According to the news self driving trucks are about to hit the road with no driver on board.
But according to this book that is not going to happen. The author says that the real purpose is to get rid of the skilled drivers and replace them with underpaid button pushers.
Will they really do that? What’s going to be the situation few years from now?
I’m hoping they’ll hit nobody on the road, with somebody on board.
Just like mercedes ‘full self driving’ this sounds like its on limited routes where there’s been extensive testing. I don’t expect truck driving to go full auto on arbitrary roads in the next few years. The tech is not there yet.
Because we haven’t learnt anything about the status quo of autonomous driving from Tesla’s “Auto Pilot”, huh?
Similar post earlier.
A serious self driving vehicle must be able to see around with different sensors. But then it must have a lot of computing power on board to merge different streams of data coming from different sensor. That adds up to the computing power required to make a proper prediction of the trajectories of dozen of other objects moving around the vehicle. I don’t know about the latest model, but I knew that the google cars few years ago had the boot occupied by big computers with several CUDA cards.
That’s not something you can put in a commercial car sold to the public, what you get is a car that relies only on one camera to look around and has a sensor in the bumper that cuts the engine if activated, but it does not create an additional stream of data. Maybe that there is a second camera looking down at the line on the road, but the data stream is not merged to the other, it is used to adjust the driving commands. I don’t even know if the little onboard computer they have is able to computes the trajectories of all the objects around the car. Few sensors and little processing power, that is not enough, it is not a self driving car.
When Tesla sells a car with driving assistance they tell to the customer that their car is not a self driving car, but they fail to explain why, where is the difference. How big is the gap. That’s one of the reasons why we had so many accidents.
Similar post earlier.
It starts from the same news, but taking the idea from the book in the link it asks something different.
the google cars few years ago had the boot occupied by big computers
But those were prototypes. These days you can get an NVIDIA H100 - several inches long, a few inches wide, one inch thick. It has 80GB of memory running at 3.5TB/s and 26 teraflops of compute (for comparison, Tesla autopilot runs on a 2 teraflop GPU).
The H100 is designed to be run in clusters, with eight GPUs on a single server, but I don’t think you’d need that much compute. You’d have two or maybe three servers, with one GPU each, and they’d be doing the same workload (for redundancy).
They’re not cheap… you couldn’t afford to put one in a Tesla that only drives 1 or 2 hours a day. But a car/truck that drives 20 hours a day? Yeah that’s affordable.
Different companies have different plans. Arizona has had auto-driving trucks on freeways off and on for a couple years now as part of test programs. Always with a driver in the cab though.
A few years ago I would have though robo-convoys would be where things landed because three or four companies where working toward that. That’s where the front truck has an operator and all the other trucks follow that leader driverlessly.
Now I feel like I have no idea where any of it is going. Step 1 in driverless should have always been to adopt an industry-wide mesh-network for all vehicles with level 3 (or higher) autonomy. If I’m on the road with (or inside of) an autonomous vehicle, I want it to be able get help from every other nearby car if its sensors suddenly die or start feeding it bad data. Especially after they’ve been on the road, poorly maintained by their owners, for a decade or more. If there are autonomous cars where will eventually be autonomous jalopies that drive like a drunk toddler because they sees lidar echos.
robo-convoys
You mean like trains?
Can’t get a train track to every single depot and loading dock in the country that receives shipments (which is like, practically every big box store and warehouse there is). There has to be a handover at some point.
Edit: also not a big fan of the train system in the US, since the vast majority of rail is privately owned. The operators have too much control. They’ll charge towns extra to put automated crossing guards on THEIR rail. They are legally only required to put up a sign.
Trains are only a good idea in tubes now. There was a memo about it a few years ago.
IMO:
Bare bones skeleton crews, similar to Railroad workers. They will try to strike but then gov’t will make it illegal to do so ASAP.
Staying hopeful though, keep learning and teaching, while being involved at your local community!
The future of our jobs is not a mystery. It is the result of a transformation that started a long time ago. It is obvious, clearly understandable, but well hidden behind of curtain of confusion. This book starts from the most asked question: “will AI take over our jobs?” In order to show how misleading it is. Misleading are also all the alarms raised over the power AI, but the real dangers could have even more deleterious consequences, leading to an era where the masses could be trapped in jobs that are alienating, mind numbing and underpaid. Exposing the arguments in a manner understandable by the layman, The Age of the Button Pushers goes trough the fields of computer science, economics and media communication. The whole picture will be reconstructed taking into account the lessons from the past with the changes brought by the industrial revolution, the present with the consequences of automation, the near future with the risk of an economy dominated by monopolistic giants. Part of the book will be dedicated to all the fabricated stories that dominate the current narrative on the media, highlighting the flaws and the inconsistencies, showing how altogether these stories paint a picture that makes absolutely no sense.
As someone who worked there previously, I can confirm that both of your statements are correct. (This has already been publicly shared by Aurora)
There will be nobody in (most of) their trucks. There will be button pushers remotely to help it in confusing situations or failures.
They’ve already been operating the trucks near-fully autonomously with safety drivers behind the wheel and copilots in the right seat monitoring the system. They plan to remove both operators from the vehicle completely, eventually.
(Now for some of my own speculation) Someone else mentioned mother goose, they may do a similar approach, however the follow trucks don’t need to keep up with the lead truck. It would be only for the lead truck to be an early warning for unexpected road conditions (new construction for example) that is handled by the safety driver, and info sent back to other trucks quickly on how to handle it or to pull over and wait for help (default action if it gets confused). It’s impossible to require that a convoy remains together in close formation, too many scenarios can split up the trucks even on the highway.
In a mechanical failure it would pull over and wait for a rescue team. The rescue team will probably include backup drivers in case it can’t resume driving autonomously.
Also, always take timetables with a grain of salt regarding anything related to autonomous vehicles.
My guess is the situation a few years from now will be that an inconsequential percentage of the US trucking fleet will be autonomous, a smaller percentage will have no safety drivers, and the remote operators will still be 1:1 ratio, maybe 1:2 (one operator for 2 trucks), but not the desired 1:10. This tech advances very slowly.
This tech advances very slowly.
Historically, anything that reduces cost of transporting goods has advanced extremely quickly. The best comparison, I think, is the shipping container.
It took about ten years for shipping containers to go from an invention nobody had heard of to one that was being used in every major seaport in the world and about another ten years for virtually all shipping used that method.
The New York docks for example, dramatically increased activity (as in, handled several times more cargo per day) while also reducing the workforce by two thirds. I think self driving trucks will do the same thing - companies/cities/highways that adopt AI will grow rapidly and any company/city/highway that doesn’t support self driving trucks will suddenly stop being used almost entirely.
Shipping containers were not a simple transition. New ships and new docks had to be built to take advantage of it. A lot of new trucks and trains were also built. Just 20 years to replace nearly all the infrastructure in one of the biggest and most important industries in the world.
I don’t disagree with you. There will be a rapid rate of adoption.
But how long before it’s capable enough to be adopted? We (as in anybody) don’t know. We just know that it’s been many many years and they’re still not there yet, and just because a few driverless vehicles are operating (in extremely ideal scenarios with lots of help) doesn’t mean it’s ready for the kind of hockey stick curve that the industry is looking forward to.
It will happen eventually, sure. My prediction was in regards to the OP’s question of what will things look like in a few years. I don’t think the tech will be ready for mass adoption in just a few years, neither does the author of the article linked.
Driverless trucks will get Jesse James’d until they have armed guards.
Just a motivated criminal, a signal jammer, and a driverless truck enter an area with no signal. Just a happy criminal leaves.
