| With all due respect the hubris (and folly) of Silicon Valley pursuing driveless cars and trucks as well as things like uber is astounding. It will fail in the market because the technology does not exist and will not exist in the foreseeable future unless or until something like AGI is perfected. Driving is not a closed domain problem. There will always be fat tail circumstances where statistical methods will break down. Furthermore driving, freight haul and taxicabs are NOT natural monopolies. They are not areas where technology can give enduring market power that society will tolerate (except perhaps in the case of regulatory / institutional capture). Instead they are low margin, established, service- commodity businesses. The point of trucking is to safely and efficiently get goods from A to B. Until machines / automation can do it cheaper than humans it will not be viable. There is no shortage of cheap low skilled labor in the USA. Why invest in hugely expensive automation in an open problem domain that you can not even perfectly model when you can just pay a driver $25 an hour to do it better? There is so much more easily attainable low hanging hanging fruit. Why not automate warehouses? Trains? Waitstaff? Insurance agents? Real estate agents? Triage nursing? All these are probably more attainable. The driverless delusion reeks of sophomoric understanding of the problem domain fueled by credulous media and group think. Personally I wouldn't hire anybody for a thinking role who believes that driverless trucks or taxis are viable marketable product for the open road. It is a good heuristic to separate critical thinkers from bandwagon riders. It is literally an easier technical problem to land a man on the moon than to design an autonomous road vehicle that can do better and be more cost effective than humans in all circumstances. Hopefully we will stop talking about this foolishness in a couple years. https://blog.piekniewski.info/2021/12/18/farcical-self-delus... |
Some of it is. Walmart has already deployed some self-driving semis in Arkansas that go between a warehouse and a store. There are a significant number of routes like this, always taking the same path back and forth between two places in a relatively controlled environment.
> Why invest in hugely expensive automation in an open problem domain that you can not even perfectly model when you can just pay a driver $25 an hour to do it better?
Driving time is a big one. There are strict limits on how many hours drivers can be driving on a given day. That means you've got a huge, expensive machine sitting idle for most of the day. Self-driving can get you double the usage of an expensive asset.
> Why not automate warehouses?
This is happening already. https://www.wsj.com/story/amazon-takes-steps-toward-warehous...
> It is literally an easier technical problem to land a man on the moon than to design an autonomous road vehicle that can do better and be more cost effective than humans in all circumstance.
Nobody's saying it has to work in all circumstances. You can choose where to deploy self-driving vehicles. If you stick to the American Southwest, you still have an enormous opportunity, but you eliminate one of the big challenges for autonomous vehicles - snow and other difficult weather.