I'm really looking forward to seeing long haul trucking automated. A few of the big brands are working on the systems, so I don't see why we won't see it on the roads in the next 5 years. Some of these drivers will shift into more of the last-mile work (manually driving a truck from the highway through the city / town to the factories) but most of them will be out of a job.
Nah. At least not the way you put it, that most drivers will be out of a job. I think that could take closer to 50 years than to 5 years.
Much more quickly, the automation could be doing the actual long distance "driving" (such as maintaining lanes and distance), while the human driver will sit back and supervise.
Without a human present, the first automated truck that "pulls a Wal-mart"[1] and wipes out a bunch of cars and people will result in the whole thing getting shut down. The human has to be there for liability reasons if for no others. It would be very hard for a company get away with blaming the computer after an injury accident.
This guy writes well, he didn't sleep thru journalism school. He's also a bit of a student of history, I enjoyed his exposition of the changes the trucking industry has gone thru.
6 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 20.5 ms ] threadAlready here in the Australian outback:
- https://medium.com/war-is-boring/giant-robotic-mining-trucks...
- http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-25/computer-controlled-tr...
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30098772
Nah. At least not the way you put it, that most drivers will be out of a job. I think that could take closer to 50 years than to 5 years.
Much more quickly, the automation could be doing the actual long distance "driving" (such as maintaining lanes and distance), while the human driver will sit back and supervise.
Without a human present, the first automated truck that "pulls a Wal-mart"[1] and wipes out a bunch of cars and people will result in the whole thing getting shut down. The human has to be there for liability reasons if for no others. It would be very hard for a company get away with blaming the computer after an injury accident.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/1...