[toomuchtodo]

Society is fragile and operates in tension, a shared delusion like a currency. If workers burn down every autonomous truck on the road, there simply is not enough law enforcement to prevent them from doing so. There are only 1 million US soliders on US soil [1], there are 100 million workers. If they can't solve cargo theft incurring ~$35B/year in losses, how would they solve this? There are millions of trucks on US roads at any one time.

> I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.

Certainly not yet, but a resolution will present itself. The quality of which is to be determined of course.

(not advocating either way, simply enumerating the risk model; I am privileged that my day job is to get paid to think like a threat actor across various verticals and model accordingly)

[1] https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-troops-are-in-the-us-m...

[jedberg]

This is of course a dangerous suggestion, but also, never in the history of the world has the destruction of a technology that was replacing workers ever turned out well for the workers. At best it briefly delayed adoption.

[toomuchtodo]

When has it worked out for workers? Genuine question. If its not offshoring manufacturing (China before, South East Asia today) and services (India primarily), its importing labor to depress wages and keep workers in economic peril (there are approximately 720,000 to 750,000 foreign-born truck drivers in the United States, representing about 18% to 20% of the total commercial driving workforce, as of this comment) to encourage compliance with the status quo [1] [2].

If you work with workers so that they will have a safe landing through a just transition, such that longshoreman experienced when the cargo container revolutionized shipping [3] [4], you might get worker buy in. If you say you will with no evidence you will follow through, you will not get buy in, and whatever is the downstream impact of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers becoming redundant rapidly without a safety net.

Despite hope not being a strategy, as an observer, I hope that policymakers make a choice that leads to a net favorable outcome. If they do not, that is a choice.

[1] Is long-haul trucking really facing a driver shortage? - https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/11/20/is-long-haul-tr... - November 20th, 2024

[2] Impacts of Alternative Compensation Methods on Truck Driver Retention and Safety Performance - https://www.nationalacademies.org/projects/TRB-CAAS-22-01 - 2024

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

[4] Arthur Donovan (1999) Longshoremen and mechanization, Journal for Maritime Research, 1:1, 66-75, DOI: 10.1080/21533369.1999.9668300 https://doi.org/10.1080/21533369.1999.9668300

[pepperoni_pizza]

That is possible, but unfortunately I think more realistic scenario is that instead of raising up and losing their chains, the masses will get brainwashed by algorithms and end up convinced it is the minorities fault or something.

The future, boot, face, forever, etc.

[soperj]

> If workers burn down every autonomous truck on the road

I don't think they need to burn them down, punctured tires would probably be enough.

[toomuchtodo]

Laziness on my part, my apologies, pick your system vulnerability to your preferences. Physical disablement, some flavor of cyber RCE, sensor spoofing or blinding, etc. Could be as easy as slowing in front of the vehicle to force it to a stop.

Risk Assessment and Threat Modeling for safe autonomous driving technology - https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.02231 | https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.02231

Autonomous Vehicle Security: A Deep Dive into Threat Modeling - https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15348 | https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.15348

[josefritzishere]

That's a great allegory.