> These new trucks won’t need sleep, they won’t speed, and they won’t get road rage. They won’t ride the brakes or make unnecessary lane changes, wasting fuel. And they won’t need to abide by the 11-hour daily driving maximum imposed on long-haul truckers for safety reasons.
Exactly.
Even if a robot vehicle could "just" match the performance of a human, we would still vastly prefer them because we want people to do higher complexity tasks than operate motor vehicles.
_heimdall · 20h ago
> we want people to do higher complexity tasks than operate motor vehicles.
Why? And who is the "we" here?
I really could care less what kind of job someone else enjoys doing. They don't owe me anything and I don't want to tell them what kind of job to have any more than I want someone telling me what job to have.
djoldman · 20h ago
If you will permit me to be more careful:
Instead of "we want people to do higher complexity tasks than operate motor vehicles," I would say:
Moving humans from lower to higher complexity tasks generally correlates to increased productivity, higher efficiency, or "getting more with less." Generally, this leads to a wealthier society and other positive things.
The above is not true about everything but holds up in general.
bluefirebrand · 19h ago
I do not understand what "higher complexity tasks" you think a bunch of unemployed truckers are going to do
It is likely that part of the reason they are truckers is because they aren't really suited for higher complexity tasks
I'm not trying to be an asshole. I respect the hard work and long hours that truckers do. I don't think they are stupid, and I greatly value the service they provide to society
But the reality is trucking is still a relatively low skill job, mostly filled by people who are not really equipped for high skill jobs
At some point if we automate all of the low skill jobs, we're going to have to deal with the fact that a ton of people who aren't cut out for complex work are now unemployed (and probably poor, and pissed off)
djoldman · 19h ago
I'm not trying to be an asshole either when I ask: what we do with all the former farmers made redundant by modern farming technology or furniture makers made redundant by the increased productivity of manufacturing processes?
I think the answer is and has always been education and retraining for different occupations.
const_cast · 1h ago
We leave a lot of those people behind, forced into a life of poverty.
We can educate truck drivers probably, but not all. But the concept as a whole has issues. Can we re-educate and engineer to be a 10x engineer? How many of them? So, what happens when you must be a 10x engineer?
People have limits. It varies person to person, but we all have limits and as we go higher "up" the rate of hitting limits increases. We can cut out low hanging fruit like, say, literacy. But I can't be Einstein, and neither can you. So, let us both pray we won't need to become Einstein.
i80and · 19h ago
People have been talking about "education and retraining" to make up for jobs lost to technology since I was young. It's a nice idea, but I'm curious if that actually happens at scale rather than in isolated pockets. Retraining is hard, expensive, and risky.
My general experience is that people tend to fall backwards into either lower-quality work or permanent semi-unemployment, but I could be mistaken about that.
Esophagus4 · 19h ago
No, you’re right.
Ultimately, after large-scale technological innovation that leads to societal change like worker displacement (like happened after agricultural innovations displaced farm workers in the American South, or manufacturing innovations displaced American factory workers, or unemployment during the Great Depression) you end up with societal unrest (like organized protest and political action) that leads to increased societal safety nets and welfare benefits… temporarily and if the unrest is big enough.
But eventually, as markets adjust and other types of employment opportunities pop up or as the capital class gets annoyed at rising labor costs, the welfare roles contract to encourage people back into the workforce (in American society, I’m talking about. I’m not sure how other countries handle this.)
There’s a thorough and well-researched (though very dense) book called Regulating the Poor if you want to see more along those lines.
But job retraining tends not to have much of an effect.
FeloniousHam · 15h ago
I wonder how much of "markets adjust and other types of employment opportunities pop up" is just the aging out through retirement and death of the redundant workers.
Basically, the labor theory of Planck's principle: '"A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it", Planck once wrote.'
Braxton1980 · 19h ago
>I think the answer is and has always been education and retraining for different occupations.
How well did this work for the previous globalization of manufacturing?
What happens most often is that populations whose careers get widely disrupted by technology become relatively impoverished for generations. The parts of the US where tech replaced a lot of farming, factory, and similar jobs are basically a map of the poorest areas in the country. So just saying "do what we've done before" is an extremely unsatisfyig answer. That's how we end up with half the country happily cheerleading the destruction of countless institutions and rights.
salawat · 18h ago
Cool. Are you paying for it for them? Everyone loves that answer, but no one wants to pony up for the retraining, or if they do, they insist the retraining meets their sensibilities.
Next time you run through that line of logic, think about that.
infecto · 18h ago
You’re not wrong but your assumptions are incredibly over optimistic. Humans are still in the loop but ideally taking out the relatively boring middle parts, long haul interstate driving. You still have paperwork, city driving, hooking up trailers.
But yes the reality is that net jobs will probably be lost. Some will transition into the new role of the truck driver, some go into different industries and some will get lost through the transition. The real truth is that it is incredibly hard to make everyone whole.
_heimdall · 19h ago
This is where free will comes in for me.
I have never seen economics or wealth as a goal in and of itself. Economics is a view of past performance and only really interesting to compare against other periods in the past or other countries/economies.
In my opinion people should do exactly the job they want to do and the economics of that will shake out however they shake out. People should be enjoying what they do, but more importantly they should be making whatever decision is best for them at the time.
This may just circle back to the question of central planning - I don't think we are ever better off in the long rum trying to plan the entire system rather than trusting every individual to do what's best for them (and trusting that decision to often include what is best for their community).
fragmede · 16h ago
Why whould a private equity investor who just wants a return care about what's best for a community a thousand miles away full of people they've never met? Looking at problems caused by bad private equity deals made public, sans regulation, that doesn't seem to have worked out well for the average American. Housing is too expensive and food prices have gone way up. Never mind the cost of healthcare, the level of service is no good.
_heimdall · 9h ago
I'm not sure that I follow you here. I wasn't talking about what private equity should do at all, they can gamble money however they want.
I was responding to the idea that we intentionally want to put drivers out of work because we want them in higher complexity roles.
fragmede · 8h ago
I was responding to
> trusting every individual to do what's best for them (and trusting that decision to often include what is best for their community)
which hasn't, in my view,
panned out, because of the reasons I outlined in my comment. Between trusting individuals to be altruistic and centralized planning of everything, it seems there's a lot of room for some central authority to decide we need more eg housing and to provide incentives for that, without becoming eg Soviet Russia.
close04 · 19h ago
> Moving humans from lower to higher complexity tasks generally correlates to increased productivity, higher efficiency, or "getting more with less." Generally, this leads to a wealthier society and other positive things.
This is the idealistic take. What's your practical take for moving hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from truck driving jobs to higher complexity tasks? Do those jobs exist today and truckers just refuse to take the step up? Are we creating new jobs that are just the right amount of "more complex" to be realistic for a truck driver?
In a world where AI is doing away exactly with the lower complexity jobs, how are we bridging the gap between the average skill level and expertise of a trucker compared to high enough complexity job that keeps them safe from being replaced by AI in 5 years? What's the reskilling or upskilling plan for these people's skills and career to advance at a faster pace than AI is catching up?
djoldman · 19h ago
Some will retire early.
Some will take on more and more of the much more complex logistics jobs like delicate loads, large loads, etc.
Some will switch professions.
Some will go to school to switch professions.
Some new professions will open up exactly because it will become cheaper to move stuff by truck. For example, if a business can now afford to move X to their location, now they can do more business. Perhaps that business hires former truck drivers.
close04 · 18h ago
At the risk of repeating myself, this is the idealistic take and even that only until you give it the slightest bit of though. Standing by this take after the realistic questions were asked also makes it an ignorant take.
3 million truckers in the US alone. Retire early? To live on what, the wealth accumulated in not even a full lifetime of trucking? Go to school? Who pays for it, who supports the person/family while they go to school, and what are the odds that the skill set increases so drastically that AI/automation won't just catch up with them in a couple of years? "Just" switch professions? If there was a better one they would have done it already, so they can only switch for the worse.
ty6853 · 18h ago
By various estimates half+ of truckers leave within their first year, so your thesis is what, that they are voluntarily switching for the worse?
Given the massive number of new drivers and that half+ of them are voluntarily switching to new jobs your whole thesis here is total bunk that they can only switch for the worse.
Trucking is one of those industries where even worse than most others recruiters lie, cheat, and steal their way into getting people into the industry and as soon as they're in they mostly find there really are greener pastures elsewhere.
close04 · 17h ago
> half+ of them are voluntarily switching to new jobs
Are they more complex task jobs? I rejected OP's theory because no evidence was put forward that drivers will just move to "higher complexity tasks". Are they? Are we creating a constant stream of higher complexity task jobs that truckers can routinely reach with moderate upskilling and which aren't at risk of being automated in a couple of years?
We have millions of jobs which haven't changed in years skills wise and are somewhere on the bottom rungs of job quality. Yes trucking is bad, but even "just" 1.5 million people doing this for years means they have no realistically better career option. There are 50% more truckers now than 20 years ago. So we haven't really created all that many "higher complexity task jobs" so far, we just created more of the same.
When the bottom falls out on this one, it falls all at once. The moment automation comes for one trucking job, it comes for all. There will be no bargaining power, there will be just "accept even worse conditions or take a hike". Automation doesn't fix their problem, it fixes yours: stuff's cheaper. Is your theory also that all those people will just magically get better jobs like stated here:
Is the theory bunk because you jumped straight in the middle of the thread? Or because it doesn't give you the good feelies? I'm not saying it's all doom and gloom. But let's not pretend it's all roses either. We'll get cheaper stuff, and maybe the next generation of people will have better than just trucking jobs, and all it will cost is that most of the current generation of truckers will get screwed worse.
mystraline · 19h ago
> This is the idealistic take. What's your practical take for moving hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from truck driving jobs to higher complexity tasks?
There isn't one, and there won't be one in the USA for the foreseeable future.
This country's people and majority governments have no issue in throwing people away, with no backup or contingency plans. Sector falls over? Too bad, go back to school (and spend MORE money), or live under a bridge.
But when a company sector falls over, they get government subsidies to tide them over till they create the next fallout.
And this isn't just a 'hate on republicans' or 'hate on democrats' thing. All elected parties share this attribute. R's just remove programs, and D's just means-test them to hell and back... But only for the individuals. Companies get free money (PPP), and have it forgiven.
Its unabashed capitalism for the populace, and socialism for the companies. And that absolutely means that people removed from trucking jobs will have absolutely nowhere to turn, unless they make their exit plan themselves.
fragmede · 16h ago
Which president started the PPP loan program again?
mystraline · 14h ago
Trump started it, and Biden forgave almost all of it. But you knew that, and just playing gotcha games.
Again, it was a massive example of 'Socialism for the rich and unabashed capitalism for the poor'. BOTH PARTIES DO THIS.
The only major positive change I've seen in this government in the last 2 decades that had a strong positive impact on the people, was the ACA. And in of itself was a federalized version of Romney's healthcare. And that was the Heritage Foundation's response for healthcare when Hillary Clinton put forth a single payer in 1995 as first lady.
But even with the ACA, it ended more up to being a corporate freebie to medical insurance companies. And only secondarily, did it start helping people.
But back to robo-semis: those people are already leaving due to tarrifs destroying shipping. And when workers are completely displaced to robotrucks being better than human drivers, there will be no relief for those displaced humans.
This country relies on sacrificing people for a narrower group to get ahead. And those who are behind are then summarily blamed for being behind, as 'poor individual choices', even if the root is completely systemic.
More people will suffer. More people will become homeless. But hey, some truck AI company will make money hand over fist.
danaris · 18h ago
> or live under a bridge.
But also don't live under a bridge, because that's illegal.
In fact, just don't be poor. Being poor may not be illegal yet, but it damn well oughtta be! And we're certainly going to make it as hard and grinding and cruel as we possibly can to be poor, because being poor is proof of low moral character. After all, if you were a good person, God would have made you rich, like Elon Musk!
Basically, if you can't get and keep a job, just go and die like a good peasant.
(/s, because sadly that always needs saying)
mousethatroared · 19h ago
If they can do the higher skilled jobs.
Otherwise by friend, a driver with spotless driving record and very poor English, is unemployable with two kids to feed.
AI cant savage the laptop class fast enough.
ty6853 · 19h ago
CDL drivers have insanely high attrition. Probably higher attrition than the phase in of driverless vehicles.
_heimdall · 19h ago
I'd be interested to see how attrition compares with new CDL drivers and those with say 3+ years of experience.
I know a few long haul drivers that did it for decades, one only stopped because a car accident then motorcycle accident damaged his back too much to sit in a cab all day.
ty6853 · 18h ago
We know from most other industries that when a downturn comes, those with the most experience shift into the entry level jobs/pay and the newcomers get gutted.
_heimdall · 18h ago
Sure, but I thought the prior comment was talking about attrition in general rather than job loss during a downturn.
In my experience, all bets are off when an industry downturn hits. People jump ship or are thrown overboard. Usually those that handle it best keep a steadier hand and don't react as emotionally, it wouldn't surprise me if that group is more often those with the most experience.
ty6853 · 18h ago
Yes you have to put two and two together.
If the attrition of newcomers is high enough, and oldtimers fill newcomer positions (or just their wages) in rough times, then if the high attrition of newcomers is high enough to overcome the phase-in rate of automation then the old timers will more or less stay employed just likely at the shit wages that newcomers get.
tstrimple · 17h ago
The worst place I've ever worked (6 month contract) was a trucking company looking to implement driver attention tracking and vehicle metrics tracking. They are known for being a CDL mill. They train up new drivers and pay them and treat them like shit until they move somewhere else. I was shocked to learn they have over 100% attrition rate on drivers. If they need 1000 drivers for the year, they will hire something like 1,100 drivers throughout the year. Constantly replacing people. I always get a chuckle when folks talk about the inefficiencies of government.
fragmede · 16h ago
Why is that inefficient? It sounds like they're still in business, and getting away with treating drivers like shit. It's horrible and mean, but if that means more money for the company owners, and they get to go on an extra vacation every year and buy new cards, why should they care?
Braxton1980 · 19h ago
Are there sufficient jobs that have these higher complexity tasks
The highest priority is being employed.
infecto · 20h ago
Ehh, the point is not to tell others what to do but to not stop innovation by government regulation pandering to trade or labor groups. Look at the latest dock workers agreement that includes language to prevent automation. Dockwork is one of the best examples of something that can be automated quite well.
SonOfKyuss · 19h ago
I mostly disagree with regulations that specifically limit progress, but I can also see the benefit of phasing changes in at a regulated pace in order to give the real humans who depend on those jobs with very little social safety net time to adjust
infecto · 19h ago
I dont disagree but the sad reality is we keep telling coal towns that coal is coming back. At some point you need to rip the bandaid off and tell the truth. It’s not a bad idea to try and help transition folks though.
_heimdall · 19h ago
Doesn't all regulation limit progress?
There is no universal direction for progress to move towards, its ultimately just changing things. Regulation removes options, that must limit progress by cutting off certain paths people may otherwise choose to progress towards.
intrasight · 19h ago
A simple regulatory solution is to require every truck to be licensed by a human "driver". That human gets income as the owner of that license. Every truck must have one human license owner and every human can only own one license.
infecto · 19h ago
That sounds like a terrible taxi medallion situation. Why require that?
chii · 19h ago
so how do you choose which human get to be the licence holder?
i, too, want free money without having to do any work.
fragmede · 16h ago
You can just quit your job and get food stamps if you just want free money. It's not much of a living though and it'll probably cause you to become alcoholic.
chii · 2h ago
why would i just quit my job? It's not like these licenses are stipulated to only be available for the trucker who is jobless.
my point is, there's no good way to help those who is economically worthless from technological progression. Any way to slice and dice it is just another word for welfare.
soco · 19h ago
And my point is, I don't want to make people lose their living. Period.
infecto · 19h ago
If it’s going to happen anyway why pander to that group? It’s like how politicians in the US keep promising coal is coming back. No it’s not.
I don’t want to actively “make” people lose jobs but I also don’t want to limit innovation. The relatively free movement of labor is a benefit for all including workers. I guess if someone really wants that Amazon warehouse picker job great but I am not sure that’s true.
fragmede · 16h ago
You don't? By paying your taxes, some of which goes to the police, you're forcing criminals, with their ill gotten gains into jail. An absurd thing to point out, other than that fact that there are some people who you do want to lose their living. Because those jobs harm you or society. Then we're just left to debate what harms society and what lets everyone in a society thrive.
harimau777 · 19h ago
Even if people want to do higher complexity tasks, that doesn't mean they will have the opportunity to. Much more likely is that people just become poorer and/or switch to more demeaning jobs.
1over137 · 20h ago
I’ve got news for you: not all humans want, or even can, do high complexity tasks.
trollbridge · 20h ago
Yep. And there's human dignity in doing work that involves low complexity tasks.
cr125rider · 18h ago
I knew a guy many years ago, super nice guy, who was an over the road trucker. I don’t think he had it in him to do more complex tasks. Hard worker, nice, just the way God made him. I think the task complexity stopped at driving.
trollbridge · 20h ago
There also won't be a truck driver to under pay or not pay at all to load and unload the truck nor be a sham owner-operator who is being leased the truck by the trucking company and can barely eke out a living.
Same challenge Uber at al face with autonomous vehicles - when you can underpay a driver 50 cents a mile to drive their own car, it doesn't make much sense to have an autonomous vehicle that costs you closer to 70 cents a mile to operate.
Molitor5901 · 19h ago
And diminishing cost of returns. If it just gets 60% of human performance the industry will use them, and push to advance the technology to the point of no human interaction.
bell-cot · 19h ago
> Even if a robot vehicle could "just" match the performance of a human, we would still vastly prefer them because we want people to do higher complexity tasks than operate motor vehicles.
Sadly, this sounds like an anodyne ideal, tuned to rationalize "don't worry, feel happy" indifference in well-to-do people - who are conveniently far away from the affected workers, and the grim realities of how the change will actually play out in their lives and communities.
close04 · 19h ago
> we want people to do higher complexity tasks than operate motor vehicles
Does it look like the market is sitting today on a pool of hundreds of thousands of higher complexity jobs that just go unfilled because people choose to "just" operate motor vehicles? Do those jobs look like a realistic fit for today's truck drivers?
There are 3 million truck drivers in the US today. Do "we" understand what's the impact of "our" preference towards what other people should do? Or is what "we" want coming from a place of "I'm safe from all of this so I can afford to have lofty ideals for others"?
I'm not sure how many of them are more complex than truck driving but it's safe to say that there are plenty of employers looking for workers.
close04 · 18h ago
> I'm not sure
You started with a number you don't understand as the answer to a question I certainly did understand when asking.
You went from "increased skills jobs are so much better for people" to "maybe they'll find some job, I'm not sure". But the average trucker won't find good job in finance, IT, or health. The jobs either aren't better (better work, better pay), or they're not realistically reachable by a normal trucker (easy enough to upskill to make it likely).
Employers aren't usually looking to hire old and inexperienced former truckers when the competition is either people with experience on that job or youngsters willing to take lower pay because they don't have a family to support.
noworld · 19h ago
Can they not ride next to each other on two lane roads? That would be great.
bgwalter · 19h ago
These trucks will also not form unions or start trucker protests like in Canada.
They'll centralize and monopolize yet another middleman's dream and create the physical Internet, with vast opportunities for rent seeking and wealth extraction.
You will not own the trucks: They'll be rented to you, you won't be able to repair them. If they malfunction, you'll have to talk to some centralized Email or "AI" based customer "service".
Somehow, the monopolists will extract as much money as you previously spent on a driver.
It may not be a monopoly in the beginning, but it will consolidate to at least an oligopoly soon.
JR1427 · 19h ago
If this scenario plays out as you describe, what would stop companies simply continuing to hire truckers and use regular trucks?
poisonborz · 19h ago
In a mostly driverless industry there will be protocols and standards a human driver will not be able to fulfill. Using humans in these workflows will be a nuisance.
juujian · 19h ago
You see, they will be cheaper at first. Or maybe they don't even need to if demand outpaces supply. And then slowly companies begin to rely on them. And once the industry is completely destroyed, they will slowly up their margins. I know, unheard of.
cam_l · 19h ago
regulatory capture?
noworld · 19h ago
Then I'll start my own trucker protest. With blackjack and hookers.
ralfd · 19h ago
This is muddled thinking. Automated trucks will lower costs for everyone.
> If that digging would give work to a hundred men with shovels and picks, why not get a thousand men and give them teaspoons with which to dig up the dirt?”
elcritch · 19h ago
> Automated trucks will lower costs for everyone.
Hopefully so, but it’s not a given. Factors like consolidation, collusion, anti-competitive regulations, etc all can lead to keeping prices high.
Braxton1980 · 19h ago
Do you have evidence that's specific to the automated truck situation?
bgwalter · 19h ago
Stereotypical anti-luddite quotes are not thinking. Automation in construction has not led to lower prices, on the contrary, prices are exploding. Automation in car manufacturing has not led to lower prices, cars are still expensive. Automation in health care didn't prevent prices from exploding.
If a monopoly emerges, by definition control and prices are centralized. And I really don't want broligarchs that follow the agenda 2025 to control the food chain.
FirmwareBurner · 19h ago
Automation has led to lower prices of commodity widgets like for example 4K TVs.
It doesn't result in lower prices of items and services necessary for survival in modern society which are also subject to regulatory capture like real estate, healthcare and education.
In the case of the latter, all advance in technology and automation move to the pockets of shareholders but the cost to the consumer stays the same or even goes up once oligopolies form.
bgwalter · 19h ago
Mostly if they are manufactured in Asia and if there is real competition (which is the case in Asia).
Much hailed privatization and automation of the postal services in. e.g., Germany has not led to lower prices. 30 years ago mailmen were literally civil servants with expensive salaries. Privatization and automation has just redirected the money to the stock holders.
There will be no real competition in trucking once a few large corporations divide up the pie and get special permissions to operate.
threatofrain · 20h ago
I could imagine we create dedicated infrastructure lanes which aren't meant for ordinary people. That would make the self-driving problems a lot more manageable.
Moomoomoo309 · 19h ago
And if it's not the same infrastructure, we can lower the fuel cost by reducing rolling resistance by switching to steel wheels on steel tracks, and then since no other vehicles will be on this infrastructure, we can chain multiple of the trailers together, aaaand we've invented trains.
All transportation alternatives converge into trains over time, it's like carcinization but for transport.
gwbas1c · 19h ago
Frankly, I think we could electrify the rails and then move single cars along like packets on a network.
pdoege · 19h ago
If we had dedicated infrastructure we could make the roadways out of wear resistant material. Maybe a metal or something
trollbridge · 20h ago
Such dedicated infrastructure lanes would cost an enormous amount of money, which the operators of such autonomous vehicles are not going to want to pay.
nmeofthestate · 19h ago
The whole point of self-driving vehicles is that they can can run on existing infrastructure, so that's a non-starter.
cassiogo · 19h ago
So... train tracks?
Symbiote · 19h ago
> Ms. Griffin recalled a particularly difficult episode: [...] She slammed on the brakes and yelled. Her truck pulled up just in time.
> “I thought for sure I was going to kill those people,” she said.
I hope at least the autonomous truck won't be driving at the very limit of the available stopping distance.
She seems to have been driving too fast around a bend in a signed construction zone.
This driver seems like a perfect example of where the autonomous truck doesn't need to be perfect to improve upon human drivers.
intrasight · 19h ago
I had the same reaction to reading this I also had the reaction that the truck would "know" way before seeing the blockage - because the cloud AI will know everything everywhere all at once.
creer · 12h ago
What's more surprising in there is that it's not Waymo doing this. It's hard to argue that Waymo isn't way ahead of the rest in self driving. And this outfit putting self driving semi trucks on the road is [checks notes] Aurora Innovation.
Who?
Further we learn they are proud of "360-degree sensors that can detect objects 1,000 feet away" and "already logged more than 1,000 driverless miles shuttling goods along Interstate 45 in Texas" - that's what? two days? "We have something like 2.7 million tests that we run the system through" and "two trucks without a driver".
What in the world?
Now, I will grant that some of this nonsense is probably the [checks notes] New York Times writer but still. This is absurd.
The conclusion goes beyond that: "What Aurora’s doing is being much more careful than most,"
creer · 10h ago
Speaking of which, has Waymo / Google spoken recently of why they are not more visible on truck self-driving?
nmeofthestate · 19h ago
Working on self-driving truck software has to be one of the most high-stress jobs in software development - I'd have trouble sleeping at night, given the carnage that could potentially result from my mistakes.
incomingpain · 19h ago
As long as they are insured. What's the problem?
Driverless vehicles dont need to be perfect drivers, they need to be as good as the worst driver who can get insured. The 16 year old kid who doesnt know how to drive at all and didnt do drivers ed...
Realistically the driverless vehicle AI is probably far better than the average driver already.
All cars and trucks will eventually be driverless.
danaris · 18h ago
> As long as they are insured. What's the problem?
"Well, the truck plowed into a schoolbus full of middle schoolers, killing everyone, but at least all the families got a nice chunk of cash!"
incomingpain · 17h ago
>"Well, the truck plowed into a schoolbus full of middle schoolers, killing everyone, but at least all the families got a nice chunk of cash!"
The 16 year old kid driving the F250 on bald tires, whose driving experience is grand theft auto 4 could drive into that school bus as well.
Whereas you cant source a single story of any driverless vehicle crashing into a school bus.
Do you think we should hold drivers to a higher standard so that we can hold driverless vehicles to higher standard?
conartist6 · 19h ago
A lot of people will die before this is done.
Even the trucks will probably start experiencing mechanical failures more quickly than anyone expects (based on the passage of calendar time) due to the 100% duty cycle I would think
Molitor5901 · 19h ago
It is only a matter of time before the bulk of truck transport is autonomous. Some can say it won't happen, or it won't happen anytime soon, but that is to be extraordinarily short sighted into what is the goal of the shippers: to remove the human. Truck driving is not an industry I would recommend anyone getting into, but truck maintenance, yes.
ryanmcgarvey · 19h ago
I don't think it will come all at once. By far the part no one wants to do and is also easiest for AI to tackle is long hauling. Humans will still be required for the last mile and delivery. I can envision a world in which we have "more" drivers because of AI not fewer.
ty6853 · 19h ago
This sounds right, but I'd be interested in hearing from a trucker.
Most of them get paid $0.X per mile, I imagine the interstate miles are the easy money and the last mile through Manhattan is the hell money.
rascul · 17h ago
A lot of the last mile truck drivers are paid hourly or per stop instead of per mile. I don't have any numbers to say how many, though.
danaris · 18h ago
I don't really see how the first part of your post leads to the last part.
Right now, we have drivers for all of the miles the trucks go.
Even if we posit that there may be more trucks on the road with self-driving long-haul routes, it's hard to imagine that it's enough more to make up for all the long-haul truckers who will no longer be needed. And at least for most purposes, it seems highly likely that the number of last-mile deliveries is primarily driven by demand, not the availability of long-haul truck routes.
Even if they could increase slightly, there are limits to how many trucks the highways can fit without congesting pretty badly. (Anecdotally, the NYS Thruway is already approaching that limit at some times and in some areas.)
So how would we end up with more drivers total than now?
gwbas1c · 19h ago
Then perhaps the question is: Where are human truck drivers needed?
Molitor5901 · 15h ago
Good question, I think human truck drivers are needed in the city where traffic is less uniform, than say a two lane highway going in just two directions.
kmacleod · 14h ago
Not really. The rise in autonomous production is going to match a rise in autonomous repair and maintenance.
Exactly.
Even if a robot vehicle could "just" match the performance of a human, we would still vastly prefer them because we want people to do higher complexity tasks than operate motor vehicles.
Why? And who is the "we" here?
I really could care less what kind of job someone else enjoys doing. They don't owe me anything and I don't want to tell them what kind of job to have any more than I want someone telling me what job to have.
Instead of "we want people to do higher complexity tasks than operate motor vehicles," I would say:
Moving humans from lower to higher complexity tasks generally correlates to increased productivity, higher efficiency, or "getting more with less." Generally, this leads to a wealthier society and other positive things.
The above is not true about everything but holds up in general.
It is likely that part of the reason they are truckers is because they aren't really suited for higher complexity tasks
I'm not trying to be an asshole. I respect the hard work and long hours that truckers do. I don't think they are stupid, and I greatly value the service they provide to society
But the reality is trucking is still a relatively low skill job, mostly filled by people who are not really equipped for high skill jobs
At some point if we automate all of the low skill jobs, we're going to have to deal with the fact that a ton of people who aren't cut out for complex work are now unemployed (and probably poor, and pissed off)
I think the answer is and has always been education and retraining for different occupations.
We can educate truck drivers probably, but not all. But the concept as a whole has issues. Can we re-educate and engineer to be a 10x engineer? How many of them? So, what happens when you must be a 10x engineer?
People have limits. It varies person to person, but we all have limits and as we go higher "up" the rate of hitting limits increases. We can cut out low hanging fruit like, say, literacy. But I can't be Einstein, and neither can you. So, let us both pray we won't need to become Einstein.
My general experience is that people tend to fall backwards into either lower-quality work or permanent semi-unemployment, but I could be mistaken about that.
Ultimately, after large-scale technological innovation that leads to societal change like worker displacement (like happened after agricultural innovations displaced farm workers in the American South, or manufacturing innovations displaced American factory workers, or unemployment during the Great Depression) you end up with societal unrest (like organized protest and political action) that leads to increased societal safety nets and welfare benefits… temporarily and if the unrest is big enough.
But eventually, as markets adjust and other types of employment opportunities pop up or as the capital class gets annoyed at rising labor costs, the welfare roles contract to encourage people back into the workforce (in American society, I’m talking about. I’m not sure how other countries handle this.)
There’s a thorough and well-researched (though very dense) book called Regulating the Poor if you want to see more along those lines.
But job retraining tends not to have much of an effect.
Basically, the labor theory of Planck's principle: '"A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it", Planck once wrote.'
How well did this work for the previous globalization of manufacturing?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knox_Mine_disaster
https://www.sitesofnj.com/Bethlehemsteel/BethlehemsteelMemor...
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/08/02/State-officials-Mond...
Next time you run through that line of logic, think about that.
But yes the reality is that net jobs will probably be lost. Some will transition into the new role of the truck driver, some go into different industries and some will get lost through the transition. The real truth is that it is incredibly hard to make everyone whole.
I have never seen economics or wealth as a goal in and of itself. Economics is a view of past performance and only really interesting to compare against other periods in the past or other countries/economies.
In my opinion people should do exactly the job they want to do and the economics of that will shake out however they shake out. People should be enjoying what they do, but more importantly they should be making whatever decision is best for them at the time.
This may just circle back to the question of central planning - I don't think we are ever better off in the long rum trying to plan the entire system rather than trusting every individual to do what's best for them (and trusting that decision to often include what is best for their community).
I was responding to the idea that we intentionally want to put drivers out of work because we want them in higher complexity roles.
> trusting every individual to do what's best for them (and trusting that decision to often include what is best for their community)
which hasn't, in my view, panned out, because of the reasons I outlined in my comment. Between trusting individuals to be altruistic and centralized planning of everything, it seems there's a lot of room for some central authority to decide we need more eg housing and to provide incentives for that, without becoming eg Soviet Russia.
This is the idealistic take. What's your practical take for moving hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from truck driving jobs to higher complexity tasks? Do those jobs exist today and truckers just refuse to take the step up? Are we creating new jobs that are just the right amount of "more complex" to be realistic for a truck driver?
In a world where AI is doing away exactly with the lower complexity jobs, how are we bridging the gap between the average skill level and expertise of a trucker compared to high enough complexity job that keeps them safe from being replaced by AI in 5 years? What's the reskilling or upskilling plan for these people's skills and career to advance at a faster pace than AI is catching up?
Some will take on more and more of the much more complex logistics jobs like delicate loads, large loads, etc.
Some will switch professions.
Some will go to school to switch professions.
Some new professions will open up exactly because it will become cheaper to move stuff by truck. For example, if a business can now afford to move X to their location, now they can do more business. Perhaps that business hires former truck drivers.
3 million truckers in the US alone. Retire early? To live on what, the wealth accumulated in not even a full lifetime of trucking? Go to school? Who pays for it, who supports the person/family while they go to school, and what are the odds that the skill set increases so drastically that AI/automation won't just catch up with them in a couple of years? "Just" switch professions? If there was a better one they would have done it already, so they can only switch for the worse.
Given the massive number of new drivers and that half+ of them are voluntarily switching to new jobs your whole thesis here is total bunk that they can only switch for the worse.
Trucking is one of those industries where even worse than most others recruiters lie, cheat, and steal their way into getting people into the industry and as soon as they're in they mostly find there really are greener pastures elsewhere.
Are they more complex task jobs? I rejected OP's theory because no evidence was put forward that drivers will just move to "higher complexity tasks". Are they? Are we creating a constant stream of higher complexity task jobs that truckers can routinely reach with moderate upskilling and which aren't at risk of being automated in a couple of years?
We have millions of jobs which haven't changed in years skills wise and are somewhere on the bottom rungs of job quality. Yes trucking is bad, but even "just" 1.5 million people doing this for years means they have no realistically better career option. There are 50% more truckers now than 20 years ago. So we haven't really created all that many "higher complexity task jobs" so far, we just created more of the same.
When the bottom falls out on this one, it falls all at once. The moment automation comes for one trucking job, it comes for all. There will be no bargaining power, there will be just "accept even worse conditions or take a hike". Automation doesn't fix their problem, it fixes yours: stuff's cheaper. Is your theory also that all those people will just magically get better jobs like stated here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44114878
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115072
Is the theory bunk because you jumped straight in the middle of the thread? Or because it doesn't give you the good feelies? I'm not saying it's all doom and gloom. But let's not pretend it's all roses either. We'll get cheaper stuff, and maybe the next generation of people will have better than just trucking jobs, and all it will cost is that most of the current generation of truckers will get screwed worse.
There isn't one, and there won't be one in the USA for the foreseeable future.
This country's people and majority governments have no issue in throwing people away, with no backup or contingency plans. Sector falls over? Too bad, go back to school (and spend MORE money), or live under a bridge.
But when a company sector falls over, they get government subsidies to tide them over till they create the next fallout.
And this isn't just a 'hate on republicans' or 'hate on democrats' thing. All elected parties share this attribute. R's just remove programs, and D's just means-test them to hell and back... But only for the individuals. Companies get free money (PPP), and have it forgiven.
Its unabashed capitalism for the populace, and socialism for the companies. And that absolutely means that people removed from trucking jobs will have absolutely nowhere to turn, unless they make their exit plan themselves.
Again, it was a massive example of 'Socialism for the rich and unabashed capitalism for the poor'. BOTH PARTIES DO THIS.
The only major positive change I've seen in this government in the last 2 decades that had a strong positive impact on the people, was the ACA. And in of itself was a federalized version of Romney's healthcare. And that was the Heritage Foundation's response for healthcare when Hillary Clinton put forth a single payer in 1995 as first lady.
But even with the ACA, it ended more up to being a corporate freebie to medical insurance companies. And only secondarily, did it start helping people.
But back to robo-semis: those people are already leaving due to tarrifs destroying shipping. And when workers are completely displaced to robotrucks being better than human drivers, there will be no relief for those displaced humans.
This country relies on sacrificing people for a narrower group to get ahead. And those who are behind are then summarily blamed for being behind, as 'poor individual choices', even if the root is completely systemic.
More people will suffer. More people will become homeless. But hey, some truck AI company will make money hand over fist.
But also don't live under a bridge, because that's illegal.
In fact, just don't be poor. Being poor may not be illegal yet, but it damn well oughtta be! And we're certainly going to make it as hard and grinding and cruel as we possibly can to be poor, because being poor is proof of low moral character. After all, if you were a good person, God would have made you rich, like Elon Musk!
Basically, if you can't get and keep a job, just go and die like a good peasant.
(/s, because sadly that always needs saying)
Otherwise by friend, a driver with spotless driving record and very poor English, is unemployable with two kids to feed.
AI cant savage the laptop class fast enough.
I know a few long haul drivers that did it for decades, one only stopped because a car accident then motorcycle accident damaged his back too much to sit in a cab all day.
In my experience, all bets are off when an industry downturn hits. People jump ship or are thrown overboard. Usually those that handle it best keep a steadier hand and don't react as emotionally, it wouldn't surprise me if that group is more often those with the most experience.
If the attrition of newcomers is high enough, and oldtimers fill newcomer positions (or just their wages) in rough times, then if the high attrition of newcomers is high enough to overcome the phase-in rate of automation then the old timers will more or less stay employed just likely at the shit wages that newcomers get.
The highest priority is being employed.
There is no universal direction for progress to move towards, its ultimately just changing things. Regulation removes options, that must limit progress by cutting off certain paths people may otherwise choose to progress towards.
i, too, want free money without having to do any work.
my point is, there's no good way to help those who is economically worthless from technological progression. Any way to slice and dice it is just another word for welfare.
I don’t want to actively “make” people lose jobs but I also don’t want to limit innovation. The relatively free movement of labor is a benefit for all including workers. I guess if someone really wants that Amazon warehouse picker job great but I am not sure that’s true.
Same challenge Uber at al face with autonomous vehicles - when you can underpay a driver 50 cents a mile to drive their own car, it doesn't make much sense to have an autonomous vehicle that costs you closer to 70 cents a mile to operate.
Sadly, this sounds like an anodyne ideal, tuned to rationalize "don't worry, feel happy" indifference in well-to-do people - who are conveniently far away from the affected workers, and the grim realities of how the change will actually play out in their lives and communities.
Does it look like the market is sitting today on a pool of hundreds of thousands of higher complexity jobs that just go unfilled because people choose to "just" operate motor vehicles? Do those jobs look like a realistic fit for today's truck drivers?
There are 3 million truck drivers in the US today. Do "we" understand what's the impact of "our" preference towards what other people should do? Or is what "we" want coming from a place of "I'm safe from all of this so I can afford to have lofty ideals for others"?
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm
I'm not sure how many of them are more complex than truck driving but it's safe to say that there are plenty of employers looking for workers.
You started with a number you don't understand as the answer to a question I certainly did understand when asking.
You went from "increased skills jobs are so much better for people" to "maybe they'll find some job, I'm not sure". But the average trucker won't find good job in finance, IT, or health. The jobs either aren't better (better work, better pay), or they're not realistically reachable by a normal trucker (easy enough to upskill to make it likely).
Employers aren't usually looking to hire old and inexperienced former truckers when the competition is either people with experience on that job or youngsters willing to take lower pay because they don't have a family to support.
They'll centralize and monopolize yet another middleman's dream and create the physical Internet, with vast opportunities for rent seeking and wealth extraction.
You will not own the trucks: They'll be rented to you, you won't be able to repair them. If they malfunction, you'll have to talk to some centralized Email or "AI" based customer "service".
Somehow, the monopolists will extract as much money as you previously spent on a driver.
It may not be a monopoly in the beginning, but it will consolidate to at least an oligopoly soon.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
> If that digging would give work to a hundred men with shovels and picks, why not get a thousand men and give them teaspoons with which to dig up the dirt?”
Hopefully so, but it’s not a given. Factors like consolidation, collusion, anti-competitive regulations, etc all can lead to keeping prices high.
If a monopoly emerges, by definition control and prices are centralized. And I really don't want broligarchs that follow the agenda 2025 to control the food chain.
It doesn't result in lower prices of items and services necessary for survival in modern society which are also subject to regulatory capture like real estate, healthcare and education.
In the case of the latter, all advance in technology and automation move to the pockets of shareholders but the cost to the consumer stays the same or even goes up once oligopolies form.
Much hailed privatization and automation of the postal services in. e.g., Germany has not led to lower prices. 30 years ago mailmen were literally civil servants with expensive salaries. Privatization and automation has just redirected the money to the stock holders.
There will be no real competition in trucking once a few large corporations divide up the pie and get special permissions to operate.
All transportation alternatives converge into trains over time, it's like carcinization but for transport.
> “I thought for sure I was going to kill those people,” she said.
I hope at least the autonomous truck won't be driving at the very limit of the available stopping distance.
She seems to have been driving too fast around a bend in a signed construction zone.
This driver seems like a perfect example of where the autonomous truck doesn't need to be perfect to improve upon human drivers.
Who?
Further we learn they are proud of "360-degree sensors that can detect objects 1,000 feet away" and "already logged more than 1,000 driverless miles shuttling goods along Interstate 45 in Texas" - that's what? two days? "We have something like 2.7 million tests that we run the system through" and "two trucks without a driver".
What in the world?
Now, I will grant that some of this nonsense is probably the [checks notes] New York Times writer but still. This is absurd.
The conclusion goes beyond that: "What Aurora’s doing is being much more careful than most,"
Driverless vehicles dont need to be perfect drivers, they need to be as good as the worst driver who can get insured. The 16 year old kid who doesnt know how to drive at all and didnt do drivers ed...
Realistically the driverless vehicle AI is probably far better than the average driver already.
All cars and trucks will eventually be driverless.
"Well, the truck plowed into a schoolbus full of middle schoolers, killing everyone, but at least all the families got a nice chunk of cash!"
The 16 year old kid driving the F250 on bald tires, whose driving experience is grand theft auto 4 could drive into that school bus as well.
Whereas you cant source a single story of any driverless vehicle crashing into a school bus.
Do you think we should hold drivers to a higher standard so that we can hold driverless vehicles to higher standard?
Even the trucks will probably start experiencing mechanical failures more quickly than anyone expects (based on the passage of calendar time) due to the 100% duty cycle I would think
Most of them get paid $0.X per mile, I imagine the interstate miles are the easy money and the last mile through Manhattan is the hell money.
Right now, we have drivers for all of the miles the trucks go.
Even if we posit that there may be more trucks on the road with self-driving long-haul routes, it's hard to imagine that it's enough more to make up for all the long-haul truckers who will no longer be needed. And at least for most purposes, it seems highly likely that the number of last-mile deliveries is primarily driven by demand, not the availability of long-haul truck routes.
Even if they could increase slightly, there are limits to how many trucks the highways can fit without congesting pretty badly. (Anecdotally, the NYS Thruway is already approaching that limit at some times and in some areas.)
So how would we end up with more drivers total than now?