[lonelyw0lf]

The video ad is so crazy -- we still need a human to lock/unlock the cargo?? and its good for the truckers because they can go home early to their family??

The first part can be trivially automated and the second is just stupid. Truckers get paid per hour of work, less work == less money.

AI-self-driving has arrived but to make the transition look "humane" as in the AD is crazy. Almost insults the intelligence of these guys who have been driving our cargo around for whole generations.

[djrogers]

Truckers generally get paid per mile, not per hour. They are also heavily regulated as to the number of hours they can drive (why you see so many husband/wife driving teams).

One can easily foresee a future where a self-driving truck has a driver in it who is only driving 'regulated' hours for a small portion of a trip (say during high traffic, highway entry/exit, etc). The driver could spend the rest of his time sleeping, reading, or coding - he'd basically be a passenger.

If a truck can haul for 20-30 hours without stopping for overnights, that dramatically changes the economies of fast freight.

[BurningFrog]

Coding is a very HN comment :)

More realistically, he can do the trucking office work from the truck.

[coldsauce]

Truck drivers don't do office work, really. All of the documents like bill of lading, etc are taken care of by the office workers of the company the driver works with.

They have to do paperwork like logging hours, doing a pre-trip inspection, etc. This is done during off-time while the driver isn't driving (for obvious reasons). Usually on the driver's seat with a clipboard on the steering wheel :D

[notatoad]

they don't write code while they're driving right now either.

but if they suddenly started sitting in a truck doing nothing all day instead of driving, it's a lot more likely that some office duties would be shifted to the truckers rather than the truckers taking on totally unrelated projects.

[BurningFrog]

This was my thought.

[masklinn]

> One can easily foresee a future where a self-driving truck has a driver in it who is only driving 'regulated' hours for a small portion of a trip (say during high traffic, highway entry/exit, etc). The driver could spend the rest of his time sleeping, reading, or coding - he'd basically be a passenger.

That kinda already exists though, with team driving. Two pilots relaying gives ~22h of driving per 24h plus 2x30mn slack (under US regs, though there's still a limit of 70h/8 days followed by 34h rest per driver).

[jonknee]

> That kinda already exists though, with team driving. Two pilots relaying gives ~22h of driving per 24h plus 2x30mn slack (under US regs, though there's still a limit of 70h/8 days followed by 34h rest per driver).

So at minimum labor costs could halve... Sounds like a huge productivity boost.

[masklinn]

> So at minimum labor costs could halve... Sounds like a huge productivity boost.

It's not a change in productivity at all.

Also

> Truckers generally get paid per mile, not per hour.

[jonknee]

One person getting the job of two people done is indeed a [giant] productivity boost. Compensation will surely change along with the industry, but there's not a reason to suspect drivers will be the winners in this.

[wombatpm]

You typically pay a surcharge for a team load, usually because you effectively move your load 1000 miles a day instead of 500. For certain types of loads, team drivers are how you make up for manufacturing delays.

[gaius]

rest of his time sleeping, reading, or coding

Problematic in at least two ways, probably three.

[superfrank]

Even if (and that's a very big if) we get to a point where we decide we need someone behind the wheel of these truck, but it's okay for them to be staring at a laptop the entire time, I can't see a whole lot of quality code coming from someone who is sitting in the cabin of a truck with one eye constantly on the road.

[rhizome]

That's why you hire 10x coders to do it, so that the worst you get is 2-3x.

[booleandilemma]

Just when I thought there wasn’t anything worse than the open office plan.

It brings a whole new meaning to the word “shipping”.

[masklinn]

> Just when I thought there wasn’t anything worse than the open office plan.

Eh. A truck cabin sounds better. You can have music without needing to wear cans, you don't hear jim's mastication or janice's burping you don't get assaulted by emily's lack of hygiene or randy's mix of aggressive cologne and smelly feet, you decide what temperature you're most comfortable at, you can work without pants, …

The main issue would be 'net connectivity.

[jsmthrowaway]

I'm not kidding: I've imagined exactly that as a career change more than once. Live on the road, see new places every day, hack on open source projects, write, spend time with someone with similar interests (the hardest part). What's not to love?

Even removing the autonomous angle, I've thought about driving during the day and having laptop time for the same activities during rest periods. Probably seems weird, but I'd be in if I could make it work. I do my best thinking behind the wheel, and I've solved a number of engineering problems on road trips. It seems ideal.

[arbie]

> I've thought about driving during the day and having laptop time for the same activities during rest periods. Probably seems weird, but I'd be in if I could make it work. I do my best thinking behind the wheel, and I've solved a number of engineering problems on road trips. It seems ideal.

I hear trucking causes quite a bit of fatigue.

[djrogers]

Why? I'm speaking of a completely autonomous truck, not some level 2 adaptive cruise control. The 'driver' could be sitting on a couch or at a desk in his sleeper cab the whole time.

[kerryfalk]

I think you've missed this one - the typical long-haul truck driver drives somewhere far enough away that they can't return home and must stay overnight (sometimes sleeping in their trucks) before they can drive again.

This system seems to indicate that the automated trucks do the long hauls between cities and the human drivers do the shorter hauls within/around cities.

If that's the case, this is a good thing.

[Johnny555]

this is a good thing

Well, maybe not for the drivers who see 90% of their income earning opportunity automated away and all they get is the local driving on each end. Well, probably on one end -- the warehouse where the truck is loaded will be located where an automated truck can drive to it easily.

[hobofan]

> who have been driving our cargo around for whole generations

What does that add to the argument? Is there some inherited right to work in a specific line of work? Also, how many generations can that be? 3-4?

[PunchTornado]

Yeah, especially that self driving cars have been in the news for years now. Everyone know they will take over. There is plenty of time for people to retrain to something else. Unless they are lazy and don't want to...

[intended]

Or you know, humanity is terrible at retraining people - that the costs of retraining are so high that the simple straight path idea everyone has is dumped on contact with reality?

Remember that the greatest advance to education was the internet.

You could now have good quality, always available, free, subject material, from reputed institutions, with interactive media, perfected explanations, testing and so on.

And despite all this - they have a 10% completion rate.

I have said this multiple times, and unless people are actively looking at this system they miss that re-educating and re-training people is extremely lossy and unlikely.

And now you have people out of a job, and they have to re-train, while also taking care of bills and family?

People tend to forget - our best training system is to take young humans with no responsibilities, mostly spare time and keep them in training centers for the vast majority of their day in childhood.

And even there we fail.

And finally - please come to India or any third world country. It should disabuse people of the idea of the fully autonomous self driving car.

The only way you get level 5 autonomy is by controlling the road and entry to it.

It's exceedingly easy to see a bunch of cows or protesters actively hamper fully alert human drivers.

[cgb223]

Having grown up in an area where becoming a trucker is a common enough career path, I can tell you that the hours of work thing (which is really miles per work, but they correlate) lands some truckers in some sketchy situations

Many of my friends have told me they take those gas station "energy supplements" so they can stay up for 2-3 straight days to log more hours and make the trip.

Thats probably not healthy for their bodies, and certainly not safe for other people on the road, but if miles = money then its whats incentivized

If trucks could drive themselves with a passenger trucker to intervene in tricky situations, the passenger could have a much more healthy intake and sleep schedule

[PeterisP]

"so they can stay up for 2-3 straight days to log more hours and make the trip" - by the way, is that legal and actually happening in USA? Sounds like a horrible risk to everyone else on the road; in EU you're not getting on the road without a tachograph recording your driving & rest times, and driving more than 9-10 hours per day (including at least 9 hours uninterrupted "rest" eash day) would result in massive fines; if the cargo is urgent and you need to drive on then it's literally cheaper (as in, it actually happens) to fly in a replacement driver with a low-cost airline than to risk the fines.

[xxpor]

No, it's absolutely not legal. The big difference is AFAIK, we don't require electronic recording. A lot of trucks owned by the bigger trucking companies do have electronic recording though.

The max per day is 11 hours, with a 70 hour cap for the whole week.

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/new-hours-servi...

[notatoad]

>trucks could drive themselves with a passenger trucker to intervene in tricky situations

this scenario has been mentioned a couple times in this thread, but if the automation isn't good enough to handle 100% of the journey 100% of the time, then it's really not good enough to allow the trucker to simply be a passenger. If the operator might have to take control in tricky situations, they can't be sleeping the rest of the time.

[stale2002]

Well, but what if it can handle 50% of the journey 100% of the time, and that 50% is known?

IE, for the 100 mile stretch of road in the desert, when it is sunny, it works great, and then when it gets to the city it tells the driver to take over.

[dsfyu404ed]

> If the operator might have to take control in tricky situations, they can't be sleeping the rest of the time.

A tricky situation for a computer is often not a tricky situation for a human. 99% of it will be the AI getting confused by things that are simple for humans (e.g interpreting detour signs).

[notatoad]

that doesn't change my point though: regardless of how easy it is for a human to respond to, they can't respond if they're sleeping.

[PeterisP]

If trucks could drive themselves with just rarely needing someone to intervene in tricky situations (and not immediately - e.g. the "passenger driver might have to wake up) then it's going to be much, much cheaper to have the "tricky situation intervention" done remotely by a having a single on-shift driver ready to handle tricky situations for a hundred trucks.

[inverse_pi]

hmm, Im not an expert but isn't your logic based on constant supply/demand? Once self driving trucks become mainstream could it be that truckers will do fewer long trips but more shorter trips which doesn't necessarily lower their income?

[jMyles]

> Truckers get paid per hour of work, less work == less money.

Such a trivial and stupid reason to guide the future of technology and the human conditions. Of course people want to be home with their families instead of driving for weeks on end.

I find it dizzying that we think we can automate all of the matter around us to do what pleases us, but the matter of changing the socioeconomic configuration to match it seems a bridge too far. Come on now.

The economy (and society) will change, and this dude can stay with his family. Sounds great.

[darpa_escapee]

The people who are doing the automation, or own what is automated, don't want to change the socioeconomic configuration, it's working out very well for them.

> The economy (and society) will change, and this dude can stay with his family. Sounds great.

Given the productivity increases we've seen in the past few decades, this really hasn't been the case.

It is hard to stay home with family, when "home" and "family" means having many low-paying jobs to support both.

[neolefty]

It is probably harder to automate the last few miles. The Uber depots in the video can be standardized, but terminal pickup and dropoff is legacy. That cramped loading bay in the downtown Giant Eagle in Pittsburgh is never gonna get much better.

[johnhenry]

Yeah, I imagine that bit about needing needing a human is a direct insult to their intelligence. It's just there to distract them until we no longer need it and they are entirely out of jobs.

[jccooper]

> The first part can be trivially automated

Having done some cargo loading and unloading myself, good luck with that. It's a very heterogeneous environment and task.

[ShabbosGoy]

I think it will be some time before the big shipping players all decide to switch to self-driving trucks. We’re still a decade away from complete vehicular automation.

> The first part can be trivially automated and the second is just stupid. Truckers get paid per hour of work, less work == less money.

You could always pay them a salary and benefits, and hopefully UBI would exist at that point. Of course it’s unlikely for Uber to do that, because their strategy has been the exact opposite.

[LoSboccacc]

weaving machinery is going to drive out of work all the textile workers!

[marnett]

No, no, that was off-shore child labor that did that.