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I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years, and I know there will be benefits, but has any government yet started planning for the relatively near-insta

I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years, and I know there will be benefits, but has any government yet started planning for the relatively near-instant transformation of the Trucker and Taxi industry once this "works"? The fall-out is going to be intense: * Fuel-stops are going to change completely, what's the point of half of the motels on long-haul drives when your car can drive all night and likely recharge automatically at a stop-point. * Reduced downtime on goods movement will impact uptime in every other industry. * Autonomous-vehicle-only lanes that line up with traffic timings creating a two-tier driving experience * Huge influx of unemployed drivers who I guess might get "chauffeur" style jobs. * Security issues, complex legal issues when there's accidents. * Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols". I know all this is extreme, but if history is studying the past to understand the present, science-fiction is studying the "future" to predict the problems of tomorrow.

givemeethekeys 5y ago
What will happen: - Truckers will go out of work in very large quantities. - They will go into other trades. - Many won't. Crime may go up if we don't figure out how to create more jobs for the type of people who chose trucking.
lostgame 5y ago
Yet another reason why Universal Basic Income is going to become a necessity. As each industry automates itself more and more, it'll be UBI or total riots and chaos. And thank God. People are not robots. They shouldn't have to spend their valuable lives doing repetitive, monotonous tasks for 8+ hours a day to barely survive anyway. So long cashiers, so long truck drivers, and hello future.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  I disagree with this. There’s a labor shortage in just about every industry right now, we aren’t in a high unemployment world by any stretch. UBI is not needed when wages are high and unemployment is low.
  - tharga8616 5y ago
    It's a matter of time. We automate to work less, not more.
boredumb 5y ago
Short of a decades long infrastructure project, there won't be any driverless cars outside of a few small areas of a few cities.
gambiting 5y ago
>>I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years That's sarcastic, right? Like "we'll have fusion power in 50 years"? Except that we might actually have fusion power in 50 years and I don't actually think we'll have truly driverless cars within 50 years.
- jefftk 5y ago
  Ten years doesn't sound sarcastic to me. With fully driverless operation starting in SF (and with several years in Phoenix), having it widely rolled out within ten years seems very plausible.
  - hwers 5y ago
    They told us we were supposed to have driverless cars in 5 years 10 years ago.
    - golergka 5y ago
      They also told us we were supposed to have mass produced electric cards in 5 years 30 years ago.
      - signatoremo 5y ago
        First time I heard of this. Who promised this 30 years ago?
        reportingsjr 5y ago
        That would have been right around the time of the gm ev1. A lot of people were expecting electric cars to kick off right after that, so OP's claim is not unreasonable.
        signatoremo 5y ago
        We’re talking about promise, not expectation. I don’t recall GM promised electric car mass production within 5 years of EV1.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
A blueprint for handling this can be cribbed off of "just transition" plans for folks in fossil electrical generation (coal) [1] [2] who are going to be out of a job in the next 5-10 years. Looking back at history, the productivity gains from automated vehicles can be split with the firms operating these fleets with those being transitioned out (as happened with the invention of the cargo container and Longshoremen's unions [3]). Another resource that covers this topic (in part) is The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger [4]. [1] https://www.justtransitionfund.org/ https://www.justtransitionfund.org/ [2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/11/03/for-a-just-transition-away-from-coal-people-must-be-at-the-center https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/11/03/for-a-j... [3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.1999.9668300 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.1999.96... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
- boredumb 5y ago
  Even if we migrate all energy production from coal to solar, solar panels require massive amounts of coal to produce. It's a shell game at best.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    > solar panels require massive amounts of coal to produce I'm would prefer to not derail this thread (as I really wanted to focus on the existing economic solutions for industry transitions), but this is patently false and can be determined as such with 5 minutes of using a search engine with terms around solar EROEI (energy return on energy invested) and the electrical generation mix of grids where solar panels are produced.
    - boredumb 5y ago
      Coal and Quartz are used to produce modern solar panels. No hand waving or EROEI can negate this fact. Takes less than 5 seconds "using a search engine" to discover this.
jordanpg 5y ago
If industry leads regulation on this, I predict a Challenger-like disaster that sets the self-driving industry back by decades. A fatal school bus collision or something like that. I hope the companies making these things are calculating margins for safety, tripling them, adding triple failsafes for everything, and not compromising on any safety standard, ever. But we all know they aren't. There's far too much money at stake. If there ever was a case for the government to proactively apply standards, this is it. Yes, there would be a delay, but it would be worth it, measured against the psychological and legal damage that will occur when (not if) the unthinkable occurs. Given probability p, and sufficiently large N and t, it is inevitable.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  There's already been an industry-shaking accident that led to vast reforms in regulation and program design: the Elaine Herzberg crash. I can't speak to every company in the space (and I can think of a couple that don't seem to have much in the way of safety), but all of organizations I've worked for are very diligent about safety and looking to improve. N > 1 here, so they exist.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    That crash did not have the kind of effect on the perpetrators that it should have had.
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      Neither did the challenger disaster. Both are continuously (and somewhat tediously) referenced in the introduction to every safety-related discussion, alongside therac-25 for software talks and the martian orbiter for units library talks.
- sebzim4500 5y ago
  I don't think a single fatal school bus collision will do much. After all, there are fatal collisions with human drivers all the time and yet there is very little public support for banning human drivers.
freedomben 5y ago
This is (hopefully) overly cynical, but having worked in and closely with politicians in the past, I highly doubt it. There are surely interest groups and think thanks that are working on the problem, and they will (if they don't already), have some legislation either ready to go or close to it. The politicians won't even think about it until it becomes an actual problem that threatens votes, and when they do start caring they will just take whatever they can get from friendly/trusted think tanks and try to ram it through. The bills will be thousands of pages long and practically nobody will read them before voting for them.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Good. Law should always lag social consensus. The power of the state should not be thrown around at the behest of unaccountable experts or a razor's edge majority. It should require the support and consent of the bulk of the people.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > Law should always lag social consensus. Oh fuck no. Social consensus is too slow. Look at the social consensus that tracking was bad followed expert consensus by like a decade, and really only started appearing after EU regulation.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      The "experts" also thought if Vietnam went communist the whole continent would. The "experts" gave us the war on drugs. The fatherless black household and the lazy black man weren't stereotypes until the "experts" tried to help minorities. How many lives are you willing to ruin and how much blood are you willing to spill getting things wrong? The power of the state shouldn't be thrown around on a whim or subject to subject specific industry fads and circle jerks.
      - eptcyka 5y ago
        I don't believe that there's a right answer that will fit all cases here - for issues like same sex marriage, you can find all permutations of social acceptance and lawful acceptance all over earth, yet I think it's hard to justify any position besides lawful and social acceptance.
mbesto 5y ago
> I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years If we get driverless cars (meaning there literally isn't a steering wheel), it may happen within 10-years BUT only for last mile stuff (or vice versa for trucking). It won't be an overnight event. We won't see truly driverless vehicles across the board for decades, if at all. TL;DR - It won't be as instant as you think.
thehappypm 5y ago
There is a labor shortage. Shifting labor from essentially low productivity things like overseeing gas stations to other industries is better for the economy.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  There is a labor shortage. Shifting labor from essentially low productivity things like overseeing gas stations to other industries is better for the economy. Only if you believe that every person is equally able and qualified to perform every other job that exists in an economy. People aren't cogs, and they're not universally interchangeable, no matter what the economic textbooks would like people on the internet to believe.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    Sure, but the labor demand is also large and spans a wide gamut of skills. Someone who used to be a gas station cashier can certainly find work elsewhere.
  - ydlr 5y ago
    > People aren't cogs Exactly. They are extremely adaptive, capable of learning and doing many things. Sure, not everyone can do everything, but there are also no purpose-built humans capable of only one job.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > People aren't cogs, and they're not universally interchangeable People aren't, but humanity is...meaning those drivers might not adapt to new work, but at least their children will. The Luddites had huge problems with obsolescence, but their kids got by OK. A social safety net could take the edge of the transition rather than just delaying the transition indefinitely.
- boredumb 5y ago
  “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well... Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
reaperducer 5y ago
has any government yet started planning for the relatively near-instant transformation of the Trucker and Taxi industry I can't say for taxis, but according to the newspapers, Texas has been running automated tractor trailers between Dallas and Houston (about 230 miles) for at least a year, and at least one other state has been doing it for at least two years. (Possibly Nevada, between Vegas and either Reno or Phoenix. But my memory is fuzzy on that, and I have zero confidence in Google.) Texas has also been thinking about building special lanes or highways just for automated tractor trailers.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That is in my opinion the way to go with this, to either adapt the infrastructure to make it work or to at least separate the self driving traffic and the 'normal' traffic so the two won't interfere.
- dont__panic 5y ago
  > special lanes or highways just for automated tractor trailers. I know that there's last-mile advantages to this compared to what already exists, but god damn I just cannot get over the fact that we've just reinvented trains with a much larger environmental impact.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    but they’re cheaper at first
  - clairity 5y ago
    the way to think of these is as instantly reconfigurable trains. in an ideal market, an enterprising entreprenuer would be able to install tracks on the most used routes and lower costs (and emissions). but we've long succumbed to corruption and financialization in markets (note that if risk is priced properly, capital wouldn't need to evaluate opportunities deeply, but would rather take every NPV-positive project available, in order of expected returns, in a large and diverse enough portfolio to mitigate systemic risk).
jacquesm 5y ago
Assuming it will indeed happen (which I'm not yet convinced of) you can add these: * cars sent to pick up stuff without drivers * kids sent to school with the car to circle back and pick up the parents afterwards * cars doing the minimum to stay 'in traffic' to avoid paying high fees for parking * far more miles per car because the biggest limiting factor (the presence of a driver) will wall away * huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
- snek_case 5y ago
  I think the cars picking up things/people without drivers could be the worst part. Imagine being driven in a taxi, and about half of the vehicles around you have nobody in them. I suppose it's not inherently wasteful since you never really needed to be in the car to go pick something up. However, if the price of delivering something by car decreases a lot, the volume of deliveries will increase a lot too.
- lkbm 5y ago
  On the other hand, if I were creating a fleet of self-driving taxis, and I could choose between 50mpg cars or 20mpg trucks/SUVs, I'd use 90% the former. People buying personal cars at the moment tend to choose the latter: https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/ https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/
  - tracker1 5y ago
    Better even... Delivery "cars" could be roughly the size of smart cars, with just a relatively big storage cabin.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > * kids sent to school with the car to circle back and pick up the parents afterwards Only if the parents are WFH and going to lunch. School starts too early already.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    Sending your kid by themselves in a taxi isn't an uncommon thing in China. I can't imagine that changing much with self driving cars, but I understand the American perspective isn't already used to such things.
trebligdivad 5y ago
I think it's the 'relatively near-instant' that's not happening; it's slowly happening in a few cities in limited routes; I'm sure it'll get better/wider but as long as it's an incremental thing then a lot of these problems aren't suddenly going to happen.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  A person's professional life lasts for around 30 years (probably much more for the people born on some interval from the 1980's to 2010's, depending on your country). How does that speed compare?
  - BatFastard 5y ago
    Going on 40 years here, just starting on a 10 year project. I hope I am not 10 years overripe!
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    30 years seems kind of short. I get that in some places (France comes to mind) it is common to retire pretty early. With the associated destruction of cognitive skills, unfortunately. But in the US I'd wager most people have a professional life more along the lines of 45-50 years.
danielmarkbruce 5y ago
It will be interesting, but I'd guess the "near instant" part is wrong. Goods need to be moved around - trucks are in constant use. It will take a long time to retro-fit trucks or manufacture new ones. It will still be positive ROI to have a human driving an existing truck for years. Taxis is harder and could happen faster, but I'd still bet it's a 5-10 year process.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
There's no need. This transition will be slow. A few cities first with a limited number of cars. And then it grows organically and probably initially quite slowly. It would take many years to upgrade all taxis world wide. The production capacity to produce the vehicles simply does not exist yet. So, the grid won't collapse. Drivers won't starve overnight. Legal issues will sort themselves out as early adopters encounter them, etc. Plenty of time for everybody to adapt.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  The cities that do make the transition quicker will have economic advantages, so I'm not so sure that the transition will be slow once a few cities make it. And we aren't just talking about the USA, we have to contend with large cities in Asia with worse traffic and more incentives to adopt the technology before American ones do.
  - dwighttk 5y ago
    Economic advantages along with a huge number of jobs destroyed
    - jliptzin 5y ago
      Huge number of *shitty jobs destroyed Isn't that kind of the point of technological progress?
      - bufferoverflow 5y ago
        Shitty or not, they are jobs. You failed to address what will happen to these drivers. Average age: 46.
        burrows 5y ago
        They will lose their jobs and will have to find new sources of incomes.
dham 5y ago
It's becoming very clear that we'll have to solve general purpose AI to solve self driving completely.
dwighttk 5y ago
Are there examples of a government seeing a large shift coming and preparing well for it? I guess there’s be fewer because they might not mention it after the fact, but…
emkoemko 5y ago
what do you mean 10 years? i remember Elon saying to buy a Telsa in like 2018 because in a year it would make you 60,000 a year by being a robo taxi? this has not happened?
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  I still get a chuckle out of the Elon fans who thought for some reason a huge fleet of robotaxis would somehow make them rich instead of become an instant race to the bottom on prices.
  - emkoemko 5y ago
    and why did they think a company who is there to make money would give you a device that will print you money... and not just keep it for them self's...
mejutoco 5y ago
I will believe self-driving car is near once I see truck drivers automated. If truck-driving cannot be profitable (with the advantage of no breaks, unlike humans, and a semi-fixed route) how could a personal vehicle or taxi be profitable? It seems it could be one of the first places to optimize. Trucks are so expensive, so they could be early adopters. I still think your prediction is too optimist. IMO (I admit, based on gut feeling) either we won't have it or the goals will have changed and it will only work in special roads (almost like rails for trains). See you in 10 years (if hn still exists!)
browningstreet 5y ago
I hope there are new limits to trucking and a concentration of those that are licensed to off hours. I-80, for instance, already feels like a truck route more than a human commute route. That said, so many of the accidents (jack knifing) there are trucks in wintery weather, I don't see that being included v1.0 of the new trucking reality.
- badthingfactory 5y ago
  I-80 always comes to mind when these autonomous vehicle discussions occur. I'll believe in autonomous vehicles when I see them driving across Pennsylvania during a winter storm. There are days where I seriously doubt an autonomous vehicle would be able to navigate out of my driveway.
- intrasight 5y ago
  Your comment makes me think about the interplay of driving and loading. A properly loaded truck can probably be driven by an AI in a way that greatly reduces jack knifing compared to human drivers. But what about improper loading - and if done on purpose to sabotage the endeavour.
mc32 5y ago
Also high-jackings. Not sure if automation would encourage it or discourage it. It’s not a big problem presently but who knows… trains in LA were getting looted in their yards.
nevir 5y ago
On the trucking side of things, I think it'll actually be a positive for the industry in the short term (a decade or two), before the jobs really start to dry up. Rail freight will probably be impacted by automated trucks sooner than road freight, weirdly enough. My guess about the industry's progression: * Automated trucks take over long haul routes (e.g. highway driving) between major distribution hubs, and previous long haul drivers move to middle and last mile routes. * Shippers begin to shift freight away from trains and towards trucks (because price of trucks goes down, speed of delivery goes up) * Automated truck centric freeways (or lanes) begin to show up, allowing for higher density and speeds of truck traffic. Price further falls, volume increases. More jobs created in short and medium haul trucking to handle increased volume of things being shipped. * Automated trucks begin to be able to handle medium haul (inner city between warehouses), jobs start declining. * Automated trucks begin to be able to handle short haul (last mile), truckers are a truly dying breed at this point.
- munificent 5y ago
  This sounds like slowly reinventing trains, but worse.
  - 1270018080 5y ago
    A lot of people in America suffer from car-brain. Car infrastructure is the only thing they know.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      Conversely, a lot of people in smaller, denser countries suffer from anti-car-brain, and don't appreciate the difficulty implementing comprehensive public infrastructure on an America scale.
      - 1270018080 5y ago
        And those difficulties are imaginary. If I wanted a high speed public rail line throughout Florida, a dense, narrow, flat state that's the size of a small country. Where is the scale challenge? Europe and America are about the same size. Why aren't you concerned about European scale? Why does it matter how your brain pictures administrative boundaries?
ffggvv 5y ago
saw this same comment 10 years ago..
scotuswroteus 5y ago
The existing government doesn't plan for that. Candidates for office and thinktanks do, and then when the threat materializes, they run for power, take over, and make a change. On the one wing, there are gonna be AOC types who say Green News Jobs is the play. In the center, you'll have the Yang Gang types who call for a UBI program that isn't paid for with carbon taxes. On the other wing, you'll have folks who say it's time to annex Greenland and mobilize paramilitaries. So we'll see
intrasight 5y ago
I think there's more near-term opportunity with trucking. I keep an eye on Aurora (AUR) in that space.
robotnikman 5y ago
In cities with good weather I can see this (it basically sunny clear weather here in phoenix all the time) However, I could not see this working well in places like Chicago. I have a hard time believing a self driving car could safely navigate a road mostly covered in snow. Either way it will be interesting to see what happens in the next 10 years.
dalbasal 5y ago
>>but has any government yet started planning for the relatively near-instant transformation of the Trucker and Taxi industry Let me put it this way.... How often do any governments have a plan for changes *beforehand?." Almost every western country saw "deindustrialization" at some point, predictably cutting off whole cohorts from wages, pensions and lifestyles. None had a plan. They watched Walmart behead high streets and then watched Amazon behead the survivors. No plan. War is, arguably, the thing we plan and provision for the most. Wartime refugees always seem to take us by surprise. I'm sure someone somewhere, in theory, had a plan for a pandemic. But when it happened, a whole lot seemed to be off the cuff. Stuff happens, then we plan and react. At best.
- amelius 5y ago
  We have a plan for climate change.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Given that climate change is already well underway, it looks more like a wishful attempt at reaction than any kind of plan.
asdff 5y ago
I think you overestimate government planning and the amount of infrastructure that will actually be built. For example, assuming autonomous vehicles will get signal preemption, when not even city buses get even signal priority today.
dogman144 5y ago
No, I don't think anyone with the possible means is preparing meaningfully. Yang did a good job of grokking the implications, but he wasn't taken very seriously and his messaging wasn't great I think. But the crux of it was solid - "XX thousand mid 30's truckers w/ iffy education all out of work, and that work was one of the last solid, fairly high paying long term jobs that demographic could land so how happy will that demographic be?" Buttigieg is a smart guy and he might be thinking about it per his DoT seat, but I haven't followed his takes on it if they exist. Watching some of the cybersec-focused hearings and comments from Ben Sasse also seem to indicate technical awareness. Overall, I do think some of the more tuned-in politicians have read some Jaron Lanier though based on the policy ideas that nod in this direction I've heard about and how they mirror his writing. He doesn't paint a great mid-term picture (tldr a lot of unemployment) but long term he offers some interesting ideas on how there might be a positive landing - data-aggregators collapse under the weight of their own data management costs vs. ability to really parse it well for profit ("siren servers"), automation/internet taxes which open up a UBI based on the robot labor, that sort of thing. This sounds really cynical and ageist but I do think we're in a standstill until Buttigieg and his generation are the senior leaders. Even breaching the surface of the pretty good certainty of what you describe (to include the sci fi -> real life mapping trend you mention, which I agree with) when watching these tech hearings makes me think we have some time to wait.
TheDong 5y ago
> * Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols". Some of the other points seem legitimate, but this one seems silly. It's trivially easy _now_ for someone to sign up for uber and drive people to random locations, and that doesn't happen. Presumably, with driverless taxis, we'll still have the same level of assurance we have now (use the app, app tells us a license plate for a valid car, that's the one you get into). Right now, you can get a driver who misbehaves, or uber could get hacked and send incorrect dropoff locations. In a driverless world, only the second attack matters since the chance of a malicious driver is gone.
zjaffee 5y ago
Lowering the cost of driving doesn't mean there will be less jobs in the transportation space, if anything it means there will be more jobs. Truck drivers jobs are the monitor and secure the shipment just as much as anything else. Taxi drivers have to keep their cars clean. And a lower cost of shipping will just mean that more stuff gets shipped in what would otherwise be a less efficient way, no different than how faster computers often just lead to less efficient software design.
deleted 5y ago
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tetsusaiga 5y ago
> I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years Anyone else wish there was a platform to place this bet on? Maybe with a smart contract? lol
- bwy 5y ago
  http://manifold.markets http://manifold.markets is one such place to do that.
  - tetsusaiga 5y ago
    Yo, thank you! very cool
throw8383833jj 5y ago
Right now there is a vast undersupply of truck drivers and it's only getting much worse within the next few years. There's so many truck drivers just about to retire. One presentation called it a truck driving apocalypse.
rootusrootus 5y ago
10 years is a pipe dream. It will be much slower. And you seem focused only on the easy cases, when it's the hard ones that will make it such a slow transition. Long haul drives are the edge case, last-mile trucking won't be anywhere near the first thing to get automated, people aren't suddenly going to want to sleep in their car to do overnight trips, etc. The biggest future change to fuel stops is electrification, not automated cars. Consider for a moment that Waymo is very early into the "hey, we are allowing driverless rides on very well mapped roads!" situation. How many years have they been almost at that point already? Now put that together with the typical R&D timeline for a new car (perhaps 6 years plus or minus), and the average lifespan of a car (11 years and climbing, last I checked). No manufacturer has legitimate driverless cars in the production pipeline. We're quite a lot farther than 10 years from seeing any consumer driverless cars on the road, much less a significant enough number of them to worry about 'two-tier' driving experiences. The EV transition is going lightning fast by comparison.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  If you are saying that people will still be driving cars in 10 years, then yes you are right. I wouldn't be surprised if 100 years from now there were still roads where it was legal for humans to drive cars. But we should expect that this transition will be very similar to the transition from horses to cars. The first cars were unreliable and unsafe and didn't work well on roads designed for horses. But as cars improved the advantages quickly became huge and demand for horses dropped quickly. The same situation is happening with Tesla. FSD is unreliable and unsafe today but once it hits an inflection point the advantages are so big more and more people become willing to accept the downsides.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    I remain skeptical. The differences between horse and car were dramatic. An automated car is still a car. I suspect it may have as many downsides as upsides, to be honest (similar to things like Uber making traffic worse, not better, counterintuitively).
    - 5y ago
munk-a 5y ago
I, personally, am waiting for the first self-driving car flash mob where everyone on 4chan decides to order a taxi to pick them up at mission & embarcadero (as an example) to swarm and DDoS intersections - or try to route a lot of requests to an intersection cut off by a parade. If self-driving cars were a thing last year do you think antifa folks would order a bunch of cab pickups for key intersections in the middle of the Jan 6th march?
- simsla 5y ago
  Sounds like a thing you can do with Uber already.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Humans would error correct - if there are too many uber drivers in the area already new drivers would drop the ride request. I think if you managed to remove all humans from that process you'd be able to get some truly bizarre scenarios.
Seattle3503 5y ago
I am a bit petty. After my last speeding ticket in a small drive through town I thought to myself "In a decade or two, these police departments will need to find a new way to fund themselves"
- 14 5y ago
  More like they will actually have to fight crime or find new jobs. I can only imagine how many we will need significantly less police if they no longer are required to patrol for speeders. I can not wait.
mgraczyk 5y ago
Hopefully governments do what they do best; get out of the way. There will still be plenty of jobs for drivers for the next 10-20 years. We'll see a mix of people retiring early, retraining, and switching into support and operational roles. Out legal system is extremely flexible and will easily accommodate self driving cars. It already handles more complex ownership issues related to product liability. There won't be a problem with fake taxis just like there isn't problem with fake mail delivery (delivering bombs for the "lols").
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  >Hopefully governments do what they do best; get out of the way. I really don't want a world in which governments get out of the way of food regulation, building codes, and other such things.
  - mgraczyk 5y ago
    Well I didn't say they should always do nothing. They are just better at getting out of the way than solving problems in most cases. Sometimes the issue is that nobody else has the incentives or means to solve a problem (climate change, food safety) Reorganizing the economy around trucker job displacement is not something the government needs to be involved in.
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      Providing worker retraining & job placement assistance isn't the government getting out of the way. They are humans and they will need assistance so we should provide it.
  - chii 5y ago
    It might sound bad, but most of those gov't regulations came about _after_ the disaster happened that triggered them.
tintor 5y ago
You forgot: * risk of cyber attack instructing all vehicles in one fleet to accelerate, steer into groups of pedestrians, or drive off bridges
la64710 5y ago
On top of all these , this particular announcement is nothing close to a commercial launch. It is like this forever beta phase where only Waymo engineers are getting picked up and nothing different than a thousand other startups that are running autonomous cars in SFO along various spectrum of autonomy.
tomc1985 5y ago
The unemployment part really concerns me. We are going to be automating so many people out of jobs and there is going to be no work or only minimum wage jobs out there for them. Whatever field the majority of them train to will be slammed with pay cuts as a glut of new workers gets added to the pool. We really need to start implementing universal basic income
- chii 5y ago
  The cost of UBI isn't low: so let me ask - what's the cost of retraining those displaced by automation to another job? Is it more, or less than the cost of UBI? Why is it assumed, a priori, that those displaced people cannot be retrained for some other useful job?
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    Because we will be destroying way more jobs than will be making and more than will be available. It will be highly disruptive to other labor markets and will cause a race to the bottom for workers' salaries.
mwattsun 5y ago
My feeling is that the trucker protests in Canada and D.C. were ostensibly about masks, vaccines and personal freedom, but a lot of people pointed out that didn't make sense since mandates were lifted, so they had anxiety about something else. I think the actual anxiety is about being put out of work by self-driving trucks. Truckers can see the future of trucking and don't see themselves in it. Nobody seems to be working on a plan for the millions of workers whose skills will no longer be needed. How Many Truckers Are There? Approximately 3.5 million truck drivers are employed in the United States, out of which 1 in 9 are independent, and most are owner-operators. https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/how-many-trucking-companies-in-the-us https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/how-many-truckin...
tonmoy 5y ago
This looks exactly like a comment I saw around 2008. In all seriousness, I don’t think it makes sense to waste resources on planning for autonomous vehicles as it is not guaranteed (probably not even likely) to have them in the near future
woah 5y ago
Not even joking, with enough time I'm pretty sure you could find an HN post from 2012 saying the same exact thing. EDIT: Actually it was very quick and easy: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1419897600&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1264204800&page=0&prefix=true&query=drivers%20unemployment&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1419897600&dateRange=custom&...
whyenot 5y ago
How about: Autonomous cars that can "tattle" to the authorities on vehicles that break speed limits or violate traffic laws. Maybe the owner of the autonomous vehicle would even get a cut of any traffic fines.
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
We'll have flying cars before driverless cars.
p1necone 5y ago
> we'll have driverless cars within ten-years It's not really clear what you mean by this - we have driverless cars now, but I assume you're talking about them being ubiquitous. My assumption is that we haven't really gotten any closer to generalizing autonomous car behaviour outside of very "clean" situations (like exhaustively tested routes in a city with known intersections) in the past 10 years, and I'm not sure we're going to make much progress on that in the next 10 years either, without a significant shift in the ways we're solving these problems. To echo another commenter - people were saying this 10 years ago too.
akhmatova 5y ago
I know we'll have driverless cars within ten years How does one "know" this exactly?
mellosouls 5y ago
I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years You certainly don't know that - at least on roads generally. You might have a reasonable hope that in some highly constrained environments they might be an option, but that's very different.
mlindner 5y ago
This isn't an issue, the changes will be gradual. The same arguments are made about EVs and not enough power on the grid, but those are similarly false for the same reason, the change will be gradual. Also people love to hate on capitalism but it does a very good job of adjusting for this type of thing, especially when changes are slow.
newhotelowner 5y ago
> Fuel-stops are going to change completely, what's the point of half of the motels on long-haul drives when your car can drive all night and likely recharge automatically at a stop-point. Impact will be minimal. Truckers don't pay much, and over the years, truckers business has gone down significantly.
- pedalpete 5y ago
  Can you clarify your comment? There is a shortage of truckers in the US (and many other countries from what I understand). What do you mean by "Truckers don't pay much"? Truckers don't pay much to whom? At the same time, motels aren't likely the big losers here as I believe most long-haul truckers sleep in the beds in the truck
pedalpete 5y ago
A few others to add to the list * reduced income for cities from speeding and parking tickets, and the reduction in people who give the tickets, all the processing that goes along with that. * availability of large lots of urban land due to lower parking needs (though there are many good uses for this like urban farming) * significant decrease in the need for auto repair shops. Partly because electric cars have less moving parts and are more reliable than ICE, but also because autonomous cars (possibly/likely) have fewer accidents. This may not happen all at once, but as they improve.. I used to have a much larger list, but I forget what many of those are.
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corey_moncure 5y ago
My personal wish is for the cars to go hide themselves inside underground parking lots when dismissed, and for us to recover hot asphalt parking lots into walkable towns and green areas.
taxyz23 5y ago
Way too optimistic in my view.
CapsAdmin 5y ago
I also keep thinking about how much of an impact driverless taxis would have on living in the city. If they are available 24/7 and cheap enough you could more easily live outside the city.
throwaway54976 5y ago
> history is studying the past to understand the present, science-fiction is studying the "future".. That's deep. Are you quoting this or its your own words, either case this is nice quote.
balaji1 5y ago
The changes you list here would take longer than 10 years. But yes the fallout will be intense. It is also hard to imagine anyone in government is incentivized to go after such issues. The huge lobby machinery that will influence the planning when the time comes.
otherotherchris 5y ago
"Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols"." That solves part of the unemployment problem, at least for the more photogenic "teens".
Gareth321 5y ago
Andrew Yang has been hammering this issue home for years. There are millions and millions of jobs on the line here, and "just learn to code" is not going to cut it. I suspect the transition won't happen overnight, but nor do I believe it's going to happen gradually over 50 year. It will be a catastrophic disruption to multiple industries, including insurance and finance, the entire oil industry, the entire delivery and transport industries, automotive repair/paint, and everything related to these industries. Which is basically everything. In typical human fashion, we're not going to do anything until everything blows up.
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  Here in Spain we just ended this week a 14-day illegal transport strike. Truckers all around the country stopped work completely without any minimal service, that meant no produce, no milk, no gas, no medicine, no nothing. Supply chain completely broken. They effectively blackmailed the government. I have ZERO pity or remorse to replace these people with self-driving trucks.
merely-unlikely 5y ago
There are huge lifts to get to mass adoption. Most of the current tests aren't even general autonomous driving in the sense that they are being conducted in specific areas only. Autonomous trucks are being tested on routes between specific destinations, cars in specific cities/neighborhoods. For example, it's going to take years (I'd put my money on 15-20 years at least) to get general availability in NYC. The roads are terrible, inconsistent, and often lacking in clear markings; the density of cyclists and pedestrians is high; and the regulators hate any kind of change, let alone one that challenges employment. Then there's all the infrastructure that needs building - charging stations, road improvements (I assume, for example, many highways will get some kind of infrastructure dedicated to making autonomous easier), maybe some last mile handoff to human drivers in certain jurisdictions, upskilled maintenance centers, warehouse facilities that can handle the presumably increased loads, communications infrastructure, etc, etc. TLDR the build out is going to be a much bigger lift than you might think. Just look at how slow the rollout of 5G is going.
cupofpython 5y ago
Autonomous driving is going to be an absolutely huge driver (lol) of consolidating wealth into fewer states, imo. It will be in a states best interest to create a tax structure around autonomous vehicles from other states performing services within its borders. Possibly a defensively high tax rate in order to promote in-state ownership of in-state autonomous vehicles.
torginus 5y ago
I think there's more stuff: * Inner city car transport will become more popular, since parking won't be a huge limit * Self-driving rideshare cars can outcompete there consumer counterparts on price - there's no need for a powerful engine, and a large battery since it will be used for small distances at low speeds. * Car ownership will plummet, which will free a ton of expensive parking lot real-estate to be developed * Ridesharing will reduce the amount of cars by 2x-4x, eliminating traffic jams * Owning a house with an 1 hour commute outside city limits will be much more feasible, as you can just sit in the car, and commute into the city, generally the value of inner city lots will go down. I think this is an absolutely monumental shift.
Camillo 5y ago
Not a problem for this SF launch, since most rideshare drivers have already disappeared.
michelb 5y ago
I don’t think we will have FSD in 10 years on most roads and in lots of countries, and I also don’t think cars with FSD will be allowed to drive everywhere. I think it will take years of trust after a real FSD comes to market. And only then will infra be changed for it. My dream is to call a car to a place near my home, get in, and automatically drive me to one or more locations, before returning me home. I’m 45, and I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.
sAbakumoff 5y ago
Don't you worry about a thing. Mr. Buttigieg is gonna sort it all out the most efficient way, just like he did it to fix the supply chain!

givemeethekeys 5y ago

What will happen: - Truckers will go out of work in very large quantities. - They will go into other trades. - Many won't. Crime may go up if we don't figure out how to create more jobs for the type of people who chose trucking.

lostgame 5y ago

Yet another reason why Universal Basic Income is going to become a necessity. As each industry automates itself more and more, it'll be UBI or total riots and chaos. And thank God. People are not robots. They shouldn't have to spend their valuable lives doing repetitive, monotonous tasks for 8+ hours a day to barely survive anyway. So long cashiers, so long truck drivers, and hello future.

thehappypm 5y ago
I disagree with this. There’s a labor shortage in just about every industry right now, we aren’t in a high unemployment world by any stretch. UBI is not needed when wages are high and unemployment is low.
- tharga8616 5y ago
  It's a matter of time. We automate to work less, not more.

boredumb 5y ago

Short of a decades long infrastructure project, there won't be any driverless cars outside of a few small areas of a few cities.

gambiting 5y ago

>>I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years That's sarcastic, right? Like "we'll have fusion power in 50 years"? Except that we might actually have fusion power in 50 years and I don't actually think we'll have truly driverless cars within 50 years.

jefftk 5y ago
Ten years doesn't sound sarcastic to me. With fully driverless operation starting in SF (and with several years in Phoenix), having it widely rolled out within ten years seems very plausible.
- hwers 5y ago
  They told us we were supposed to have driverless cars in 5 years 10 years ago.
  - golergka 5y ago
    They also told us we were supposed to have mass produced electric cards in 5 years 30 years ago.
    - signatoremo 5y ago
      First time I heard of this. Who promised this 30 years ago?
      - reportingsjr 5y ago
        That would have been right around the time of the gm ev1. A lot of people were expecting electric cars to kick off right after that, so OP's claim is not unreasonable.
        signatoremo 5y ago
        We’re talking about promise, not expectation. I don’t recall GM promised electric car mass production within 5 years of EV1.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

A blueprint for handling this can be cribbed off of "just transition" plans for folks in fossil electrical generation (coal) [1] [2] who are going to be out of a job in the next 5-10 years. Looking back at history, the productivity gains from automated vehicles can be split with the firms operating these fleets with those being transitioned out (as happened with the invention of the cargo container and Longshoremen's unions [3]). Another resource that covers this topic (in part) is The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger [4]. [1] https://www.justtransitionfund.org/ https://www.justtransitionfund.org/ [2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/11/03/for-a-just-transition-away-from-coal-people-must-be-at-the-center https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/11/03/for-a-j... [3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.1999.9668300 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.1999.96... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

boredumb 5y ago
Even if we migrate all energy production from coal to solar, solar panels require massive amounts of coal to produce. It's a shell game at best.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  > solar panels require massive amounts of coal to produce I'm would prefer to not derail this thread (as I really wanted to focus on the existing economic solutions for industry transitions), but this is patently false and can be determined as such with 5 minutes of using a search engine with terms around solar EROEI (energy return on energy invested) and the electrical generation mix of grids where solar panels are produced.
  - boredumb 5y ago
    Coal and Quartz are used to produce modern solar panels. No hand waving or EROEI can negate this fact. Takes less than 5 seconds "using a search engine" to discover this.

jordanpg 5y ago

If industry leads regulation on this, I predict a Challenger-like disaster that sets the self-driving industry back by decades. A fatal school bus collision or something like that. I hope the companies making these things are calculating margins for safety, tripling them, adding triple failsafes for everything, and not compromising on any safety standard, ever. But we all know they aren't. There's far too much money at stake. If there ever was a case for the government to proactively apply standards, this is it. Yes, there would be a delay, but it would be worth it, measured against the psychological and legal damage that will occur when (not if) the unthinkable occurs. Given probability p, and sufficiently large N and t, it is inevitable.

AlotOfReading 5y ago
There's already been an industry-shaking accident that led to vast reforms in regulation and program design: the Elaine Herzberg crash. I can't speak to every company in the space (and I can think of a couple that don't seem to have much in the way of safety), but all of organizations I've worked for are very diligent about safety and looking to improve. N > 1 here, so they exist.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That crash did not have the kind of effect on the perpetrators that it should have had.
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    Neither did the challenger disaster. Both are continuously (and somewhat tediously) referenced in the introduction to every safety-related discussion, alongside therac-25 for software talks and the martian orbiter for units library talks.
sebzim4500 5y ago
I don't think a single fatal school bus collision will do much. After all, there are fatal collisions with human drivers all the time and yet there is very little public support for banning human drivers.

freedomben 5y ago

This is (hopefully) overly cynical, but having worked in and closely with politicians in the past, I highly doubt it. There are surely interest groups and think thanks that are working on the problem, and they will (if they don't already), have some legislation either ready to go or close to it. The politicians won't even think about it until it becomes an actual problem that threatens votes, and when they do start caring they will just take whatever they can get from friendly/trusted think tanks and try to ram it through. The bills will be thousands of pages long and practically nobody will read them before voting for them.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Good. Law should always lag social consensus. The power of the state should not be thrown around at the behest of unaccountable experts or a razor's edge majority. It should require the support and consent of the bulk of the people.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > Law should always lag social consensus. Oh fuck no. Social consensus is too slow. Look at the social consensus that tracking was bad followed expert consensus by like a decade, and really only started appearing after EU regulation.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    The "experts" also thought if Vietnam went communist the whole continent would. The "experts" gave us the war on drugs. The fatherless black household and the lazy black man weren't stereotypes until the "experts" tried to help minorities. How many lives are you willing to ruin and how much blood are you willing to spill getting things wrong? The power of the state shouldn't be thrown around on a whim or subject to subject specific industry fads and circle jerks.
    - eptcyka 5y ago
      I don't believe that there's a right answer that will fit all cases here - for issues like same sex marriage, you can find all permutations of social acceptance and lawful acceptance all over earth, yet I think it's hard to justify any position besides lawful and social acceptance.

mbesto 5y ago

> I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years If we get driverless cars (meaning there literally isn't a steering wheel), it may happen within 10-years BUT only for last mile stuff (or vice versa for trucking). It won't be an overnight event. We won't see truly driverless vehicles across the board for decades, if at all. TL;DR - It won't be as instant as you think.

thehappypm 5y ago

There is a labor shortage. Shifting labor from essentially low productivity things like overseeing gas stations to other industries is better for the economy.

reaperducer 5y ago
There is a labor shortage. Shifting labor from essentially low productivity things like overseeing gas stations to other industries is better for the economy. Only if you believe that every person is equally able and qualified to perform every other job that exists in an economy. People aren't cogs, and they're not universally interchangeable, no matter what the economic textbooks would like people on the internet to believe.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Sure, but the labor demand is also large and spans a wide gamut of skills. Someone who used to be a gas station cashier can certainly find work elsewhere.
- ydlr 5y ago
  > People aren't cogs Exactly. They are extremely adaptive, capable of learning and doing many things. Sure, not everyone can do everything, but there are also no purpose-built humans capable of only one job.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  > People aren't cogs, and they're not universally interchangeable People aren't, but humanity is...meaning those drivers might not adapt to new work, but at least their children will. The Luddites had huge problems with obsolescence, but their kids got by OK. A social safety net could take the edge of the transition rather than just delaying the transition indefinitely.
boredumb 5y ago
“Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well... Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”

reaperducer 5y ago

has any government yet started planning for the relatively near-instant transformation of the Trucker and Taxi industry I can't say for taxis, but according to the newspapers, Texas has been running automated tractor trailers between Dallas and Houston (about 230 miles) for at least a year, and at least one other state has been doing it for at least two years. (Possibly Nevada, between Vegas and either Reno or Phoenix. But my memory is fuzzy on that, and I have zero confidence in Google.) Texas has also been thinking about building special lanes or highways just for automated tractor trailers.

jacquesm 5y ago
That is in my opinion the way to go with this, to either adapt the infrastructure to make it work or to at least separate the self driving traffic and the 'normal' traffic so the two won't interfere.
dont__panic 5y ago
> special lanes or highways just for automated tractor trailers. I know that there's last-mile advantages to this compared to what already exists, but god damn I just cannot get over the fact that we've just reinvented trains with a much larger environmental impact.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  but they’re cheaper at first
- clairity 5y ago
  the way to think of these is as instantly reconfigurable trains. in an ideal market, an enterprising entreprenuer would be able to install tracks on the most used routes and lower costs (and emissions). but we've long succumbed to corruption and financialization in markets (note that if risk is priced properly, capital wouldn't need to evaluate opportunities deeply, but would rather take every NPV-positive project available, in order of expected returns, in a large and diverse enough portfolio to mitigate systemic risk).

jacquesm 5y ago

Assuming it will indeed happen (which I'm not yet convinced of) you can add these: * cars sent to pick up stuff without drivers * kids sent to school with the car to circle back and pick up the parents afterwards * cars doing the minimum to stay 'in traffic' to avoid paying high fees for parking * far more miles per car because the biggest limiting factor (the presence of a driver) will wall away * huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles

snek_case 5y ago
I think the cars picking up things/people without drivers could be the worst part. Imagine being driven in a taxi, and about half of the vehicles around you have nobody in them. I suppose it's not inherently wasteful since you never really needed to be in the car to go pick something up. However, if the price of delivering something by car decreases a lot, the volume of deliveries will increase a lot too.
lkbm 5y ago
On the other hand, if I were creating a fleet of self-driving taxis, and I could choose between 50mpg cars or 20mpg trucks/SUVs, I'd use 90% the former. People buying personal cars at the moment tend to choose the latter: https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/ https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/
- tracker1 5y ago
  Better even... Delivery "cars" could be roughly the size of smart cars, with just a relatively big storage cabin.
HWR_14 5y ago
> * kids sent to school with the car to circle back and pick up the parents afterwards Only if the parents are WFH and going to lunch. School starts too early already.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Sending your kid by themselves in a taxi isn't an uncommon thing in China. I can't imagine that changing much with self driving cars, but I understand the American perspective isn't already used to such things.

trebligdivad 5y ago

I think it's the 'relatively near-instant' that's not happening; it's slowly happening in a few cities in limited routes; I'm sure it'll get better/wider but as long as it's an incremental thing then a lot of these problems aren't suddenly going to happen.

marcosdumay 5y ago
A person's professional life lasts for around 30 years (probably much more for the people born on some interval from the 1980's to 2010's, depending on your country). How does that speed compare?
- BatFastard 5y ago
  Going on 40 years here, just starting on a 10 year project. I hope I am not 10 years overripe!
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  30 years seems kind of short. I get that in some places (France comes to mind) it is common to retire pretty early. With the associated destruction of cognitive skills, unfortunately. But in the US I'd wager most people have a professional life more along the lines of 45-50 years.

danielmarkbruce 5y ago

It will be interesting, but I'd guess the "near instant" part is wrong. Goods need to be moved around - trucks are in constant use. It will take a long time to retro-fit trucks or manufacture new ones. It will still be positive ROI to have a human driving an existing truck for years. Taxis is harder and could happen faster, but I'd still bet it's a 5-10 year process.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

There's no need. This transition will be slow. A few cities first with a limited number of cars. And then it grows organically and probably initially quite slowly. It would take many years to upgrade all taxis world wide. The production capacity to produce the vehicles simply does not exist yet. So, the grid won't collapse. Drivers won't starve overnight. Legal issues will sort themselves out as early adopters encounter them, etc. Plenty of time for everybody to adapt.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
The cities that do make the transition quicker will have economic advantages, so I'm not so sure that the transition will be slow once a few cities make it. And we aren't just talking about the USA, we have to contend with large cities in Asia with worse traffic and more incentives to adopt the technology before American ones do.
- dwighttk 5y ago
  Economic advantages along with a huge number of jobs destroyed
  - jliptzin 5y ago
    Huge number of *shitty jobs destroyed Isn't that kind of the point of technological progress?
    - bufferoverflow 5y ago
      Shitty or not, they are jobs. You failed to address what will happen to these drivers. Average age: 46.
      - burrows 5y ago
        They will lose their jobs and will have to find new sources of incomes.

dham 5y ago

It's becoming very clear that we'll have to solve general purpose AI to solve self driving completely.

dwighttk 5y ago

Are there examples of a government seeing a large shift coming and preparing well for it? I guess there’s be fewer because they might not mention it after the fact, but…

emkoemko 5y ago

what do you mean 10 years? i remember Elon saying to buy a Telsa in like 2018 because in a year it would make you 60,000 a year by being a robo taxi? this has not happened?

rootusrootus 5y ago
I still get a chuckle out of the Elon fans who thought for some reason a huge fleet of robotaxis would somehow make them rich instead of become an instant race to the bottom on prices.
- emkoemko 5y ago
  and why did they think a company who is there to make money would give you a device that will print you money... and not just keep it for them self's...

mejutoco 5y ago

I will believe self-driving car is near once I see truck drivers automated. If truck-driving cannot be profitable (with the advantage of no breaks, unlike humans, and a semi-fixed route) how could a personal vehicle or taxi be profitable? It seems it could be one of the first places to optimize. Trucks are so expensive, so they could be early adopters. I still think your prediction is too optimist. IMO (I admit, based on gut feeling) either we won't have it or the goals will have changed and it will only work in special roads (almost like rails for trains). See you in 10 years (if hn still exists!)

browningstreet 5y ago

I hope there are new limits to trucking and a concentration of those that are licensed to off hours. I-80, for instance, already feels like a truck route more than a human commute route. That said, so many of the accidents (jack knifing) there are trucks in wintery weather, I don't see that being included v1.0 of the new trucking reality.

badthingfactory 5y ago
I-80 always comes to mind when these autonomous vehicle discussions occur. I'll believe in autonomous vehicles when I see them driving across Pennsylvania during a winter storm. There are days where I seriously doubt an autonomous vehicle would be able to navigate out of my driveway.
intrasight 5y ago
Your comment makes me think about the interplay of driving and loading. A properly loaded truck can probably be driven by an AI in a way that greatly reduces jack knifing compared to human drivers. But what about improper loading - and if done on purpose to sabotage the endeavour.

mc32 5y ago

Also high-jackings. Not sure if automation would encourage it or discourage it. It’s not a big problem presently but who knows… trains in LA were getting looted in their yards.

nevir 5y ago

On the trucking side of things, I think it'll actually be a positive for the industry in the short term (a decade or two), before the jobs really start to dry up. Rail freight will probably be impacted by automated trucks sooner than road freight, weirdly enough. My guess about the industry's progression: * Automated trucks take over long haul routes (e.g. highway driving) between major distribution hubs, and previous long haul drivers move to middle and last mile routes. * Shippers begin to shift freight away from trains and towards trucks (because price of trucks goes down, speed of delivery goes up) * Automated truck centric freeways (or lanes) begin to show up, allowing for higher density and speeds of truck traffic. Price further falls, volume increases. More jobs created in short and medium haul trucking to handle increased volume of things being shipped. * Automated trucks begin to be able to handle medium haul (inner city between warehouses), jobs start declining. * Automated trucks begin to be able to handle short haul (last mile), truckers are a truly dying breed at this point.

munificent 5y ago
This sounds like slowly reinventing trains, but worse.
- 1270018080 5y ago
  A lot of people in America suffer from car-brain. Car infrastructure is the only thing they know.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Conversely, a lot of people in smaller, denser countries suffer from anti-car-brain, and don't appreciate the difficulty implementing comprehensive public infrastructure on an America scale.
    - 1270018080 5y ago
      And those difficulties are imaginary. If I wanted a high speed public rail line throughout Florida, a dense, narrow, flat state that's the size of a small country. Where is the scale challenge? Europe and America are about the same size. Why aren't you concerned about European scale? Why does it matter how your brain pictures administrative boundaries?

ffggvv 5y ago

saw this same comment 10 years ago..

scotuswroteus 5y ago

The existing government doesn't plan for that. Candidates for office and thinktanks do, and then when the threat materializes, they run for power, take over, and make a change. On the one wing, there are gonna be AOC types who say Green News Jobs is the play. In the center, you'll have the Yang Gang types who call for a UBI program that isn't paid for with carbon taxes. On the other wing, you'll have folks who say it's time to annex Greenland and mobilize paramilitaries. So we'll see

intrasight 5y ago

I think there's more near-term opportunity with trucking. I keep an eye on Aurora (AUR) in that space.

robotnikman 5y ago

In cities with good weather I can see this (it basically sunny clear weather here in phoenix all the time) However, I could not see this working well in places like Chicago. I have a hard time believing a self driving car could safely navigate a road mostly covered in snow. Either way it will be interesting to see what happens in the next 10 years.

dalbasal 5y ago

>>but has any government yet started planning for the relatively near-instant transformation of the Trucker and Taxi industry Let me put it this way.... How often do any governments have a plan for changes *beforehand?." Almost every western country saw "deindustrialization" at some point, predictably cutting off whole cohorts from wages, pensions and lifestyles. None had a plan. They watched Walmart behead high streets and then watched Amazon behead the survivors. No plan. War is, arguably, the thing we plan and provision for the most. Wartime refugees always seem to take us by surprise. I'm sure someone somewhere, in theory, had a plan for a pandemic. But when it happened, a whole lot seemed to be off the cuff. Stuff happens, then we plan and react. At best.

amelius 5y ago
We have a plan for climate change.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Given that climate change is already well underway, it looks more like a wishful attempt at reaction than any kind of plan.

asdff 5y ago

I think you overestimate government planning and the amount of infrastructure that will actually be built. For example, assuming autonomous vehicles will get signal preemption, when not even city buses get even signal priority today.

dogman144 5y ago

No, I don't think anyone with the possible means is preparing meaningfully. Yang did a good job of grokking the implications, but he wasn't taken very seriously and his messaging wasn't great I think. But the crux of it was solid - "XX thousand mid 30's truckers w/ iffy education all out of work, and that work was one of the last solid, fairly high paying long term jobs that demographic could land so how happy will that demographic be?" Buttigieg is a smart guy and he might be thinking about it per his DoT seat, but I haven't followed his takes on it if they exist. Watching some of the cybersec-focused hearings and comments from Ben Sasse also seem to indicate technical awareness. Overall, I do think some of the more tuned-in politicians have read some Jaron Lanier though based on the policy ideas that nod in this direction I've heard about and how they mirror his writing. He doesn't paint a great mid-term picture (tldr a lot of unemployment) but long term he offers some interesting ideas on how there might be a positive landing - data-aggregators collapse under the weight of their own data management costs vs. ability to really parse it well for profit ("siren servers"), automation/internet taxes which open up a UBI based on the robot labor, that sort of thing. This sounds really cynical and ageist but I do think we're in a standstill until Buttigieg and his generation are the senior leaders. Even breaching the surface of the pretty good certainty of what you describe (to include the sci fi -> real life mapping trend you mention, which I agree with) when watching these tech hearings makes me think we have some time to wait.

TheDong 5y ago

> * Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols". Some of the other points seem legitimate, but this one seems silly. It's trivially easy _now_ for someone to sign up for uber and drive people to random locations, and that doesn't happen. Presumably, with driverless taxis, we'll still have the same level of assurance we have now (use the app, app tells us a license plate for a valid car, that's the one you get into). Right now, you can get a driver who misbehaves, or uber could get hacked and send incorrect dropoff locations. In a driverless world, only the second attack matters since the chance of a malicious driver is gone.

zjaffee 5y ago

Lowering the cost of driving doesn't mean there will be less jobs in the transportation space, if anything it means there will be more jobs. Truck drivers jobs are the monitor and secure the shipment just as much as anything else. Taxi drivers have to keep their cars clean. And a lower cost of shipping will just mean that more stuff gets shipped in what would otherwise be a less efficient way, no different than how faster computers often just lead to less efficient software design.

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tetsusaiga 5y ago

> I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years Anyone else wish there was a platform to place this bet on? Maybe with a smart contract? lol

bwy 5y ago
http://manifold.markets http://manifold.markets is one such place to do that.
- tetsusaiga 5y ago
  Yo, thank you! very cool

throw8383833jj 5y ago

Right now there is a vast undersupply of truck drivers and it's only getting much worse within the next few years. There's so many truck drivers just about to retire. One presentation called it a truck driving apocalypse.

rootusrootus 5y ago

10 years is a pipe dream. It will be much slower. And you seem focused only on the easy cases, when it's the hard ones that will make it such a slow transition. Long haul drives are the edge case, last-mile trucking won't be anywhere near the first thing to get automated, people aren't suddenly going to want to sleep in their car to do overnight trips, etc. The biggest future change to fuel stops is electrification, not automated cars. Consider for a moment that Waymo is very early into the "hey, we are allowing driverless rides on very well mapped roads!" situation. How many years have they been almost at that point already? Now put that together with the typical R&D timeline for a new car (perhaps 6 years plus or minus), and the average lifespan of a car (11 years and climbing, last I checked). No manufacturer has legitimate driverless cars in the production pipeline. We're quite a lot farther than 10 years from seeing any consumer driverless cars on the road, much less a significant enough number of them to worry about 'two-tier' driving experiences. The EV transition is going lightning fast by comparison.

gitfan86 5y ago
If you are saying that people will still be driving cars in 10 years, then yes you are right. I wouldn't be surprised if 100 years from now there were still roads where it was legal for humans to drive cars. But we should expect that this transition will be very similar to the transition from horses to cars. The first cars were unreliable and unsafe and didn't work well on roads designed for horses. But as cars improved the advantages quickly became huge and demand for horses dropped quickly. The same situation is happening with Tesla. FSD is unreliable and unsafe today but once it hits an inflection point the advantages are so big more and more people become willing to accept the downsides.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  I remain skeptical. The differences between horse and car were dramatic. An automated car is still a car. I suspect it may have as many downsides as upsides, to be honest (similar to things like Uber making traffic worse, not better, counterintuitively).
  - 5y ago

munk-a 5y ago

I, personally, am waiting for the first self-driving car flash mob where everyone on 4chan decides to order a taxi to pick them up at mission & embarcadero (as an example) to swarm and DDoS intersections - or try to route a lot of requests to an intersection cut off by a parade. If self-driving cars were a thing last year do you think antifa folks would order a bunch of cab pickups for key intersections in the middle of the Jan 6th march?

simsla 5y ago
Sounds like a thing you can do with Uber already.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Humans would error correct - if there are too many uber drivers in the area already new drivers would drop the ride request. I think if you managed to remove all humans from that process you'd be able to get some truly bizarre scenarios.

Seattle3503 5y ago

I am a bit petty. After my last speeding ticket in a small drive through town I thought to myself "In a decade or two, these police departments will need to find a new way to fund themselves"

14 5y ago
More like they will actually have to fight crime or find new jobs. I can only imagine how many we will need significantly less police if they no longer are required to patrol for speeders. I can not wait.

mgraczyk 5y ago

Hopefully governments do what they do best; get out of the way. There will still be plenty of jobs for drivers for the next 10-20 years. We'll see a mix of people retiring early, retraining, and switching into support and operational roles. Out legal system is extremely flexible and will easily accommodate self driving cars. It already handles more complex ownership issues related to product liability. There won't be a problem with fake taxis just like there isn't problem with fake mail delivery (delivering bombs for the "lols").

JaimeThompson 5y ago
>Hopefully governments do what they do best; get out of the way. I really don't want a world in which governments get out of the way of food regulation, building codes, and other such things.
- mgraczyk 5y ago
  Well I didn't say they should always do nothing. They are just better at getting out of the way than solving problems in most cases. Sometimes the issue is that nobody else has the incentives or means to solve a problem (climate change, food safety) Reorganizing the economy around trucker job displacement is not something the government needs to be involved in.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    Providing worker retraining & job placement assistance isn't the government getting out of the way. They are humans and they will need assistance so we should provide it.
- chii 5y ago
  It might sound bad, but most of those gov't regulations came about _after_ the disaster happened that triggered them.

tintor 5y ago

You forgot: * risk of cyber attack instructing all vehicles in one fleet to accelerate, steer into groups of pedestrians, or drive off bridges

la64710 5y ago

On top of all these , this particular announcement is nothing close to a commercial launch. It is like this forever beta phase where only Waymo engineers are getting picked up and nothing different than a thousand other startups that are running autonomous cars in SFO along various spectrum of autonomy.

tomc1985 5y ago

The unemployment part really concerns me. We are going to be automating so many people out of jobs and there is going to be no work or only minimum wage jobs out there for them. Whatever field the majority of them train to will be slammed with pay cuts as a glut of new workers gets added to the pool. We really need to start implementing universal basic income

chii 5y ago
The cost of UBI isn't low: so let me ask - what's the cost of retraining those displaced by automation to another job? Is it more, or less than the cost of UBI? Why is it assumed, a priori, that those displaced people cannot be retrained for some other useful job?
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Because we will be destroying way more jobs than will be making and more than will be available. It will be highly disruptive to other labor markets and will cause a race to the bottom for workers' salaries.

mwattsun 5y ago

My feeling is that the trucker protests in Canada and D.C. were ostensibly about masks, vaccines and personal freedom, but a lot of people pointed out that didn't make sense since mandates were lifted, so they had anxiety about something else. I think the actual anxiety is about being put out of work by self-driving trucks. Truckers can see the future of trucking and don't see themselves in it. Nobody seems to be working on a plan for the millions of workers whose skills will no longer be needed. How Many Truckers Are There? Approximately 3.5 million truck drivers are employed in the United States, out of which 1 in 9 are independent, and most are owner-operators. https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/how-many-trucking-companies-in-the-us https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/how-many-truckin...

tonmoy 5y ago

This looks exactly like a comment I saw around 2008. In all seriousness, I don’t think it makes sense to waste resources on planning for autonomous vehicles as it is not guaranteed (probably not even likely) to have them in the near future

woah 5y ago

Not even joking, with enough time I'm pretty sure you could find an HN post from 2012 saying the same exact thing. EDIT: Actually it was very quick and easy: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1419897600&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1264204800&page=0&prefix=true&query=drivers%20unemployment&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1419897600&dateRange=custom&...

whyenot 5y ago

How about: Autonomous cars that can "tattle" to the authorities on vehicles that break speed limits or violate traffic laws. Maybe the owner of the autonomous vehicle would even get a cut of any traffic fines.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

We'll have flying cars before driverless cars.

p1necone 5y ago

> we'll have driverless cars within ten-years It's not really clear what you mean by this - we have driverless cars now, but I assume you're talking about them being ubiquitous. My assumption is that we haven't really gotten any closer to generalizing autonomous car behaviour outside of very "clean" situations (like exhaustively tested routes in a city with known intersections) in the past 10 years, and I'm not sure we're going to make much progress on that in the next 10 years either, without a significant shift in the ways we're solving these problems. To echo another commenter - people were saying this 10 years ago too.

akhmatova 5y ago

I know we'll have driverless cars within ten years How does one "know" this exactly?

mellosouls 5y ago

I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years You certainly don't know that - at least on roads generally. You might have a reasonable hope that in some highly constrained environments they might be an option, but that's very different.

mlindner 5y ago

This isn't an issue, the changes will be gradual. The same arguments are made about EVs and not enough power on the grid, but those are similarly false for the same reason, the change will be gradual. Also people love to hate on capitalism but it does a very good job of adjusting for this type of thing, especially when changes are slow.

newhotelowner 5y ago

> Fuel-stops are going to change completely, what's the point of half of the motels on long-haul drives when your car can drive all night and likely recharge automatically at a stop-point. Impact will be minimal. Truckers don't pay much, and over the years, truckers business has gone down significantly.

pedalpete 5y ago
Can you clarify your comment? There is a shortage of truckers in the US (and many other countries from what I understand). What do you mean by "Truckers don't pay much"? Truckers don't pay much to whom? At the same time, motels aren't likely the big losers here as I believe most long-haul truckers sleep in the beds in the truck

pedalpete 5y ago

A few others to add to the list * reduced income for cities from speeding and parking tickets, and the reduction in people who give the tickets, all the processing that goes along with that. * availability of large lots of urban land due to lower parking needs (though there are many good uses for this like urban farming) * significant decrease in the need for auto repair shops. Partly because electric cars have less moving parts and are more reliable than ICE, but also because autonomous cars (possibly/likely) have fewer accidents. This may not happen all at once, but as they improve.. I used to have a much larger list, but I forget what many of those are.

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corey_moncure 5y ago

My personal wish is for the cars to go hide themselves inside underground parking lots when dismissed, and for us to recover hot asphalt parking lots into walkable towns and green areas.

taxyz23 5y ago

Way too optimistic in my view.

CapsAdmin 5y ago

I also keep thinking about how much of an impact driverless taxis would have on living in the city. If they are available 24/7 and cheap enough you could more easily live outside the city.

throwaway54976 5y ago

> history is studying the past to understand the present, science-fiction is studying the "future".. That's deep. Are you quoting this or its your own words, either case this is nice quote.

balaji1 5y ago

The changes you list here would take longer than 10 years. But yes the fallout will be intense. It is also hard to imagine anyone in government is incentivized to go after such issues. The huge lobby machinery that will influence the planning when the time comes.

otherotherchris 5y ago

"Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols"." That solves part of the unemployment problem, at least for the more photogenic "teens".

Gareth321 5y ago

Andrew Yang has been hammering this issue home for years. There are millions and millions of jobs on the line here, and "just learn to code" is not going to cut it. I suspect the transition won't happen overnight, but nor do I believe it's going to happen gradually over 50 year. It will be a catastrophic disruption to multiple industries, including insurance and finance, the entire oil industry, the entire delivery and transport industries, automotive repair/paint, and everything related to these industries. Which is basically everything. In typical human fashion, we're not going to do anything until everything blows up.

ricardobayes 5y ago
Here in Spain we just ended this week a 14-day illegal transport strike. Truckers all around the country stopped work completely without any minimal service, that meant no produce, no milk, no gas, no medicine, no nothing. Supply chain completely broken. They effectively blackmailed the government. I have ZERO pity or remorse to replace these people with self-driving trucks.

merely-unlikely 5y ago

There are huge lifts to get to mass adoption. Most of the current tests aren't even general autonomous driving in the sense that they are being conducted in specific areas only. Autonomous trucks are being tested on routes between specific destinations, cars in specific cities/neighborhoods. For example, it's going to take years (I'd put my money on 15-20 years at least) to get general availability in NYC. The roads are terrible, inconsistent, and often lacking in clear markings; the density of cyclists and pedestrians is high; and the regulators hate any kind of change, let alone one that challenges employment. Then there's all the infrastructure that needs building - charging stations, road improvements (I assume, for example, many highways will get some kind of infrastructure dedicated to making autonomous easier), maybe some last mile handoff to human drivers in certain jurisdictions, upskilled maintenance centers, warehouse facilities that can handle the presumably increased loads, communications infrastructure, etc, etc. TLDR the build out is going to be a much bigger lift than you might think. Just look at how slow the rollout of 5G is going.

cupofpython 5y ago

Autonomous driving is going to be an absolutely huge driver (lol) of consolidating wealth into fewer states, imo. It will be in a states best interest to create a tax structure around autonomous vehicles from other states performing services within its borders. Possibly a defensively high tax rate in order to promote in-state ownership of in-state autonomous vehicles.

torginus 5y ago

I think there's more stuff: * Inner city car transport will become more popular, since parking won't be a huge limit * Self-driving rideshare cars can outcompete there consumer counterparts on price - there's no need for a powerful engine, and a large battery since it will be used for small distances at low speeds. * Car ownership will plummet, which will free a ton of expensive parking lot real-estate to be developed * Ridesharing will reduce the amount of cars by 2x-4x, eliminating traffic jams * Owning a house with an 1 hour commute outside city limits will be much more feasible, as you can just sit in the car, and commute into the city, generally the value of inner city lots will go down. I think this is an absolutely monumental shift.

Camillo 5y ago

Not a problem for this SF launch, since most rideshare drivers have already disappeared.

michelb 5y ago

I don’t think we will have FSD in 10 years on most roads and in lots of countries, and I also don’t think cars with FSD will be allowed to drive everywhere. I think it will take years of trust after a real FSD comes to market. And only then will infra be changed for it. My dream is to call a car to a place near my home, get in, and automatically drive me to one or more locations, before returning me home. I’m 45, and I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.

sAbakumoff 5y ago

Don't you worry about a thing. Mr. Buttigieg is gonna sort it all out the most efficient way, just like he did it to fix the supply chain!