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California's Governor Vetoes State Ban on Driverless Trucks

14 points by mattas 3y ago

bpodgursky 3y ago
> On the other hand, as the Associated Press notes, California Labor Federation head Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher estimates that not requiring human drivers in trucks would cost around 250,000 jobs. “We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety and jobs for increased corporate profits," Fletcher, who called autonomous trucks dangerous, said in a statement. "We will continue to fight to make sure that robots do not replace human drivers and that technology is not used to destroy good jobs.” At least they are being honest and not pretending it is about safety or consumer benefit.
- guerrilla 3y ago
  > and not pretending it is about safety > We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety [...] for increased corporate profits, Did you skip over that part of the sentence?
  - bpodgursky 3y ago
    Yes, it was obviously filler.
    - guerrilla 3y ago
      Says you. On the other hand, we have no reqson to think they don't value their (and their family and freund's) safety like everyone else.
- dangerboysteve 3y ago
  They can always smash looms.
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    The people who were smashing looms had their own looms. They were being undercut by automation and forced out of running their own one family business to working for a factory. The factory could also cut costs by employing child labour to crawl among the machines fixing breakages at risk of their limbs. That's capitalism for you. Are you really surprised people opposed this?
    - BurningFrog 3y ago
      200 years later, we are unfathomably better off materially, because automation was slowed to destroy jobs.
    - DrThunder 3y ago
      Right... because working conditions in communist countries are so great, totally zero child slave labor going on in China. It's awesome when you're forced to work and still starve right?
      - olddustytrail 3y ago
        This has nothing to do with communism, which hadn't even been invented at this point. It's about cottage industry vs capitalism.
        DrThunder 3y ago
        It has nothing to do with capitalism either but you decided to insert it because your pink haired sociology professor and Berkley told you so.
        olddustytrail 3y ago
        Of course it does, it was literally when capitalism replaced cottage industry. I'm not an American, so I didn't go to Berkley and in fact don't have a degree because I went out and got a job. Perhaps if you'd done the same you wouldn't have such a limited view of the world?
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Fletcher, who called autonomous trucks dangerous You were taken in by the selective use of quotation vs summarization.
jedberg 3y ago
> “We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety and jobs for increased corporate profits," [California Labor Federation head Lorena Gonzalez] Fletcher, who called autonomous trucks dangerous, said in a statement. We would obviously need to collect lots of data with safety drivers in place to determine how often they are necessary and how many accidents (both lethal and non-lethal) the trucks get into to determine if they really are dangerous, but this is a totally reasonable take from the head of the CFL. > "We will continue to fight to make sure that robots do not replace human drivers and that technology is not used to destroy good jobs.” Using union power to protect jobs just for the sake of protecting them is the thing that labor unions do that most people don't support. See the recent writer's strike for a good example -- many supported their desire for better wages and working conditions, but feelings were much more mixed on support for allowing AI to replace writers.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  You truly live in a tech industry bubble if you think most people would side with mass unemployment of truck drivers, one of the most common professions for men in the US, or want to consume AI-generated drivel for entertainment.
  - dventimi 3y ago
    Would their likelihood to side with mass unemployment of truck drivers increase or decrease if it were explained to most people that this would lower the prices they pay?
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Most consumers don't care either way, and many care about price above all else. Automated trucking means possibly lower prices, and AI entertainment does to. And depending on the source you look at, Truck Driver isn't even in the top 25 for men (it's mostly construction, HVAC, Pipe fitting, and related jobs). And in fact one source I looked at said that software engineering employs more men than truck driving (but that source was dubious).
spankalee 3y ago
I think it's very reasonably to say that the legislature is not the right place at the moment to make these kind of decisions and in inflexible ways. Whether or not safety drivers are better or required is something that depends on the technology and changes as it evolves. This is the kind of thing regulatory agencies are made for.
kstrauser 3y ago
Good. I don't see this as a safety issue so much as a make-work law. If a human would have to be in a self-driving truck at all times and ready to assume the controls on a moment's notice, that's basically human-driven with extra steps. Either the tech is good enough to be autonomous, or it's not good enough to replace a human driver in the first place. And as a driver, I don't think I'd want to be legally responsible for whatever boneheaded move a truck might take in the moments before I could regain control over it. "Hey, I know it was the AI that decided to swerve into the crowd of toddlers, and you only had 300ms to respond, but you were the one sitting in the driver's seat..." Now, I'm not thrilled with the idea of ending human jobs without giving those people a way to survive. Even if I weren't sympathetic to those hard-working people who are ready and willing to do the tough jobs that keep society running -- and I hope it's obvious that I am -- enlightened self interest means that I don't want all of to be unemployed and hungry. That's bad for everyone. I also wish we shipped more freight via train, which is cheaper and way more environmentally friendly. Making it easier and cheaper to ship even more via truck is probably the wrong path to optimize. But all that aside, I still think this is a well intended but ultimately wrong solution. Frankly, it seems like it'd be cheaper and more efficient to pay those drivers to stay home rather than pay them to perch in a self-driving truck.
- thegrim33 3y ago
  "Either the tech is good enough to be autonomous ..[]" - The issue is that the tech currently, categorically, is not good enough to be autonomous. There's no "self-driving" system that even claims to be a level 5 system.
  - dventimi 3y ago
    If Level 5 means there is no driver, then Cruise and Waymo already don't have drivers.
    - KerrAvon 3y ago
      Cruise and Waymo are level 4. https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update
grecy 3y ago
It's obvious that advances in technology have been "taking away jobs" for centuries. The automobile must have been hell on farriers, leather workers, stables and hay suppliers, but it obviously created mechanics, gas stations and all the rest. Asbestos miners lost their jobs en-mass, as are coal miners now. The writing is on the wall that self-driving vehicles are coming (taxis, transport trucks, etc.). We could argue all week about the timeline for when exactly, but the important thing is they are coming. The really important part of this is how will society handle the "loss of jobs". Are we already preparing for this eventuality? Are we gearing up to re-train truck drivers, are we gearing up to not have thousands of taxi drivers per city and all the stuff that comes along with that (added taxes, medallions, etc.) Do we want the protection of jobs to limit our use of technology? Should we block progress just so people can keep jobs that are not healthy for them in the first place?
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  Yes, we want the protection of jobs to limit our use of technology when said technology is proven to be inherently dangerous without human supervision. The difference between a Tesla driving into oncoming traffic and a semi driving into oncoming traffic is massive when it comes to potential loss of life. These trucks are not proven to be safe and we shouldn't pretend that they are. Laws can be revised.
  - dventimi 3y ago
    Who's "we"? Personally, I don't want what you're describing.
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    Human drivers are well known to be inherently dangerous! They/we kill 10s of thousands of people on US roads each year.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  > The really important part of this is how will society handle the "loss of jobs". Are we already preparing for this eventuality? Are we gearing up to re-train truck drivers, are we gearing up to not have thousands of taxi drivers per city and all the stuff that comes along with that (added taxes, medallions, etc.) Instead of fighting for jobs that are becoming obsolete solely so those people don't lose jobs, maybe their union should be working on answers to this question. I'm not saying I support these people losing jobs but, like you said, should "It'd take away jobs" be a reason we should never progress technologically? Even if it stands to potentially vastly decrease the amount of accidents non-truckers die in? While they die because they're forced to overwork and overwork means sitting for most of their waking hours? Instead of spending money on these kinds of battles the union could be working towards figuring out programs that could set these truckers up for other jobs or towards some sort of strategy that will cover their expenses until they get on their feet. But, then again, most of those would mean their priority is their union members and not just making money. Because one way they will likely end up spending any dues money on their members with the end game eventually being dissolving the union when there are no more truckers. aka, no more money.
kemiller 3y ago
Value of a human in the loop is not so much for driving but for eg fixing flats, clearing debris from cameras, etc. Less training needed, you probably only need one per convoy and they can do something else when the truck drives.
jeffbee 3y ago
The question really is whether humans can be trusted to drive a truck at all. As soon as the technology allows, human-controlled trucks should be outlawed on freeways in California.
bhhaskin 3y ago
It's crazy to me that we don't even have automated trains, and we want automate trucks? If we want to automate stuff, start with the easy stuff.
- thehappypm 3y ago
  Automated trains doesnt seem as valuable though. Trains are so much bigger than trucks that the costs of its operators is much smaller than paying a truck driver for 1 load
dogman144 3y ago
Andre Yang was a goober but we’re watching his stump speech about truckers getting unemployed en-masse by AI play out. Fascinating. His next part of the arguments was social unrest due to kicking to the curb one of the last $100k+ jobs for the average middle aged man outside of the information economy. More accurately - Jaron Lanier’s views are playing out, which got picked up by Yang somehow.
- thehappypm 3y ago
  There’s a major labor shortage. I applaud AI for taking people out of health-wrecking, monotonous, isolating jobs. The next generation of trucker will find work elsewhere.
  - dogman144 3y ago
    The current generation gets to have a lot of time and anger on their hands. But good for Waymo and co cracking the code on this intractable engineering problem finally.
Animats 3y ago
The California DMV still has to allow this. They currently prohibit on-road testing of autonomous vehicles with trailers or over 10,000 pounds. Right now, Waymo is probably the only autonomous operator with a good enough record to be trusted with heavy truck operations. Waymo announced back in July 2023 that they were abandoning truck testing for now, to focus on ride-hailing.[1] [1] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/07/doubling-down-on-waymo-one.html https://waymo.com/blog/2023/07/doubling-down-on-waymo-one.ht...
Simulacra 3y ago
I'm convinced that autonomous trucks are the way to go. Free from fatigue, bad training, bad driving, and all the other things that come with human drivers, it could save lives, and maybe even reduce cost for everyone.
- timbo1642 3y ago
  [dead]
- zolbrek 3y ago
  I'm not looking forward to seeing immobilized trucks blocking the road because someone got clever with a traffic cone.
  - mwint 3y ago
    There’s not much preventing people from doing this today. Maybe truck drivers wouldn’t fall for it, but the average American driver is absolutely vulnerable to a single-cone attack.
- Melting_Harps 3y ago
  Not surprised, as I said [0] Newsom wants to run for POTUS and he needs the endorsement and (more importantly) the money from the SV/VC king makers if he has any chance at doing it. >I'm convinced that autonomous trucks are the way to go. Free from fatigue, bad training, bad driving, and all the other things that come with human drivers, it could save lives, and maybe even reduce cost for everyone. This is peak HN techno-utopian thinking, that is only poassible due to a rather shallow analysis of the state of things: first, its myopic to rely 100% on FSD when they are currently colliding into things in cities that have favourable conditions for it (Bay Area, AZ etc...). Second, most of you probably do not drive much in middle America, the roads are often not marked and signage isn't entirely better. Sure there may be a way to overcome all of these short-comings in time when ML training becomes more refined and can do much more capable than it can now. But then you have a severe lack of connectivity in much of the US (hence why Starlink is such a massive game changer) and before you say 'well then just make them use starlink) I think Elon has proven himself to be unreliable in ensuring he can deliver services without some reason that only make sense to his deluded mind being a real threat. Honestly, if people want to take these kind of risks on the road then they need to at least be well informed on the matter: drive through the Rockies Mountains during an avalanche or even a blizzard, hell drive through Texas during one of their snow storms that takes out the entire grid--I've done all 3. You'll see why contingencies need to be in place, because modern logistics is a modern miracle and that relies on a myriad of moving pieces all working toward the same goal and even then things break. I'd be open to the idea of those Human piloted convoy methods, with a Human pilot to correct where needed, until things get to that miraculous inflection point where FSD is possible but we are so far away from that this needs to be taken serious because too much capital has been destroyed on things that quite likely will never come to fruition, and FSD being around the corner is one of them. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37514843#37516811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37514843#37516811
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
He’s running for President. He’s going to continue to veto things he MAY want and know some will have majorities anyhow. I basically take what he does for now to be about zero percent authentic.
- operatingthetan 3y ago
  Your metric for politicians is authenticity? I don't think that's the game at all.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    It’s more like my metric is outright gaming.
- deleted 3y ago
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someonehere 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
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adasdasdas 3y ago
Why is this veto controversial? If autonomous trucks are proved to be just as safe as a human driven truck, why should there be a safety driver.
- sharts 3y ago
  Seen the autonomy problems with Cruise?
- DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
  The key word here being if, i.e. iff.
  - adasdasdas 3y ago
    Ok, but the bill is ignoring the if which is idiotic
    - Robotbeat 3y ago
      It’s not. The federal government has safety requirements.
      - adasdasdas 3y ago
        I'm saying the bill would still require a safety driver even if AV trucks are proven to be just as safe
- for1nner 3y ago
  (edit for clarity: I'm ignoring the reality of current self-driving tech/safety for the sake of the philosophical argument) it's cheaper and faster to fire truck drivers and then hire the folks who can run the dispatch/diag/driving software - even if (philosophically) we should want to redirect drivers' skills/experience and retrain them, there's no economic incentive. So, utterly reasonably, unions and labor organizations and the general public push back against wanton job cuts and firings-due-to-obsolescence (though this is not an america-unique problem). I think largely as a species we've yet to crack the code on "hey this wave of tech is going to make X obsolete, maybe we should account for the folks doing X" - certainly one of the weak spots of free market capitalism.
klasko 3y ago
Good
hparadiz 3y ago
Are people on HN really that cynical to say that autonomous logic can't navigate a highway? These trucks are gonna be used for depot to depot transfers with human drivers taking over for urban / last mile destinations.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  Actually, we're cynical enough to know that all software has bugs, and new software has more bugs than old software. How about, before you approve a bill for human-less autonomous driving, you first use the software with human oversight until the software is old.
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  A truck has a huge amount of kinetic energy and when accidents happen they are usuallly not pretty. Couple that with the fact that US trucks AFAIK are not required to have several safety features required elsewhere in the world, such as the underrun protection (metal bars) and that self-driving technology is far from proven at scale, maybe it's prudent to be a little bit careful. Edit: after a quick Google, Embark Trucks[1] claims that they are the first to have driven 100k miles. That's a factor of 10 less than what Waymo claims to have driven. And there will be smaller outfits that will want to cut corners to get a piece of the pie. [1] https://embarktrucks.com/ https://embarktrucks.com/
  - hparadiz 3y ago
    Assertions about safety are irrelevant. This is not what this law is addressing. Furthermore anyone who has used even automatic lane tracking knows their concentration falls off rapidly when they aren't actually driving so a "safety" driver is a misnomer since it's likely in the event of an accident they won't realize in time. You're just adding another victim if there is an accident at all.
  - harles 3y ago
    Waymo has driven 20m+ autonomous miles btw. [0] The 1 million mile number appears to be rides with external passengers, but the first sources I found lead to dead links, so who knows. Anyways, quite a difference. I’m not sure where the threshold should be set for proving safety. I recall the number for provable safety being something like 20bn+ miles, so no one is close if it’s set there. [0]: https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/ https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/
thereisnospork 3y ago
Mandating humans in autonomous vehicles is something expected expected out of a distopia like 1984. Absolutely hair-brained policy suggestion.
- viraptor 3y ago
  Have you actually read 1984? Which part of it reminds you of the idea to assign human staff to new automation? (Whether for safety, or social reasons)
  - thereisnospork 3y ago
    The part where the government uses double-speak to convince the people, which as I recall is most of the book. The amount of double-speak behind the ''merit'' of this policy is maddening. The linked tweets 'saving jobs and protecting communities' translates to something along the lines of 'corrupt regulatory capture for the benefit of my Union's interest'. Makes my skin crawl to read it. I genuinely don't think I have the diction to adequately express the inanity of a policy requiring humans to babysit machines and the resulting loss of economic efficiency. Like I said, it is something I would expect to read in a dystopia, about how shitty and unfulfilling life is that the government needs to invent make-work jobs like sitting in automated trucks. Or in a history book about how some once-great empire has fallen "the consuls in their wisdom dictated that every slave must have an overseer, who is required to not work an only observe the work of the slave such that the working slave not accidentally deviate from his or her assigned tasks -- the obviously resulting crash in grain output was one of the contributing factors in the destabilization of the 8th dynasty". I am also reminded of wikipedia article I read recently, from an HN post, about how the Soviet union starved themselves (and china followed) because they put a psuedo-scientist in charge of their agriculture. >new automation I missed the part where this would've been a transitory policy with a clearly defined and reasonable exit condition? If so I judged too hastily, but I doubt it.
    - orwin 3y ago
      So this has nothing to do with 1984 then. ?Doublespeak or rather newspeak is a third of the book at most, and mostly because the main character works at the ministry of truth. Also newspeak is about removing words and simplifying the language. If anybody talk about 'newspeak' because new words were added, they're lying about having read the book or morons, I don't see a third option.
PeterStuer 3y ago
A human is psychologically incapable of paying attention for hours on end to take over from the AI at the spur of the moment. It would be easier for a human to just drive the truck.
- viraptor 3y ago
  Humans have a good sense for "things not going right" though. Crashing is one failure class. Crashing due to bad sensors/logic and continuing to drive the same way because you don't know things are broken is another class.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I also doubt that humans are very useful in self-driving loops. They might be able to solve some hardware failure cases of rig itself. But I doubt they will avoid most accidents at highway conditions. After month of nothing happening all day they don't really pay attention. Ships and planes are different as most of the times margins of reaction time is not seconds, but minutes... Giving enough time to person overseeing to re-orient themselves.
- tzs 3y ago
  For trucks on highways you might not need continuous attention. For example I've driven between Los Angeles and the Bay Area late at night, and between central California and Seattle late at night, and for much of that time there were no other cars near me. Just the occasional faster car that comes from over the horizon behind me, passes me, and disappears over the forward horizon, or the occasional situation where I'm the faster car doing that to someone else. With an AI driver I could have read or slept most of the trip with the AI only asking me to pay attention when we are encountering other vehicles or there is anything unexpected near the road, and probably covered 99% of the cases where something happens that needs an attentive human driver to take over for.
bentt 3y ago
If an autonomous vehicle kills someone, who is reponsible and what does that mean? I fear that unless the penalty for negligence is severe we will see a lot of bad situations.
- xnx 3y ago
  Probably a similar legal situation as if an elevator kills someone.

14 points by mattas 3y ago

> On the other hand, as the Associated Press notes, California Labor Federation head Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher estimates that not requiring human drivers in trucks would cost around 250,000 jobs. “We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety and jobs for increased corporate profits," Fletcher, who called autonomous trucks dangerous, said in a statement. "We will continue to fight to make sure that robots do not replace human drivers and that technology is not used to destroy good jobs.” At least they are being honest and not pretending it is about safety or consumer benefit.

guerrilla 3y ago
> and not pretending it is about safety > We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety [...] for increased corporate profits, Did you skip over that part of the sentence?
- bpodgursky 3y ago
  Yes, it was obviously filler.
  - guerrilla 3y ago
    Says you. On the other hand, we have no reqson to think they don't value their (and their family and freund's) safety like everyone else.
dangerboysteve 3y ago
They can always smash looms.
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  The people who were smashing looms had their own looms. They were being undercut by automation and forced out of running their own one family business to working for a factory. The factory could also cut costs by employing child labour to crawl among the machines fixing breakages at risk of their limbs. That's capitalism for you. Are you really surprised people opposed this?
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    200 years later, we are unfathomably better off materially, because automation was slowed to destroy jobs.
  - DrThunder 3y ago
    Right... because working conditions in communist countries are so great, totally zero child slave labor going on in China. It's awesome when you're forced to work and still starve right?
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      This has nothing to do with communism, which hadn't even been invented at this point. It's about cottage industry vs capitalism.
      - DrThunder 3y ago
        It has nothing to do with capitalism either but you decided to insert it because your pink haired sociology professor and Berkley told you so.
        olddustytrail 3y ago
        Of course it does, it was literally when capitalism replaced cottage industry. I'm not an American, so I didn't go to Berkley and in fact don't have a degree because I went out and got a job. Perhaps if you'd done the same you wouldn't have such a limited view of the world?
anigbrowl 3y ago
Fletcher, who called autonomous trucks dangerous You were taken in by the selective use of quotation vs summarization.

jedberg 3y ago

> “We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety and jobs for increased corporate profits," [California Labor Federation head Lorena Gonzalez] Fletcher, who called autonomous trucks dangerous, said in a statement. We would obviously need to collect lots of data with safety drivers in place to determine how often they are necessary and how many accidents (both lethal and non-lethal) the trucks get into to determine if they really are dangerous, but this is a totally reasonable take from the head of the CFL. > "We will continue to fight to make sure that robots do not replace human drivers and that technology is not used to destroy good jobs.” Using union power to protect jobs just for the sake of protecting them is the thing that labor unions do that most people don't support. See the recent writer's strike for a good example -- many supported their desire for better wages and working conditions, but feelings were much more mixed on support for allowing AI to replace writers.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
You truly live in a tech industry bubble if you think most people would side with mass unemployment of truck drivers, one of the most common professions for men in the US, or want to consume AI-generated drivel for entertainment.
- dventimi 3y ago
  Would their likelihood to side with mass unemployment of truck drivers increase or decrease if it were explained to most people that this would lower the prices they pay?
- jedberg 3y ago
  Most consumers don't care either way, and many care about price above all else. Automated trucking means possibly lower prices, and AI entertainment does to. And depending on the source you look at, Truck Driver isn't even in the top 25 for men (it's mostly construction, HVAC, Pipe fitting, and related jobs). And in fact one source I looked at said that software engineering employs more men than truck driving (but that source was dubious).

spankalee 3y ago

I think it's very reasonably to say that the legislature is not the right place at the moment to make these kind of decisions and in inflexible ways. Whether or not safety drivers are better or required is something that depends on the technology and changes as it evolves. This is the kind of thing regulatory agencies are made for.

kstrauser 3y ago

Good. I don't see this as a safety issue so much as a make-work law. If a human would have to be in a self-driving truck at all times and ready to assume the controls on a moment's notice, that's basically human-driven with extra steps. Either the tech is good enough to be autonomous, or it's not good enough to replace a human driver in the first place. And as a driver, I don't think I'd want to be legally responsible for whatever boneheaded move a truck might take in the moments before I could regain control over it. "Hey, I know it was the AI that decided to swerve into the crowd of toddlers, and you only had 300ms to respond, but you were the one sitting in the driver's seat..." Now, I'm not thrilled with the idea of ending human jobs without giving those people a way to survive. Even if I weren't sympathetic to those hard-working people who are ready and willing to do the tough jobs that keep society running -- and I hope it's obvious that I am -- enlightened self interest means that I don't want all of to be unemployed and hungry. That's bad for everyone. I also wish we shipped more freight via train, which is cheaper and way more environmentally friendly. Making it easier and cheaper to ship even more via truck is probably the wrong path to optimize. But all that aside, I still think this is a well intended but ultimately wrong solution. Frankly, it seems like it'd be cheaper and more efficient to pay those drivers to stay home rather than pay them to perch in a self-driving truck.

thegrim33 3y ago
"Either the tech is good enough to be autonomous ..[]" - The issue is that the tech currently, categorically, is not good enough to be autonomous. There's no "self-driving" system that even claims to be a level 5 system.
- dventimi 3y ago
  If Level 5 means there is no driver, then Cruise and Waymo already don't have drivers.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    Cruise and Waymo are level 4. https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update

grecy 3y ago

It's obvious that advances in technology have been "taking away jobs" for centuries. The automobile must have been hell on farriers, leather workers, stables and hay suppliers, but it obviously created mechanics, gas stations and all the rest. Asbestos miners lost their jobs en-mass, as are coal miners now. The writing is on the wall that self-driving vehicles are coming (taxis, transport trucks, etc.). We could argue all week about the timeline for when exactly, but the important thing is they are coming. The really important part of this is how will society handle the "loss of jobs". Are we already preparing for this eventuality? Are we gearing up to re-train truck drivers, are we gearing up to not have thousands of taxi drivers per city and all the stuff that comes along with that (added taxes, medallions, etc.) Do we want the protection of jobs to limit our use of technology? Should we block progress just so people can keep jobs that are not healthy for them in the first place?

MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Yes, we want the protection of jobs to limit our use of technology when said technology is proven to be inherently dangerous without human supervision. The difference between a Tesla driving into oncoming traffic and a semi driving into oncoming traffic is massive when it comes to potential loss of life. These trucks are not proven to be safe and we shouldn't pretend that they are. Laws can be revised.
- dventimi 3y ago
  Who's "we"? Personally, I don't want what you're describing.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  Human drivers are well known to be inherently dangerous! They/we kill 10s of thousands of people on US roads each year.
chankstein38 3y ago
> The really important part of this is how will society handle the "loss of jobs". Are we already preparing for this eventuality? Are we gearing up to re-train truck drivers, are we gearing up to not have thousands of taxi drivers per city and all the stuff that comes along with that (added taxes, medallions, etc.) Instead of fighting for jobs that are becoming obsolete solely so those people don't lose jobs, maybe their union should be working on answers to this question. I'm not saying I support these people losing jobs but, like you said, should "It'd take away jobs" be a reason we should never progress technologically? Even if it stands to potentially vastly decrease the amount of accidents non-truckers die in? While they die because they're forced to overwork and overwork means sitting for most of their waking hours? Instead of spending money on these kinds of battles the union could be working towards figuring out programs that could set these truckers up for other jobs or towards some sort of strategy that will cover their expenses until they get on their feet. But, then again, most of those would mean their priority is their union members and not just making money. Because one way they will likely end up spending any dues money on their members with the end game eventually being dissolving the union when there are no more truckers. aka, no more money.

kemiller 3y ago

Value of a human in the loop is not so much for driving but for eg fixing flats, clearing debris from cameras, etc. Less training needed, you probably only need one per convoy and they can do something else when the truck drives.

jeffbee 3y ago

The question really is whether humans can be trusted to drive a truck at all. As soon as the technology allows, human-controlled trucks should be outlawed on freeways in California.

bhhaskin 3y ago

It's crazy to me that we don't even have automated trains, and we want automate trucks? If we want to automate stuff, start with the easy stuff.

thehappypm 3y ago
Automated trains doesnt seem as valuable though. Trains are so much bigger than trucks that the costs of its operators is much smaller than paying a truck driver for 1 load

dogman144 3y ago

Andre Yang was a goober but we’re watching his stump speech about truckers getting unemployed en-masse by AI play out. Fascinating. His next part of the arguments was social unrest due to kicking to the curb one of the last $100k+ jobs for the average middle aged man outside of the information economy. More accurately - Jaron Lanier’s views are playing out, which got picked up by Yang somehow.

thehappypm 3y ago
There’s a major labor shortage. I applaud AI for taking people out of health-wrecking, monotonous, isolating jobs. The next generation of trucker will find work elsewhere.
- dogman144 3y ago
  The current generation gets to have a lot of time and anger on their hands. But good for Waymo and co cracking the code on this intractable engineering problem finally.

Animats 3y ago

The California DMV still has to allow this. They currently prohibit on-road testing of autonomous vehicles with trailers or over 10,000 pounds. Right now, Waymo is probably the only autonomous operator with a good enough record to be trusted with heavy truck operations. Waymo announced back in July 2023 that they were abandoning truck testing for now, to focus on ride-hailing.[1] [1] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/07/doubling-down-on-waymo-one.html https://waymo.com/blog/2023/07/doubling-down-on-waymo-one.ht...

Simulacra 3y ago

I'm convinced that autonomous trucks are the way to go. Free from fatigue, bad training, bad driving, and all the other things that come with human drivers, it could save lives, and maybe even reduce cost for everyone.

timbo1642 3y ago
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zolbrek 3y ago
I'm not looking forward to seeing immobilized trucks blocking the road because someone got clever with a traffic cone.
- mwint 3y ago
  There’s not much preventing people from doing this today. Maybe truck drivers wouldn’t fall for it, but the average American driver is absolutely vulnerable to a single-cone attack.
Melting_Harps 3y ago
Not surprised, as I said [0] Newsom wants to run for POTUS and he needs the endorsement and (more importantly) the money from the SV/VC king makers if he has any chance at doing it. >I'm convinced that autonomous trucks are the way to go. Free from fatigue, bad training, bad driving, and all the other things that come with human drivers, it could save lives, and maybe even reduce cost for everyone. This is peak HN techno-utopian thinking, that is only poassible due to a rather shallow analysis of the state of things: first, its myopic to rely 100% on FSD when they are currently colliding into things in cities that have favourable conditions for it (Bay Area, AZ etc...). Second, most of you probably do not drive much in middle America, the roads are often not marked and signage isn't entirely better. Sure there may be a way to overcome all of these short-comings in time when ML training becomes more refined and can do much more capable than it can now. But then you have a severe lack of connectivity in much of the US (hence why Starlink is such a massive game changer) and before you say 'well then just make them use starlink) I think Elon has proven himself to be unreliable in ensuring he can deliver services without some reason that only make sense to his deluded mind being a real threat. Honestly, if people want to take these kind of risks on the road then they need to at least be well informed on the matter: drive through the Rockies Mountains during an avalanche or even a blizzard, hell drive through Texas during one of their snow storms that takes out the entire grid--I've done all 3. You'll see why contingencies need to be in place, because modern logistics is a modern miracle and that relies on a myriad of moving pieces all working toward the same goal and even then things break. I'd be open to the idea of those Human piloted convoy methods, with a Human pilot to correct where needed, until things get to that miraculous inflection point where FSD is possible but we are so far away from that this needs to be taken serious because too much capital has been destroyed on things that quite likely will never come to fruition, and FSD being around the corner is one of them. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37514843#37516811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37514843#37516811

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago

He’s running for President. He’s going to continue to veto things he MAY want and know some will have majorities anyhow. I basically take what he does for now to be about zero percent authentic.

operatingthetan 3y ago
Your metric for politicians is authenticity? I don't think that's the game at all.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  It’s more like my metric is outright gaming.
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someonehere 3y ago

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adasdasdas 3y ago

Why is this veto controversial? If autonomous trucks are proved to be just as safe as a human driven truck, why should there be a safety driver.

sharts 3y ago
Seen the autonomy problems with Cruise?
DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
The key word here being if, i.e. iff.
- adasdasdas 3y ago
  Ok, but the bill is ignoring the if which is idiotic
  - Robotbeat 3y ago
    It’s not. The federal government has safety requirements.
    - adasdasdas 3y ago
      I'm saying the bill would still require a safety driver even if AV trucks are proven to be just as safe
for1nner 3y ago
(edit for clarity: I'm ignoring the reality of current self-driving tech/safety for the sake of the philosophical argument) it's cheaper and faster to fire truck drivers and then hire the folks who can run the dispatch/diag/driving software - even if (philosophically) we should want to redirect drivers' skills/experience and retrain them, there's no economic incentive. So, utterly reasonably, unions and labor organizations and the general public push back against wanton job cuts and firings-due-to-obsolescence (though this is not an america-unique problem). I think largely as a species we've yet to crack the code on "hey this wave of tech is going to make X obsolete, maybe we should account for the folks doing X" - certainly one of the weak spots of free market capitalism.

klasko 3y ago

Good

hparadiz 3y ago

Are people on HN really that cynical to say that autonomous logic can't navigate a highway? These trucks are gonna be used for depot to depot transfers with human drivers taking over for urban / last mile destinations.

lelanthran 3y ago
Actually, we're cynical enough to know that all software has bugs, and new software has more bugs than old software. How about, before you approve a bill for human-less autonomous driving, you first use the software with human oversight until the software is old.
janosdebugs 3y ago
A truck has a huge amount of kinetic energy and when accidents happen they are usuallly not pretty. Couple that with the fact that US trucks AFAIK are not required to have several safety features required elsewhere in the world, such as the underrun protection (metal bars) and that self-driving technology is far from proven at scale, maybe it's prudent to be a little bit careful. Edit: after a quick Google, Embark Trucks[1] claims that they are the first to have driven 100k miles. That's a factor of 10 less than what Waymo claims to have driven. And there will be smaller outfits that will want to cut corners to get a piece of the pie. [1] https://embarktrucks.com/ https://embarktrucks.com/
- hparadiz 3y ago
  Assertions about safety are irrelevant. This is not what this law is addressing. Furthermore anyone who has used even automatic lane tracking knows their concentration falls off rapidly when they aren't actually driving so a "safety" driver is a misnomer since it's likely in the event of an accident they won't realize in time. You're just adding another victim if there is an accident at all.
- harles 3y ago
  Waymo has driven 20m+ autonomous miles btw. [0] The 1 million mile number appears to be rides with external passengers, but the first sources I found lead to dead links, so who knows. Anyways, quite a difference. I’m not sure where the threshold should be set for proving safety. I recall the number for provable safety being something like 20bn+ miles, so no one is close if it’s set there. [0]: https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/ https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/

thereisnospork 3y ago

Mandating humans in autonomous vehicles is something expected expected out of a distopia like 1984. Absolutely hair-brained policy suggestion.

viraptor 3y ago
Have you actually read 1984? Which part of it reminds you of the idea to assign human staff to new automation? (Whether for safety, or social reasons)
- thereisnospork 3y ago
  The part where the government uses double-speak to convince the people, which as I recall is most of the book. The amount of double-speak behind the ''merit'' of this policy is maddening. The linked tweets 'saving jobs and protecting communities' translates to something along the lines of 'corrupt regulatory capture for the benefit of my Union's interest'. Makes my skin crawl to read it. I genuinely don't think I have the diction to adequately express the inanity of a policy requiring humans to babysit machines and the resulting loss of economic efficiency. Like I said, it is something I would expect to read in a dystopia, about how shitty and unfulfilling life is that the government needs to invent make-work jobs like sitting in automated trucks. Or in a history book about how some once-great empire has fallen "the consuls in their wisdom dictated that every slave must have an overseer, who is required to not work an only observe the work of the slave such that the working slave not accidentally deviate from his or her assigned tasks -- the obviously resulting crash in grain output was one of the contributing factors in the destabilization of the 8th dynasty". I am also reminded of wikipedia article I read recently, from an HN post, about how the Soviet union starved themselves (and china followed) because they put a psuedo-scientist in charge of their agriculture. >new automation I missed the part where this would've been a transitory policy with a clearly defined and reasonable exit condition? If so I judged too hastily, but I doubt it.
  - orwin 3y ago
    So this has nothing to do with 1984 then. ?Doublespeak or rather newspeak is a third of the book at most, and mostly because the main character works at the ministry of truth. Also newspeak is about removing words and simplifying the language. If anybody talk about 'newspeak' because new words were added, they're lying about having read the book or morons, I don't see a third option.

PeterStuer 3y ago

A human is psychologically incapable of paying attention for hours on end to take over from the AI at the spur of the moment. It would be easier for a human to just drive the truck.

viraptor 3y ago
Humans have a good sense for "things not going right" though. Crashing is one failure class. Crashing due to bad sensors/logic and continuing to drive the same way because you don't know things are broken is another class.
Ekaros 3y ago
I also doubt that humans are very useful in self-driving loops. They might be able to solve some hardware failure cases of rig itself. But I doubt they will avoid most accidents at highway conditions. After month of nothing happening all day they don't really pay attention. Ships and planes are different as most of the times margins of reaction time is not seconds, but minutes... Giving enough time to person overseeing to re-orient themselves.
tzs 3y ago
For trucks on highways you might not need continuous attention. For example I've driven between Los Angeles and the Bay Area late at night, and between central California and Seattle late at night, and for much of that time there were no other cars near me. Just the occasional faster car that comes from over the horizon behind me, passes me, and disappears over the forward horizon, or the occasional situation where I'm the faster car doing that to someone else. With an AI driver I could have read or slept most of the trip with the AI only asking me to pay attention when we are encountering other vehicles or there is anything unexpected near the road, and probably covered 99% of the cases where something happens that needs an attentive human driver to take over for.

bentt 3y ago

If an autonomous vehicle kills someone, who is reponsible and what does that mean? I fear that unless the penalty for negligence is severe we will see a lot of bad situations.

xnx 3y ago
Probably a similar legal situation as if an elevator kills someone.