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.
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.
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.
I'm convinced that automated trains are the way to go.
Way more energy efficient per cargo pound mile. Technology already exists. Can easily ge electrified without expensive batteries that need replacing every few years.
Why wouldn't it be both in this case? A train obviously can't go into as many areas as a truck for one. But more straightforwardly than that, non-automated trains and trucks both exist today and fulfill different roles. Why wouldn't it be the same for ai piloted versions of each?
For the same reason as driveless cars are not everywhere. Also, an accident caused by a truck makes way more damage as the one caused by a car.
I agree with trains, way more safe thanks to the rails and less environment to take into account by the AI.
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.
(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.
Yea totally, earth spins much faster these days and its difficult to keep up. Numerous studies have shown that, past a certain age, retraining is almost pointless, younger folks still have a chance. But, no matter what, we need to push back against bad faith stuff like this, while we figure out our social problems.
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.
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.
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.
Every single day there are millions of people using the self driving features on various vehicles with zero issues.
I don't really understand what you want here. If you claim that a person in one of these vehicles will increase safety I am sceptical. Concentration falls off drastically when you're not actively driving.
It is the other way round actually. There are no reports from L2 (and there are no other systems in the field in numbers) because people take over before something happens. If the drivers would not have been there, we'd see all those accidents.
I'm cynical/experienced enough to know that the USA is run by oligarchs who don't give a shit about normal people. This results in regulations regarding safety to be written in a business friendly, and not people friendly, manner.
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.
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.
> translates to something along the lines of 'corrupt regulatory capture for the benefit of my Union's interest'
And you don't think the veto translates to something along the lines of 'corrupt regulatory capture for the benefit of tech companies'? Just because you don't like the proposed solution doesn't make it double speak for something you think.
> where the government uses double-speak to convince the people
It was used to control the narrative/population, not convince people - everyone knew it's obvious BS. But there the government was implementing totalitarian system squashing opposition. Here, we've got agreement from majority of both the government and population and a veto from a single person higher up. It's almost the complete opposite of the book.
> how shitty and unfulfilling life is that the government needs to invent make-work jobs like sitting in automated trucks
Wait until you hear about mining and farming subsidies in lots of countries and how much voting weight those groups had around the time of increasing automation and phasing out coal. Or why corn is in everything in the US...
>And you don't think the veto translates to something along the lines of 'corrupt regulatory capture for the benefit of tech companies'? Just because you don't like the proposed solution doesn't make it double speak for something you think.
How precisely is not forcing an industry into an inefficient[0] mode of operation 'corrupt regulatory capture'? It's pretty literally the opposite of regulatory capture.
(hence when removing the not the above sentence becomes regulatory capture, regardless of how double-speakily it is described).
There's a lot that we force the market to do that's not a market derived solution. Slaves are very market efficient. Racketeering can be too. You can make choices of long-term benefits of not choosing a purely free market solution.
What I meant though is that the veto may be simple opposition to the idea, or it may come from having a special interests of tech corps influencing that decision - given popular acceptance of the proposed law, that would make it corrupt regulatory capture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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?
> “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.
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.
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?
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).
In a way, consumers also rely on each other to keep prices low. If you don't have a large number of middle-class peers buying the same consumer goods as you, helping distribute R&D and manufacturing costs, then that consumer good will become a luxury item with luxury pricing.
I do not know what you pay for entertainment if it is expensive, but in my world, it is not. And writers are not the expensive part of it either, that seems to be the cheapest one.
“More than 3.5 million people work as truck drivers, an occupation dominated by men who hold more than 90% of truck driving jobs. Driving large tractor-trailers or delivery trucks is one of the largest occupations in the United States.”
> Automated trucking means possibly lower prices, and AI entertainment does to.
We currently have inflation driven across a wide swathe of goods, driven primarily by corporate greed, and streaming services jacking up prices while putting out endless reboot and IP farm garbage. I’m not sure what would ever lead you to this conclusion.
They would side against the unemployment but be for the cheaper prices it produces and ultimately vote with their wallets. Same way people decry the working conditions in Apple's factories but buy the products made in those factories anyways. This is not a SV bubble, it's just the facts of human nature. No one (or a tiny fraction) pays more for something when an identical service is available for cheaper.
What’s to say it would ever lead to lower prices and not simply higher executive pay, stock buybacks etc? That certainly seems to be far more the order of the day.
It's possible but that seems to be a fully general argument against ever making things more efficient? Why bother with any innovation at all if the profits are eaten by execs?
For lowering prices vs. eating the profits, I think a bit of both happens in most industries. There are plenty of examples where better tech constantly leads to lower prices - basically most PC hardware like SSDs today. IMO these kinds of things never get media attention but yeah prices do get lower in many areas. The dynamics of whether they extract profits or pass on savings are complex and vary over time depending on competition etc. but over the long term its hard to argue that some industry will get more efficient but no one else will start competing with the same tech to bring prices down. For self driving cars we have 2-3 players in the field too which is a good sign.
Overall this argument has been rehashed for different technologies many times. Horse drivers vs. cars, scribes vs. typewriters blah blah. Its difficult to argue we would have been better off today by protecting jobs over letting the technology help everyone eventually. Personally i think this transition will be rough though, a lot of people including programmers are going to lose their jobs and we might have years of pain ahead before things stabilize. But in the long term yeah its better than just hiding AI in a box and pretending like nothing happened.
I’m not referring to the argument in the abstract, but the specific case of making unemployed 3.5 million truck drivers and the cost savings getting passed onto consumers in the form of lower-priced goods. If this was a realistic scenario (setting aside that the driverless tech is not there) then why are the cost savings from exploiting truck drivers by making them all over-worked, independent contractors being passed on to consumers now? Instead, what we have is unrestrained corporate greed, with companies jacking up the price of goods to obscene levels and keeping the profits for themselves.
I agree grocery prices have been nuts recently. Canada recently completed a study on high prices that concluded there's not enough competition in the market [1]. They made some recommendations but nothing will be done lol..
My problem is that people are increasingly blaming technology for the failures of the government. Self driving trucks SHOULD make things cheaper. Having a robot do things that people used to do SHOULD help us all in the long run the same way washing machines do.
But when it doesn't, people have such low expectations of the government that they don't even consider that option. Like are we supposed to just stop all scientific and technological progress that could endanger jobs now, just freeze society in the state its at now?
The way I see it we need both levers, science and government to make progress. Lately the sentiment is we should burn down the half that works because the other half doesn't work. I think that's the wrong approach.
I am shocked how little sympathy people have for e,g, teachers, who impact their kids every day, and have been consistently crapped on for decades on this continent. General public's overall sympathy to unions and/or truckers is limited.
Unfortunately, most people's attitude is "I don't have that, so they shouldn't either!" or "My life is hard, theirs should be too!!!". It would be more productive and compassionate to say "I don't have what they're asking for either, maybe I should do something about that and we'll all get better", but sadly that's not how it tends to work :-<
Maybe teachers would have more sympathy if they weren't lobbying to keep children in failing schools while sending their own children to private schools.
In California, teachers in public schools are stopping to assign the homework to students, certainly through 5th grade and, in some places, beyond. They a going along with de-tracking (removing advanced classes). Not to mention other practices.
As parent, you basically have to find tutors, enroll kids into AoPS/Russian Math, etc… I, for one, stopped understanding what is it that these teachers actually do?
My parents are both public school teachers. "Classroom management" is the term that describes most of the job. My dad has inadvertently conflated the need for reopening schools during the pandemic with the need for childcare to keep the economy moving (though he quickly reversed course on the need to reopen schools when union talking points came down the pipe).
Teachers have definitely been "crapped on" for a long time, but they fervently argue for the system from which the crap flows.
My wife was a teacher before we had kids. She left the profession for exactly the reasons you mention. She liked teaching children. She hated dealing with discipline and especially with needy parents who would not trust her when she said that their child wasn't any better than any other student. She hated the fact that they wouldn't let her teach advanced concepts to advanced kids, and that they got rid of tracking and classroom aides.
When her job became more overhead than actually teaching, that's when she called it quits. Now she volunteers most of the day at school trying to help the teachers in any way she can to make their jobs easier.
> 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.
if the windows of the truck are tinted and you can't tell whether or not an AI is driving and if the script isn't signed with an author's signature and you can't tell who wrote it then who how will you even know to be upset or not?
> You truly live in a tech industry bubble if you think most people would side with mass unemployment of truck drivers
Radical idea here: How about some places accept autonomous trucks, and some places accept human-operated ones, and then customers can choose which places they frequent? If they truly would side with truck drivers, they should go to stores that only used human-operated trucks without the need for legislation, right?
The most likely first adopters are probably FedEx or UPS, which have huge numbers of heavy trucks which operate only between their internal distribution hubs. This will require infrastructure at the endpoints, to get trucks directed to the correct loading dock, backed into place, and docked. They'll also need fueling, washing, and maintenance. Random trucks between random points are a ways off.
Most automated trucking scenarios are similar to the harbor pilot method ships use. The automated driving would be on the highway, and the local pilot would take over when it arrived at the gate to get it into the right loading bay and back out again.
No, is the short answer. Of course self driving continues to be trialled in SF and elsewhere, but my understanding is that the safety data (where available) for example does not consider a wide range of road conditions, and has other statistical limitations when attempting to compare with human drivers.
Certainly there are good reasons why SFFD is not keen on Waymo and Cruise.
Self-driving (and AI in general) has a tendency to go catastrophically wrong for impossible to determine reasons (imagine if each hallucination was a potential traffic accident), in a way that is hard to predict and is essentially open ended in terms of consequence. Humans do very stupid things much much less often than fairly stupid things - no such correlation is offered by AI.
> Self-driving [AI] has a tendency to go catastrophically wrong for impossible to determine reasons
I don't think that's true. I live in SF and am not aware of a single catastrophe owing to self-driving cars, let alone enough such catastrophes to form a statistical sample from which we could reliably infer tendencies.
I don't really have anything to back this up, so take it with a massive gain of salt, but I seem to keep seeing discussion of Teslas hitting bikes (both cyclists and motorcycles). Most of it centers around there being enough doubt about whether Autopilot was being used, or whether the driver was actually monitoring like they should have been, or whether the cyclist "should" have been in the road, etc, as to "count" as being less safe. I can only imagine that there are impassioned interpretations of the data going multiple directions.
A Verge article [0] has some discussion on this with regard to a motorcyclist that follows this pattern, and FortNine also covers this in a characteristically well-made video [1].
There's also the problem of autonomous (electric) cars being too quiet when they first begin moving, but that's easy to solve.
So I'm not entirely sure about their safety being "proven", but that's largely because the problem domain is enormous and the data somewhat open to interpretation. Overall "proved" seems too certain a word as of now, without narrowly defining the scope.
Waymo/Cruise are the more relevant entities for this conversation (although neither are actively pursuing trucking right now). Tesla hasn't even legally registered FSD as a self-driving product in California. Once they do that and get their disengagement rates 10^-3 lower then they will be more relevant to the conversation about how safe driver-less vehicles are.
Not to discount the obvious potential safety issues, just noting that Tesla is taking a very different approach that is currently pretty far from being able to complete trips consistently, let alone be measured up against human drivers.
I might be in a bubble but in my circle the writer's strike was indeed widely supported. It's only among my techy friends that the AI replacement thing was ever really considered. My artist friends and my gymbros were just "yeah fuck the man".
> many supported their desire for better wages and working conditions, but feelings were much more mixed on support for allowing AI to replace writers.
It could be slightly lower but its still pretty high. This poll says 74% of likely voters support a prohibition on AI replacing humans for writing TV shows compared to 67% support for the strike overall.
It is a lot lower than the 87% support for "appropriate compensation" for reruns and streaming, but I think that is a much less contentious question than the AI writing prohibition one. By definition practically everyone agrees that they deserve "appropriate" compensation, the debate is over what is appropriate.
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.
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.
I agree, if we can get them into other jobs. So many other times we've seen workers who flat-out refused to participate in retraining because politicians talked them out of it. I'm specifically thinking of coal miners who believed the lie that their jobs were coming back, and based on that turned away free education offers that would have given them modern-world skills.
Gonna be honest: if someone told me my tech job had been replaced with all its benefits (wfh! office stipend!) and now I have to retrain as a plumber, including back to the shitty apprenticeship system for low pay and low benefits (starting from the bottom again) I would also get really damn upset and resist that. There will be a lot of tooth gnashing on my end even if you pay for my apprenticeship and initial training, I'm still significantly worse off for the literal rest of my whole life.
Yes, I'm just pointing out the retraining isn't actually the real alternative people think it is. It's directly lowering the quality of life and destroying the economic future of an entire industry's worth of people and all their families/dependents. This is important to deal with as it is, not with some bs "well we offered them retraining!" as if that means anything.
But not as much as not retraining. Given the choice between a ship and a lifeboat, I’d take the ship. Choosing between a lifeboat and treading water, scoot over and hand me an oar.
I'm arguing that retraining isn't really the lifeboat people are saying it is.
Just be upfront: removing jobs is drowning people. That's it. Don't comfort yourself with "retraining" programs like they mean anything. They don't. Acting like you're giving them an oar is just insulting them on top of taking their livelihoods, so I understand the anger.
I would argue that any long-haul trucker or coal miner will have a much higher quality of life when those jobs go away and they re-train for something where they don't have to be away from their families doing dangerous things.
I don't regard that as obvious. A social safety net COULD catch them when they fall out of the workforce. We don't seem to have such a safety net in America, but that's a consequence of politics, not of economics or technology. Confronting those politics admittedly is a tall order, but consider the alternative: retarding innovation, wasting human potential, and maintaining make-work jobs because politics is hard? Is that really the hill you wanna die on?
You make it sound like there are only two choices:
1. Confronting the politics of building a social saftey net in America.
2. Retarding innovation, wasting human potential, etc. etc.
Yet there is a perfectly good third solution that has worked countless times in history when technology has made certain jobs redundant, and will without a doubt continue to work long into the future.
You made it sound like there's only one choice when you wrote above:
> Eventually, you simply have to go to work for a roof over your head, food and healthcare.
I'm glad we finally agree that there are at least three choices, that building a safety net is one of them, and that going to work so that you have a roof, food, and healthcare isn't the only one.
I get why it sucks, but every day someone resists retraining from a dying or dead occupation is a day they’re not getting experience in a new job. In the case of the coal miners, those jobs were gone. No amount of bargaining would bring them back. The mines aren’t going to re-open. The affected people didn’t get to choose between retraining or keeping their current jobs. They had to choose between learning new marketable skills in a classroom or scrabbling through whatever remaining local jobs they could find.
We’re not there with truck driving yet, but to me it seems inevitable. I wouldn’t consider it as a brand new career worth starting today if my intent were to retire from it.
I'm only arguing that it makes complete sense why people are resisting if someone is telling them otherwise. I would also cling to my livelihood if my alternative was losing my home, my healthcare, my stability. And I'd further be insulted by people offering me retraining programs that don't actually train me to a lateral career. I'm trying to practice some empathy, man.
I'm empathetic. My family background is solidly working class. My dad worked in a funeral home. My mom retired from a railroad. My brother-in-law drives long-haul trucks for a living. My ancestors were farmers, miners, settlers, and little horse teamsters. I love these people and want good things for them.
But there's "is" vs "ought". It ought to be the case that these hard-working people can earn a decent living doing the jobs they spent many years in. It is the case that a lot of those jobs are disappearing as the natural result of technological and societal changes. My grandpa couldn't have delivered ice in downtown St. Louis with a horse and cart today if he wanted to. That job no longer exists. In the case of coal mining, most people don't want those jobs to exist anymore: each ton of coal pulled out of the ground is nearly 3 tons of CO2 gas into the air (purely from the burning process, not counting the effort to mine it).
I don't have the answers here. I don't know what we should be doing. I sure don't want my BIL to lose his career. But what is the kind, empathetic thing to do? We've gone from zero to having self-driving cars zipping around San Francisco in a few short years. What will they be like in 10 years? 20? I don't know when it'll happen, but it seems absolutely inevitable that at some point in the near future, autonomous vehicles will be better drivers than we are. After that, do we build a little passenger cabin onto automated vehicles so that we can pay "drivers" to pretend to operate them? Even if we did, how long can we keep that going? I don't know. I just can't see a path where that's the new state of affairs forever.
Sometimes love means having hard, uncomfortable conversations. I think that's where we're at today with jobs like mining, and where we'll be soon with other careers.
"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.
That's why I said, "If Level 5 means no driver..." I said that for a reason that's germaine to the subject at hand, autonomous trucks: I'm not persuaded autonomous trucks need the level 5 defined in the way the link you provided defines it.
The difference from 4 to 5 is the breadth of conditions under which autonomous driving is viable, seemingly with locality as a limiting factor. If a route has the truck leaving the local municipality, the truck is likely not autonomous, even at level 4. I'd be curious if it's possible to schedule a route from San Francisco to Sacramento (let alone San Francisco to New York City) with either Cruise or Waymo, assuming it's necessary to take a highway for such a trip.
> These features can drive the vehicle under limited conditions and will not operate unless all required conditions are met.
If one of these conditions is locality then the vehicle cannot be driven autonomously outside that locale. If a freight truck needs to go from City A to City B -- as they often do -- but the autonomous software only works in City A, then the truck won't be driven autonomously even if it's otherwise capable of autonomous driving.
So I slightly misspoke by saying it's "not autonomous" but going into level 4 vs. level 5, a freight truck is not functionally autonomous until it's level 5. It can be driven autonomously in some conditions but such conditions are almost certainly not all conditions that human freight drivers encounter daily.
(FWIW, I also entered the conversation late and am mostly responding to this: "I'm not persuaded autonomous trucks need the level 5 defined in the way the link you provided defines it.")
Thanks for entering the conversation when you did. I hope you'll entertain it for a little longer, but if not, no worries.
I'm just thinking, what if those conditions don't prohibit a truck from operating outside of a locale, but rather, they prohibit a truck from operating on anything but certain prescribed routes, on interstates, connecting ports and rail terminals and distribution centers, in the right lane only, in daylight, and in good weather conditions only? Is that level 5? It doesn't sound like level 5 to me. It sounds like level 4. And yet, it also sounds like it would still be very useful to someone running a fleet of trucks.
So again, I'm not persuaded level 5 is necessary for autonomous trucks. Some kinds of trucking would be excluded until we get to level 5, but that still leaves some useful trucking that could be handled by level 4.
It's all about per-mile safety and economy. Ohio was bad. Having that same amount of the same chemicals shipped via highways that snake through the middles of cities would be vastly worse.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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]
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] thread>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
I'm convinced that automated trains are the way to go.
Way more energy efficient per cargo pound mile. Technology already exists. Can easily ge electrified without expensive batteries that need replacing every few years.
"AI" Piloted trucks are not.
Truck freight is already much cheaper per lb/mile than truck freight.
After you roll in the costs to develop, build and maintain a 500k-1million dollar self driving truck it only gets worse.
There's a reason why we don't have people remote-controlling trucks today.
These trucks are gonna be used for depot to depot transfers with human drivers taking over for urban / last mile destinations.
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.
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/
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/
I don't really understand what you want here. If you claim that a person in one of these vehicles will increase safety I am sceptical. Concentration falls off drastically when you're not actively driving.
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.
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.
And you don't think the veto translates to something along the lines of 'corrupt regulatory capture for the benefit of tech companies'? Just because you don't like the proposed solution doesn't make it double speak for something you think.
> where the government uses double-speak to convince the people
It was used to control the narrative/population, not convince people - everyone knew it's obvious BS. But there the government was implementing totalitarian system squashing opposition. Here, we've got agreement from majority of both the government and population and a veto from a single person higher up. It's almost the complete opposite of the book.
> how shitty and unfulfilling life is that the government needs to invent make-work jobs like sitting in automated trucks
Wait until you hear about mining and farming subsidies in lots of countries and how much voting weight those groups had around the time of increasing automation and phasing out coal. Or why corn is in everything in the US...
How precisely is not forcing an industry into an inefficient[0] mode of operation 'corrupt regulatory capture'? It's pretty literally the opposite of regulatory capture.
(hence when removing the not the above sentence becomes regulatory capture, regardless of how double-speakily it is described).
[0]A non-market derived solution.
What I meant though is that the veto may be simple opposition to the idea, or it may come from having a special interests of tech corps influencing that decision - given popular acceptance of the proposed law, that would make it corrupt regulatory capture.
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.
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.
I fear that unless the penalty for negligence is severe we will see a lot of bad situations.
At least they are being honest and not pretending it is about safety or consumer benefit.
> 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?
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?
Perhaps if you'd done the same you wouldn't have such a limited view of the world?
You were taken in by the selective use of quotation vs summarization.
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.
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).
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps...
> Automated trucking means possibly lower prices, and AI entertainment does to.
We currently have inflation driven across a wide swathe of goods, driven primarily by corporate greed, and streaming services jacking up prices while putting out endless reboot and IP farm garbage. I’m not sure what would ever lead you to this conclusion.
For lowering prices vs. eating the profits, I think a bit of both happens in most industries. There are plenty of examples where better tech constantly leads to lower prices - basically most PC hardware like SSDs today. IMO these kinds of things never get media attention but yeah prices do get lower in many areas. The dynamics of whether they extract profits or pass on savings are complex and vary over time depending on competition etc. but over the long term its hard to argue that some industry will get more efficient but no one else will start competing with the same tech to bring prices down. For self driving cars we have 2-3 players in the field too which is a good sign.
Overall this argument has been rehashed for different technologies many times. Horse drivers vs. cars, scribes vs. typewriters blah blah. Its difficult to argue we would have been better off today by protecting jobs over letting the technology help everyone eventually. Personally i think this transition will be rough though, a lot of people including programmers are going to lose their jobs and we might have years of pain ahead before things stabilize. But in the long term yeah its better than just hiding AI in a box and pretending like nothing happened.
My problem is that people are increasingly blaming technology for the failures of the government. Self driving trucks SHOULD make things cheaper. Having a robot do things that people used to do SHOULD help us all in the long run the same way washing machines do.
But when it doesn't, people have such low expectations of the government that they don't even consider that option. Like are we supposed to just stop all scientific and technological progress that could endanger jobs now, just freeze society in the state its at now?
The way I see it we need both levers, science and government to make progress. Lately the sentiment is we should burn down the half that works because the other half doesn't work. I think that's the wrong approach.
[1] https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/competition-bureau-canada/e...
I am shocked how little sympathy people have for e,g, teachers, who impact their kids every day, and have been consistently crapped on for decades on this continent. General public's overall sympathy to unions and/or truckers is limited.
Unfortunately, most people's attitude is "I don't have that, so they shouldn't either!" or "My life is hard, theirs should be too!!!". It would be more productive and compassionate to say "I don't have what they're asking for either, maybe I should do something about that and we'll all get better", but sadly that's not how it tends to work :-<
https://katv.com/news/nation-world/chicago-teachers-union-le...
As parent, you basically have to find tutors, enroll kids into AoPS/Russian Math, etc… I, for one, stopped understanding what is it that these teachers actually do?
Teachers have definitely been "crapped on" for a long time, but they fervently argue for the system from which the crap flows.
When her job became more overhead than actually teaching, that's when she called it quits. Now she volunteers most of the day at school trying to help the teachers in any way she can to make their jobs easier.
if the windows of the truck are tinted and you can't tell whether or not an AI is driving and if the script isn't signed with an author's signature and you can't tell who wrote it then who how will you even know to be upset or not?
Radical idea here: How about some places accept autonomous trucks, and some places accept human-operated ones, and then customers can choose which places they frequent? If they truly would side with truck drivers, they should go to stores that only used human-operated trucks without the need for legislation, right?
Certainly there are good reasons why SFFD is not keen on Waymo and Cruise.
Self-driving (and AI in general) has a tendency to go catastrophically wrong for impossible to determine reasons (imagine if each hallucination was a potential traffic accident), in a way that is hard to predict and is essentially open ended in terms of consequence. Humans do very stupid things much much less often than fairly stupid things - no such correlation is offered by AI.
I don't think that's true. I live in SF and am not aware of a single catastrophe owing to self-driving cars, let alone enough such catastrophes to form a statistical sample from which we could reliably infer tendencies.
A Verge article [0] has some discussion on this with regard to a motorcyclist that follows this pattern, and FortNine also covers this in a characteristically well-made video [1].
There's also the problem of autonomous (electric) cars being too quiet when they first begin moving, but that's easy to solve.
So I'm not entirely sure about their safety being "proven", but that's largely because the problem domain is enormous and the data somewhat open to interpretation. Overall "proved" seems too certain a word as of now, without narrowly defining the scope.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23280461/tesla-autopilot-...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRdzIs4FJJg
Not to discount the obvious potential safety issues, just noting that Tesla is taking a very different approach that is currently pretty far from being able to complete trips consistently, let alone be measured up against human drivers.
It could be slightly lower but its still pretty high. This poll says 74% of likely voters support a prohibition on AI replacing humans for writing TV shows compared to 67% support for the strike overall.
It is a lot lower than the 87% support for "appropriate compensation" for reruns and streaming, but I think that is a much less contentious question than the AI writing prohibition one. By definition practically everyone agrees that they deserve "appropriate" compensation, the debate is over what is appropriate.
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2023/8/17/a-majority-of...
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.
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.
Eventually, you simply have to go to work for a roof over your head, food and healthcare.
It doesn't really matter if you like it or not. If you current job ceases to exist you will get another job, or you will die.
Just be upfront: removing jobs is drowning people. That's it. Don't comfort yourself with "retraining" programs like they mean anything. They don't. Acting like you're giving them an oar is just insulting them on top of taking their livelihoods, so I understand the anger.
I would argue that any long-haul trucker or coal miner will have a much higher quality of life when those jobs go away and they re-train for something where they don't have to be away from their families doing dangerous things.
No, you don't. Plenty of retired people don't go to work and yet they have all of those things.
of course, retirement is an option.
But we're talking about people that need to re-train, so I'm assuming here we're talking about people who are not yet ready to retire
You make it sound like there are only two choices:
1. Confronting the politics of building a social saftey net in America.
2. Retarding innovation, wasting human potential, etc. etc.
Yet there is a perfectly good third solution that has worked countless times in history when technology has made certain jobs redundant, and will without a doubt continue to work long into the future.
3. Re-skill and get a different job.
> Eventually, you simply have to go to work for a roof over your head, food and healthcare.
I'm glad we finally agree that there are at least three choices, that building a safety net is one of them, and that going to work so that you have a roof, food, and healthcare isn't the only one.
We’re not there with truck driving yet, but to me it seems inevitable. I wouldn’t consider it as a brand new career worth starting today if my intent were to retire from it.
But there's "is" vs "ought". It ought to be the case that these hard-working people can earn a decent living doing the jobs they spent many years in. It is the case that a lot of those jobs are disappearing as the natural result of technological and societal changes. My grandpa couldn't have delivered ice in downtown St. Louis with a horse and cart today if he wanted to. That job no longer exists. In the case of coal mining, most people don't want those jobs to exist anymore: each ton of coal pulled out of the ground is nearly 3 tons of CO2 gas into the air (purely from the burning process, not counting the effort to mine it).
I don't have the answers here. I don't know what we should be doing. I sure don't want my BIL to lose his career. But what is the kind, empathetic thing to do? We've gone from zero to having self-driving cars zipping around San Francisco in a few short years. What will they be like in 10 years? 20? I don't know when it'll happen, but it seems absolutely inevitable that at some point in the near future, autonomous vehicles will be better drivers than we are. After that, do we build a little passenger cabin onto automated vehicles so that we can pay "drivers" to pretend to operate them? Even if we did, how long can we keep that going? I don't know. I just can't see a path where that's the new state of affairs forever.
Sometimes love means having hard, uncomfortable conversations. I think that's where we're at today with jobs like mining, and where we'll be soon with other careers.
https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update
I don't understand what you mean. Can you clarify?
> These features can drive the vehicle under limited conditions and will not operate unless all required conditions are met.
If one of these conditions is locality then the vehicle cannot be driven autonomously outside that locale. If a freight truck needs to go from City A to City B -- as they often do -- but the autonomous software only works in City A, then the truck won't be driven autonomously even if it's otherwise capable of autonomous driving.
So I slightly misspoke by saying it's "not autonomous" but going into level 4 vs. level 5, a freight truck is not functionally autonomous until it's level 5. It can be driven autonomously in some conditions but such conditions are almost certainly not all conditions that human freight drivers encounter daily.
(FWIW, I also entered the conversation late and am mostly responding to this: "I'm not persuaded autonomous trucks need the level 5 defined in the way the link you provided defines it.")
I'm just thinking, what if those conditions don't prohibit a truck from operating outside of a locale, but rather, they prohibit a truck from operating on anything but certain prescribed routes, on interstates, connecting ports and rail terminals and distribution centers, in the right lane only, in daylight, and in good weather conditions only? Is that level 5? It doesn't sound like level 5 to me. It sounds like level 4. And yet, it also sounds like it would still be very useful to someone running a fleet of trucks.
So again, I'm not persuaded level 5 is necessary for autonomous trucks. Some kinds of trucking would be excluded until we get to level 5, but that still leaves some useful trucking that could be handled by level 4.
>.> ohio
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?
Laws can be revised.
They/we kill 10s of thousands of people on US roads each year.
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.
If we want to automate stuff, start with the easy stuff.
More accurately - Jaron Lanier’s views are playing out, which got picked up by Yang somehow.
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.ht...