Side hustle or masters degree? Pilots don’t work another job while autopilot is in use, and neither should truck drivers monitoring its autonomy system.
A self-driving vehicle would be a step beyond current autopilot, and asking any human to constantly monitor an autonomous system is going to result in pretty catastrophic failure. An autonomous system needs to be fail-safe to be used.
Plane autopilot only works because air is so empty and flying in the same direction at constant elevation is unlikely to result in any problem. There are repeated examples of both pilots falling asleep and planes over-shooting destination airports, for example.
> A self-driving vehicle would be a step beyond current autopilot, and asking any human to constantly monitor an autonomous system is going to result in pretty catastrophic failure. An autonomous system needs to be fail-safe to be used.
I think the idea we’ll attain this in the next decade or two is borderline delusional, but to each their own.
Commercial aviation is one of the safest transportation mechanisms in the world; aircraft can go runway to runway in mostly automated fashion (auto throttle/TOGA [take off go around] for takeoff, autopilot for cruise, autoland for landing). We (customers and regulators) still require human attention the entire time.
My comment was unintentionally overgenerous. I’ve corrected my statement after reviewing the aviation stackoverflow site, and flushed it out with more details (specific aviation terms).
At that point you're getting no more bang for your buck, since the operator is going to be subject to the same limits on time behind the wheel as a driver of a non-autonomous truck. And you're not getting any more safety, because, as Uber and Tesla have been illustrating for us so vividly, a self-driving system that needs a human overseer can't drive safely, and a human who isn't physically in control of the car at all times can't oversee safely.
(Edit: This is, naturally, not accounting for the need for a transitional period while getting the technology bootstrapped. But that's time invested in developing the tech, not time where the tech generates any profit.)
> At that point you're getting no more bang for your buck, since the operator is going to be subject to the same limits on time behind the wheel as a driver of a non-autonomous truck.
Human lives and property loss are expensive. The average cost of a fatal crash is well over $3 million. The average cost of a large truck crash that does not involve a death is approximately $62,000. Settlement payouts due to big rig accidents are roughly $20 billion per year.
You don’t need to replace the driver to see significant upside.
Plane autopilot only works because air is so empty and flying in the same direction at constant elevation is unlikely to result in any problem. There are repeated examples of both pilots falling asleep and planes over-shooting destination airports, for example.