[altotrees]

So I read this and cannot help but wonder if we really are 5 years away from a massive sea change. People think truck drivers could be obsolete in 5 years time, the bullish ones anyway.

The tech is still developing. We may be in a bit of a hype bubble, but it is as real and clear as it has ever been. I think even as the tech advances rapidly, public acceptance will be way further out than 5, 10 or 15 years. I would venture to say self-driving cars and truck fleets being normalized is 30 years away and in no way because of the tech, but due to all the red tape and public debate that will encase the issue.

If you think all truck drivers are going to be displaced in 5 or even 10 years, you may be living in an HN bubble. Sure jobs will be automated away, but this is going to take more time than lots of people think. For instance, one article like this could delay acceptance for months or years, in my opinion.

[ocdtrekkie]

Even once the problem is "solved", there's still an entire industry, one of the biggest, to turn around. Right now we still don't even get software updates for our head units in our car in most cases. As technology improves, how will self-driving cars adapt?

We change out our phones every couple years, but may car is five years old and I'm just about to finish paying it off. With a decade being a reasonable replacement cycle for a car, how will the car technology keep pace? Surely people aren't going to start buying iCars as often as they replace iPhones. Even if you adopted a service-only module for the industry, it's not like driving services will want to replace their entire fleet every two years.

Will cars have some sort of "technology package" including the computer and some of the sensor modules that can be made plug-and-play removable so you can upgrade your car?

[rsynnott]

> People think truck drivers could be obsolete in 5 years time, the bullish ones anyway.

I'm not sure how many people _really_ think that; it's pure fantasy. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if they're not obsolete in 20 years. AI stuff has a tendency to get nearly good enough quite quickly, and then improve very little more for decades afterwards.

[ghaff]

>AI stuff has a tendency to get nearly good enough quite quickly, and then improve very little more for decades afterwards.

What tends to happen is that some approach, deep learning in the current case, turns out to be very effective for a class of problems. But it turns out that it only gets you, say, 90 percent of the way there to being truly useful in the real world. And there isn't an obvious way to get you the other 10 percent.

[cybwraith]

My take on it as far as truck drivers is that the pay for truck drivers (as they are today) will likely drop as the skill required to drive one drops from partial automation. Similar to how airline pilots of today's advanced jets are typically only "needed" during taxi, take-off, and landing.