being scooped up by a sliver of the population, we change the rules to benefit all. One person, one vote. As automation automates away more jobs, the cohort of people without jobs grows, forcing regulations (through democracy) to change to move towards a citizen's dividend funded by a tax on automation. The system will reach equilibrium, or there will be a revolution. If you don't want your automation lifting the tide of all boats, someone else will come along and build it.
        djrogers 9y ago

tomjen3 9y ago

Even so, it will devastate the economies of the places they drive through.

tyingq 9y ago
Truck stops, motels, independent semi repair shops, CB radio and accessories, probably more I'm missing. Oh, yeah, the final death knell for DVD porn.

jabits 9y ago

I really don't see why autonomous vehicles couldn't handle the first/last miles soon after mastering the open road. I think only regulation would made this a requirement.

semi-extrinsic 9y ago
For trucks that don't follow the same routes every day (e.g. FedEx/UPS/etc.), even humans frequently have a hard time getting it right. "Oh, no, it's the other side of that bridge that's only for light vehicles. Yes, you'll have to drive around for two miles in heavy traffic to get here. No, it's the entrance on the back facing the tall green building." Etc...
moftz 9y ago
Until AI for vehicles massively increases, humans are going to be better at navigating the truck through smaller roads, abiding by weight restrictions that may not already be known about, having local knowledge of the area that AI might not have. Every delivery location is going to be a little different so you would need a really general AI to understand how to just get the truck up to the loading dock (if you are that lucky). The long haul portion of the journey is much more suited to the AI of today, cars already have enough tech to get this done with pretty good results.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > Every delivery location is going to be a little different so you would need a really general AI to understand how to just get the truck up to the loading dock (if you are that lucky). or, as someone with a loading dock, i'd be willing to pay to have someone come out with a bunch of lidar gear and whatever to model up my dock and surrounding area, so i could just provide a big data blob about my dock to the shipping companies, and have their AI trucks pull in correctly every time. as opposed to worrying about the days when some new guy (with his local knowledge and general intelligence) shows up to deliver and comes in the wrong way and gets stuck for 2 hours. (there's a new job for you right there, folks, since the model will probably need to be updated every year or two as the shipping companies change their AIs, and changes are made to the surrounding buildings.)

WalterBright 9y ago

The long haul stuff should go on rails anyway. It's very wasteful to run it on the interstates. The majority of the fatigue damage to the highways comes from trucks, then there's all the rubber dust, fuel inefficiency, etc. The trailers should just be picked up and dropped on flatcars, and trucks used for intracity last mile stuff.

zspade 9y ago
This comment invariably pops up in these threads; If it was going to, it already would have.. It's too late now. Would it have been a better solution? Probably, but the investment required (laying down the rails, land buyouts, copious use of emanate domain, political greasing of the wheels, etc...) has always been prohibitive. The gains would be shared between many disparate groups that would need to fund this together, taking years to decades for any ROI - certainly a longer time-frame than most publicly traded, quarterly measured, corporations can afford. At the least this would have required some government subsidization. With driver-less tech around the corner, returns on this investment for any one company become even more dubious, and thus make it less likely to happen. I think the parent comment here will always get some up-votes, but that is as far as I see this going anymore. Maybe it'd go farther if we threw in words like 'Hyperloop' ;)
- WalterBright 9y ago
  The rails are already there. When I drive down I5, you can see them. The reason this sorry state of affairs exists is because truck traffic is heavily subsidized (highways paid for with taxes) whereas rail traffic is heavily taxed (and the rail companies have to pay for the tracks). It could be improved by increasing weight taxes on trucks, and using the proceeds to subsidize intercity tracks.
  - alphaalpha101 9y ago
    Yeah the impact on roads increases with the fourth power of vehicle weight. Why doesn't the tax?

notatoad 9y ago

That's almost certainly a temporary effect though - if the trucks are being outfitted with the hardware necesary for full automation, full automation is only a software update away and the pilots will only have a job for the relatively short period where automation isn't good enough to handle that portion of the journey.

felippee 9y ago
It's going to be a one hell of a software update...
- notatoad 9y ago
  that's how autopilot landed on current Tesla cars.

FussyZeus 9y ago

There are a few things I think you've overlooked: - For one, you're talking about human drivers covering first and last mile, which is a tiny, tiny fraction of the route that a truck covers which is why the Starsky model works well, in theory anyway. That means one given driver can do the work of probably a few hundred trucks in their last mile phase, even if they end up with some downtime in the middle, it's not even close to balancing. You're still talking about a possibly slightly larger market being overseen by a much smaller workforce. - Secondly, this completely ignores what could be the silver medal effect of truck driving becoming automated; the death of millions of small and large businesses that operate basing heavily on the incomes of truckers, everything from truck stops and diners, all the way to motels, specialty truck accessory companies, on and on and on. These are the ripple effects that many people aren't looking at when they're thinking about this, it isn't just trucking, it's one of the last jobs available to you with naught but high school under your belt that earns around $40k. And that's not even going into how many businesses do a ton of business with truckers that earn that wage, which is usually much higher than their neighbors are earning. - Thirdly, if all trucking is done from various Starsky-like operations, then truckers in general will be moving into more consolidated living conditions. Again trucking is one of the VERY rare jobs that requires minimal training, pays a comfortable wage, and is available pretty much anywhere in the States where there are roads and people who buy products. If you want to work as a software developer, chances are you'll have to move to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, etc. but if you're looking to be a trucker, you can go pretty much anywhere and have fairly solid employment opportunities. For now.

sigstoat 9y ago
> Thirdly, if all trucking is done from various Starsky-like operations, then truckers in general will be moving into more consolidated living conditions. why? if the controls are network traffic, and one driver being right next to another driver doesn't add value, why not spread them across the country? it'll reduce control latency, increase reliability (can't have all deliveries stopping if the fiber to one building is cut), and make it easier to have drivers awake when the deliveries are tending to take place (certainly some locations might take deliveries in the middle of the night, but mostly they're going to happen when businesses and such have employees available to receive the materials.)

dforrestwilson 9y ago

Corollary - Why no driverless trains yet?

xur17 9y ago
The savings likely aren't worth it. Trains can pull a lot of cargo compared to a truck, so the marginal cost for a driver is a substantially smaller percentage.
- dogruck 9y ago
  Yup, this is often the answer. Same with "why do we still have humans taking orders at McD?" Then it materializes when the cashier's minimum wage pops up -- in comes the kiosks.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    I don't think it has anything to do with cashier wages, and more to do with customer perception. Kiosks are already cheaper than people. With minimum wage at $7.25/hour, and a Kiosk being able to replace 2+ shifts (16 hour days 7 days a week), that's $30K/year in savings, which would more than pay for a kiosk and maintenance. Developing the software to run them isn't free, but spreading $15M in development costs among 14,000 restaurants is only $1K each. But many customers would balk at having to order at a kiosk, so McDonalds will still hire humans.
    - Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
      > But many customers would balk at having to order at a kiosk, so McDonalds will still hire humans. A lot of locations around me have both kiosks and staffed registers. I used the kiosk once and thought it was annoying to work through. If you have a simple order like "A medium #3", then its an order of magnitude faster to order through a person. On the other hand, if you like to customize your burger, or order a several things a la carte, the kiosk might be better depending on the competence of the human at the cash register. (Of course, whether or not your customized burger or list of a la carte items gets made correctly by the kitchen staff is an entirely different conversation...)

sly010 9y ago

> They employ truck drivers as remote pilots for the "first and last mile" It would make even more sense to employ a "local" pilot with local knowledge for the first and last miles, kind of how tug-boats help large container ships in and out of ports.

caf 9y ago
Harbour pilots actually drive those large ships in and out of port from the bridge.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Parallels also to the rise in the demand for horses after the introduction of the railroad. The availability of long-haul transport increased transportation volume, but the "last mile" connection from origin/destination to the railroad depot couldn't be accomodated as readily. So: horses and carts. Variously: Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Vaclav Smil, Energy and World History -- of which there's a heavily revised edition out this year, Energy and Civilization.

foxylad 9y ago

If Uber is right about it's autonomous taxis, and Tesla's cars really will be able to come when you whistle, then last mile driving and docking are surely solvable problems. I'm generally an optimistic person, but I think autonomous driving is going to seriously disrupt our societies. I simply cannot see where the huge workforce of unskilled males driving trucks and taxis is going to be soaked up. The industrial revolution did it last time, but anything you can suggest as a potential equivalent (colonising Mars?) will be demanding smart flexible people - and an awful lot of automated systems. I'm picking the mass unemployment will lead to civil war in the US (where all those unskilled males have semi automatic guns) and universal basic incomes in more civilised countries.

catbodi 9y ago
You're fucking crazy
- ada1981 9y ago
  Exactly. Truckers with AR-15s aren't going to stand a chance against the robotic police force...
  - ada1981 9y ago
    Come to think of it, this would make a good comic or sci-fi film. A mob of former truckers, farmers and Uber drivers armed with bump-stocked AR-15's wearing Make America Analog Again hats and fueled on pillaged Soylent trying to overtake Silicon Valley and having to fight through an army of Teslas, Otto, Boston Dynamics, Weaponized Amazon Drones, etc.