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Lmfao, long haul drivers are very much on the chopping block this decade. Every major logistics corporation is lining up to snap up self driving trucks between

Lmfao, long haul drivers are very much on the chopping block this decade. Every major logistics corporation is lining up to snap up self driving trucks between warehouses. Short-haul/local drivers however yes, they will continue to exist for now due to the additional complexity preseneted by everyone and their mom's loading dock being all kinds of differently designed, often in ridiculous ways.

killtimeatwork 6y ago
> Every major logistics corporation is lining up to snap up self driving trucks between warehouses. Of course they're lining for it, but if no one delivers L5 autonomy trucks, then they'll still be stuck with drivers.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
I’ve been hearing about self driving cars since I was a kid a few decades ago. I have yet to see any evidence of a self driving vehicle that can handle anything other than the simple roads of sunny AZ or CA. Show me one that can handle a snow squall or heavy rain or missing signs and lane markers and construction zones, and I might think it’s possible this decade. Otherwise, I assume there’s a lot of work to be done.
- derwiki 6y ago
  How does Pittsburgh strike you? https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/26/5-companies-are-testing-55-self-driving-cars-in-pittsburgh/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/26/5-companies-are-testing-5... (Maybe they’ll finally figure out the belt system /s)
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > meaning that they’re capable of performing all driving functions autonomously under certain conditions, and they drive on public roads mostly during weekdays (both during the day and at night) with occasional testing on weekends “only during favorable weather conditions.” Since they don’t advertise being able to drive in less than ideal weather, I assume it means they can’t yet.
    - derwiki 6y ago
      I don’t want to be pedantic but you said: > I have yet to see any evidence of a self driving vehicle that can handle anything other than the simple roads of sunny AZ or CA. I’m not disagreeing about weather constraints in the ODD. But I don’t think anyone who’s driven in Pittsburgh thinks it has “simple roads” like Chandler, AZ. I should have been more explicit I was only responding to that aspect.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Yeah, that was news to me and I’m happy there are advances being made. I was responding to claims of automation hitting truck drivers relatively soon (in the next decade), and causing drivers to lose employability, which I think is pie in the sky thinking. If anything, I think truck drivers’ jobs will be resilient and in demand with all the move to delivery in the next decade or even two. It’s going to take a lot of time and data to prove the safety of self driving trucks and sort out the calculation of liability and who is insuring what.
  - mcphage 6y ago
    > Maybe they’ll finally figure out the belt system /s Look, they're just machines, they're not miracle workers ;-)
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  There’s a lot of work to be done. And 100 years is a really really long time in which to do it!
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Yes, 100 years is a long time, but the person I was responding to mentioned this decade, which I don’t find reasonable.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  There's money in it. Whether its transponders on the roads to help guide them, RFID tags in the cement for accurate lane location, beacons at terminals that share route information, or all of that, it'll happen because it will pay. We built the railroads because it paid. It's not about where we are, but where we'll be going.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  Those are all corner cases that won't convince spreadsheet guy to stop automating. And once automation does take hold, there will be plenty of incentive to solve them.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > Show me one that can handle a snow squall or heavy rain or missing signs and lane markers and construction zones, and I might think it’s possible this decade. And the next step would be correct recognition and behaviour based on the current location. Different countries use different colors and styles for road markings. Some use yellow lines in the middle, others orange in the case of redirection around construction sites. Then there are the cases where the lines are simply incorrect or out of date(which famously lead to the fatal Tesla autopilot crash). It is impressive how far the technology has come, but it's an area with countless edge cases and unpredictable situations coupled with high stakes if something goes wrong. I can see self-driving trucks being adopted slowly on specific routes, but a full switch not labeled as "pilot project" will still take a while I think.
  - wenc 6y ago
    I imagine for well-plied, fixed routes (interstates between two warehouses) there could be training runs (with a driver) to check edge cases along routes before going to prod. There could also be periodic retraining with drivers, as well as offline model retraining with the data that the trucks will be collecting continuously. This simplifies the problem significantly (even though it doesn't solve it completely -- there's always the 1% off case). I don't think one would just plop a general system on any route without human-supervised customization -- at least we're not there yet.
- wpietri 6y ago
  I get it. I think self-driving cars are way over-hyped, and I'm not expecting them to be real level-5 automation for 10-20 years. But I think trucking is different. There is a lot of work to be done, but we can cheat a bit. The first cheat is to only automate the long-haul portion. As anybody who has driven cross country knows, long stretches of American highway barely require you to be conscious, let alone skilled. The truck pulls over before needs to get on city streets and a human driver gets in. The second cheat is what Waymo is doing. If the car doesn't know what to do, it slows or stops and asks for help from a central driver that plots a path through the hard part for it. This works for trucking because network coverage on highways is very good. The third cheat is to work around the limitations. If the weather is going to be bad, the truck waits or takes an alternate route. If it gets into trouble like a freak snowstorm, it either proceeds very slowly or just stops until either conditions improve or a human driver can get to it. This approach isn't perfect automation, but it will significantly drop labor cost right away, and it gives you a lot of road-miles to iteratively chip away at the problems.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - root_axis 6y ago
    It's simply too risky and will be for the foreseeable future. The liability cost for a semi-accident is huge, not just in lives but in cargo and in the truck itself. Highways have decent network coverage but nothing close to the levels of reliability necessary to satisfy the actuaries. From a risk perspective, failure mitigation strategies like slowing or stopping are largely hamstrung by the same reliability concerns that prevent the vehicle from simply driving on its own, the vehicle may simply not recognize that the situation is dangerous until it's too late, that's without factoring in the reality that stopping or slowing can actually be extremely dangerous and can't be relied upon as a catch-all fallback. Additionally, I think you're greatly underestimating the practical problems involved in operating a remote emergency-on-call driver system, there's also some questionable economics around the idea of paying to keep someone on call when you could just pay them to drive the truck. On top of all that there are various other hard problems that need solving like fueling and security. You can be sure that automated trucks hauling valuable cargo will find themselves regularly waylaid by sophisticated criminals who will be greatly encouraged by the lack of a human element to resist their efforts. Truck drivers don't really get paid that much money, the risks just aren't worth it.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  outside of the major east coast (and maybe some west coast?) cities, US interstates tend to be pretty straightforward and well-marked. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw trucks driving themselves most of the length of I-70 in the near future. they would have to stop in some conditions where a human driver could keep going, but in ideal conditions, they could also keep driving when a human would be required to sleep.
tartoran 6y ago
That until pirates start attacking their unmanned fleets, then they’d have to hire people to keep an eye on them.
- toyg 6y ago
  There is a scifi novel or two still to write, in that sentence.
- kbos87 6y ago
  I’m more imagining roving bands of laid off truck drivers stopping the autonomous truck, robbing it, and setting it on fire.
  - eigenket 6y ago
    This is pretty much where we get the word "Luddite" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
  - tartoran 6y ago
    They could band together as pirates as their alternatives for employment become null. That or becoming digital servants doing shopping and other erands for the well to do for peanuts.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Hey you can attack a manned fleet right now. The driver isn't risking their life for a load. Not happening much. Why is that do we think?
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    I distantly know some people who work in logistics, and they tell me this already happens more often than you might expect. Example: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-54972784 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-5497278...
- XorNot 6y ago
mensetmanusman 6y ago
The U.S. will not spend the amount on infrastructure required to make this happen in the next decade. We can solve self driving, but it requires better maintained infrastructure, you can’t have self driving trucks which break down due to pot holes and black ice and no internet access clogging up the logistical supply chain.

killtimeatwork 6y ago

> Every major logistics corporation is lining up to snap up self driving trucks between warehouses. Of course they're lining for it, but if no one delivers L5 autonomy trucks, then they'll still be stuck with drivers.

lotsofpulp 6y ago

I’ve been hearing about self driving cars since I was a kid a few decades ago. I have yet to see any evidence of a self driving vehicle that can handle anything other than the simple roads of sunny AZ or CA. Show me one that can handle a snow squall or heavy rain or missing signs and lane markers and construction zones, and I might think it’s possible this decade. Otherwise, I assume there’s a lot of work to be done.

derwiki 6y ago
How does Pittsburgh strike you? https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/26/5-companies-are-testing-55-self-driving-cars-in-pittsburgh/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/26/5-companies-are-testing-5... (Maybe they’ll finally figure out the belt system /s)
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > meaning that they’re capable of performing all driving functions autonomously under certain conditions, and they drive on public roads mostly during weekdays (both during the day and at night) with occasional testing on weekends “only during favorable weather conditions.” Since they don’t advertise being able to drive in less than ideal weather, I assume it means they can’t yet.
  - derwiki 6y ago
    I don’t want to be pedantic but you said: > I have yet to see any evidence of a self driving vehicle that can handle anything other than the simple roads of sunny AZ or CA. I’m not disagreeing about weather constraints in the ODD. But I don’t think anyone who’s driven in Pittsburgh thinks it has “simple roads” like Chandler, AZ. I should have been more explicit I was only responding to that aspect.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Yeah, that was news to me and I’m happy there are advances being made. I was responding to claims of automation hitting truck drivers relatively soon (in the next decade), and causing drivers to lose employability, which I think is pie in the sky thinking. If anything, I think truck drivers’ jobs will be resilient and in demand with all the move to delivery in the next decade or even two. It’s going to take a lot of time and data to prove the safety of self driving trucks and sort out the calculation of liability and who is insuring what.
- mcphage 6y ago
  > Maybe they’ll finally figure out the belt system /s Look, they're just machines, they're not miracle workers ;-)
matthewmacleod 6y ago
There’s a lot of work to be done. And 100 years is a really really long time in which to do it!
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Yes, 100 years is a long time, but the person I was responding to mentioned this decade, which I don’t find reasonable.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
There's money in it. Whether its transponders on the roads to help guide them, RFID tags in the cement for accurate lane location, beacons at terminals that share route information, or all of that, it'll happen because it will pay. We built the railroads because it paid. It's not about where we are, but where we'll be going.
lordnacho 6y ago
Those are all corner cases that won't convince spreadsheet guy to stop automating. And once automation does take hold, there will be plenty of incentive to solve them.
alpaca128 6y ago
> Show me one that can handle a snow squall or heavy rain or missing signs and lane markers and construction zones, and I might think it’s possible this decade. And the next step would be correct recognition and behaviour based on the current location. Different countries use different colors and styles for road markings. Some use yellow lines in the middle, others orange in the case of redirection around construction sites. Then there are the cases where the lines are simply incorrect or out of date(which famously lead to the fatal Tesla autopilot crash). It is impressive how far the technology has come, but it's an area with countless edge cases and unpredictable situations coupled with high stakes if something goes wrong. I can see self-driving trucks being adopted slowly on specific routes, but a full switch not labeled as "pilot project" will still take a while I think.
- wenc 6y ago
  I imagine for well-plied, fixed routes (interstates between two warehouses) there could be training runs (with a driver) to check edge cases along routes before going to prod. There could also be periodic retraining with drivers, as well as offline model retraining with the data that the trucks will be collecting continuously. This simplifies the problem significantly (even though it doesn't solve it completely -- there's always the 1% off case). I don't think one would just plop a general system on any route without human-supervised customization -- at least we're not there yet.
wpietri 6y ago
I get it. I think self-driving cars are way over-hyped, and I'm not expecting them to be real level-5 automation for 10-20 years. But I think trucking is different. There is a lot of work to be done, but we can cheat a bit. The first cheat is to only automate the long-haul portion. As anybody who has driven cross country knows, long stretches of American highway barely require you to be conscious, let alone skilled. The truck pulls over before needs to get on city streets and a human driver gets in. The second cheat is what Waymo is doing. If the car doesn't know what to do, it slows or stops and asks for help from a central driver that plots a path through the hard part for it. This works for trucking because network coverage on highways is very good. The third cheat is to work around the limitations. If the weather is going to be bad, the truck waits or takes an alternate route. If it gets into trouble like a freak snowstorm, it either proceeds very slowly or just stops until either conditions improve or a human driver can get to it. This approach isn't perfect automation, but it will significantly drop labor cost right away, and it gives you a lot of road-miles to iteratively chip away at the problems.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- root_axis 6y ago
  It's simply too risky and will be for the foreseeable future. The liability cost for a semi-accident is huge, not just in lives but in cargo and in the truck itself. Highways have decent network coverage but nothing close to the levels of reliability necessary to satisfy the actuaries. From a risk perspective, failure mitigation strategies like slowing or stopping are largely hamstrung by the same reliability concerns that prevent the vehicle from simply driving on its own, the vehicle may simply not recognize that the situation is dangerous until it's too late, that's without factoring in the reality that stopping or slowing can actually be extremely dangerous and can't be relied upon as a catch-all fallback. Additionally, I think you're greatly underestimating the practical problems involved in operating a remote emergency-on-call driver system, there's also some questionable economics around the idea of paying to keep someone on call when you could just pay them to drive the truck. On top of all that there are various other hard problems that need solving like fueling and security. You can be sure that automated trucks hauling valuable cargo will find themselves regularly waylaid by sophisticated criminals who will be greatly encouraged by the lack of a human element to resist their efforts. Truck drivers don't really get paid that much money, the risks just aren't worth it.
leetcrew 6y ago
outside of the major east coast (and maybe some west coast?) cities, US interstates tend to be pretty straightforward and well-marked. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw trucks driving themselves most of the length of I-70 in the near future. they would have to stop in some conditions where a human driver could keep going, but in ideal conditions, they could also keep driving when a human would be required to sleep.

tartoran 6y ago

That until pirates start attacking their unmanned fleets, then they’d have to hire people to keep an eye on them.

toyg 6y ago
There is a scifi novel or two still to write, in that sentence.
kbos87 6y ago
I’m more imagining roving bands of laid off truck drivers stopping the autonomous truck, robbing it, and setting it on fire.
- eigenket 6y ago
  This is pretty much where we get the word "Luddite" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
- tartoran 6y ago
  They could band together as pirates as their alternatives for employment become null. That or becoming digital servants doing shopping and other erands for the well to do for peanuts.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Hey you can attack a manned fleet right now. The driver isn't risking their life for a load. Not happening much. Why is that do we think?
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  I distantly know some people who work in logistics, and they tell me this already happens more often than you might expect. Example: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-54972784 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-5497278...
XorNot 6y ago

mensetmanusman 6y ago

The U.S. will not spend the amount on infrastructure required to make this happen in the next decade. We can solve self driving, but it requires better maintained infrastructure, you can’t have self driving trucks which break down due to pot holes and black ice and no internet access clogging up the logistical supply chain.