[Bartweiss]

One for one replacement is a truly strange standard to hold to. After all, even trucking automation will not be a 100% loss - if nothing else, we'll see a rise in full-service highway gas stations to fuel driverless trucks.

On the other hand, even 10% replacement of an industry (9 workers doing what 10 workers do now) is a big deal, and there are a lot of careers (legal, HR, document handling) that should expect to see values like 75% replacement. I can't think why someone would (in good faith) treat a one-to-one statistic as the whole of the answer here.

[arcticfox]

If driverless trucking takes off, why would the gas station need to be full service (staffed with humans)?

Compared to building an autonomous truck, autonomous refueling seems like the easy part.

[infogulch]

Think of it this way:

Right now, to move one trucks' worth of cargo for one hour requires one man hour. i.e.: 1 man-hour per cargo-hour.

If you have a single human that full-services 200 self-driving trucks in one day, you have: 1 man-hour per 200 cargo-hours.

Sure, autonomous refueling is easier than self-driving, but self-driving trucks also makes the human relatively way cheaper to employ.

[Bartweiss]

My thoughts exactly.

The usual standard for automation, I believe, is 18-24 months salary - if the capital cost can be recouped in two years automation is worthwhile. For hundreds of well-paid truckers that's a relatively generous target, but automating a reliable gas pumping system just to save on one minimum-wage gas pumper looks like a much lower ROI.

[gregpilling]

I recently spent $100,000 on some automation for my factory. The first $60,000 was for a machine that will take an outside supplier cost of $5000 per month, and replace it with a machine payment of $1000 per month. I now need to supply an operator, space, electrical and consumables, but I save $4000 to do that with. My 'new' worker will be just one of the existing workers (or myself) who will push the buttons on this mostly automated machine. The human still needs to load and unload the machine.

The other $40,000 was spent on NEW machines that automatically do NEW processes which we could never do before. I have a lot of pressure from the market to deliver new goods, and I have a lot of competitors both in the USA and in China and India copying my existing products. So this investment is about new streams of revenue (and I like toys/equipment!) . This is a $500 per month investment on the lease.

I have a reasonable expectation that the new machines could help us achieve a sales doubling in the next three years.

So in my case, 18-24 months salary replacement was never the thought process. It was honestly more about getting rid of a supplier, bringing it in-house to control quality and output, and saving money. I have a lot of automation, and I think the bigger concept most don't get is that the automation is way way more accurate and repeatable than a human. Quality goes up as costs go down. The quality part is a big big part of it.

[Pica_soO]

The factor is availability- you need three of these workers for a around the clock shift. AI does not sleep.

[infogulch]

Ok, so you have 3 employees working 24/7 for an average of a $20k salary (33% more than minimum wage). That's $60k/year or $120k over 24 months (based on Bartweiss' ROI estimation).

Do you think it's possible to deliver an automated gas pump that services 4,800 trucks per day (~1 truck every 3 minutes) for $120k? I don't.

[maxerickson]

I don't think 3 humans can service 4800 trucks per day either.

At least, not without more automation than existing pumps have.

[napoleond]

Eventually I think it could happen. It simply requires economies of scale--the hardware is not the expensive part of an automated gas pump.

[746F7475]

Except the employees are going to need breaks in between working and I'm going to just guess that manning a gas station in the middle of desert alone makes you insane pretty fast. So at least double that salary estimate if you truly want to keep things rolling with 1 truck every 3 minutes.

[bobdole1234]

Not the first year, but the next pumps come with automated fueling as standard equipment, and we can write off the upgrades over the next few years for tax savings.

[vl]

Track per 3 minutes is 480 tracks per day.

[throwwit]

Rentier economy dynamics now encroaching on human capital.

[cm2187]

But you might have more trucks, not necessarily less humans.

[Shivetya]

Until the automate the process of inspection and refueling it would be a good job to place people. Treat it like an airplane coming in from a flight. Support crew go out to verify the condition the truck thinks its in, fix minor things the truck called out, and refuel it. Sign off on the paperwork stating truck meets all acceptable Federal and State laws.

[Bartweiss]

This is definitely part of it - humans are great at flexible-requirement tasks. Gas the truck, kick the tires, squeegee off the sensors, make sure nothing is obviously falling apart. Rather than paying one human per truck, you pay one human per ~200 trucks to do all of the minor, unpredictable service tasks needed.

[zardo]

Far fewer units to move and a much longer expected life on the hardware. Hiring a fuel filler is an easy retrofit.

[freehunter]

It would also likely be prudent to have a human visually inspecting the trucks and able to perform small maintenance tasks. My car can tell me the tire pressure is low, but it can't change the tire. It can tell me the backup sensor is obscured, but it can't clean it. Maybe it didn't even notice it hit something/something hit it (like a fast, low flying bird) and now the fender is hanging off. Things that might need to be done in between distribution centers that would be easier for a human to check, at least in the short term.

[sdenton4]

Yeah, my guess is we'll see convoys of automated trucks first, with one operator for each line of five or ten trucks. In part for small upkeep and correction in real time, in part to increase the risks of straight up highway robbery... If you can blow out an automated truck's tires and know it will take a day for a repair vehicle to show up, you might as well go for it...

[jsprogrammer]

Trucks would be standardized and have sensors to detect many types of damage and the truck could be rerouted to an automated repair facility (or perhaps a repair vehicle would be dispatched). Visual inspection could be done better automatically.

Automation that relies on humans to minimally function is garbage.

[freehunter]

There will always be humans overseeing automation for the foreseeable future. At least until we figure out what all will/can go wrong. There are humans supervising automation in factories and warehouses, just in case. It's simply a good idea until we have AI as smart and observant as a human.

[justanotherbody]

By this logic should we have autonomous refueling already?

After factoring in the cost of the robotics I suspect paying humans minimum wage is quite a bit cheaper. Especially given the diverse outdoor environments such a system would need to be maintained in

[Animats]

By this logic should we have autonomous refueling already?

It's been done a few times.[1][2] The systems are rather slow and clunky, but work. Dealing with all the variation between cars runs up the cost.

Tesla has a charging robot.[3] This is much easier, since Tesla controls both sides of the interface. The car actively cooperates, opening the charging port door. Tesla also interlocks the car so that you can't drive away while plugged in. I'm surprised that Tesla hasn't deployed those robot chargers yet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y_J7fg03fA [2] http://mashable.com/2014/01/29/robotic-gas-pump/#hDxoRZBZ5Zq... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI

[icebraining]

They did deploy one station, between SF and LA. They say it has barely got any traffic, so they aren't planning to build any more. Others have pointed out that building the station was a requirement to get some CA tax benefit.

[gambiting]

There is no value in automated refueling - almost everywhere in the world drivers re-fuel their cars themselves, so there is no money to be saved by making this process automated. The only exception to this are some american states where you can't do it yourself by law.

[unclebucknasty]

Not really. There's not a lot of value in autonomous refueling when everything else about vehicle operation is manual.

[Robotenomics]

By 2050 gas stations will disappear to be replaced by electric charging stations which will be automated.

[cm2187]

I'd say rather than refueling, repairing. Right now there is a human in the truck who will do basic repairs, change a wheel, etc. If you have driverless trucks, they will need people available all over the country to service them on a short notice. Although admittedly these jobs could also be automated in the long term.

[Robotenomics]

My thoughts:

Fleets of self-driving trucks will be on the roads worldwide by 2020.

Those same trucks will have a ‘delivery driver’ inside the cabin for at least another 10 years.

By 2030 all sales of new trucks will be self-driving From 2030 onwards a robot such as the latest generation Atlas will be in the cabin to handle deliveries.

By 2050 very few, if any, human couriers will be used, instead people will have new jobs coordinating the self-driving trucks, delivery robots and facilitation depots.

DHL recently hosted journalists, customers, and experts in the field of robotics at “Robotics Day” in their DHL Innovation Center in Troisdorf, Germany. The company says “Robots will be part of the future of logistics, and we’re excited to be on the ground floor of what that future cooperation will be like.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeL-YtaUkWc&feature=youtu.be

[orkoden]

There was a story about a Tesla's radar being blocked by a moth, that smashed to its front. A fully autonomous vehicle would have had to stop and wait for someone to come by and clean the radar. Or there need to be lots of additional minor repair gadgets added to the car to clean sensors in case of dirt.

[robotresearcher]

There are already lots of failure modes that require a tow truck to rescue a human-driven car. I bet the reduction in human-caused accidents (sleepy, drunk, distracted driver) will more than make up for weird new failure modes like sensor-splats.

[vl]

>we'll see a rise in full-service highway gas stations to fuel driverless trucks

Not really - all AV trucks will be owned by consolidated corporations, think Uber for trucks. These corporations will have service centers in strategic location, AV trucks will come for refueling to these centers.

[baudehlo]

I am still yet to see an answer to the liability question on driverless trucks. Are the truck manufacturers going to take that insurance on? It cost Airbus billions of dollars when their software screwed up and they got massive amounts of government support to basically bail them out.

[laurentoget]

Presumable automated trucks will kill less people than human operated ones, so the insurance will be cheaper.

I am sure the companies who will operate those trucks and the manufacturers can figure a way to divide liability.

They seem to be doing just fine figuring out how to deal with the liability associated with the 3600 or so people who die in crashes involving big trucks every year.

[zacharycohn]

Refueling of long haul trucks is already automated.