Self-Driving Trucks Could Replace 90% of Human Long-Distance Truckers, Finds Study (bloombergquint.com) 221
There are already several startups focused on replacing long-haul freight trucks with self-driving trucks, reports Bloomberg — and the potential is huge. (Alternate URLs here and here.)
The short trip from a factory or distribution center to an interstate is usually far more complicated than the next several hundred miles. The same is true once the machine exits the interstate. One solution is for trucking companies to set up transfer stations at either end, where human drivers handle the tricky first leg of the trip and then hitch their cargo up to robot rigs for the tiresome middle portion. Another station at the exit would flip the freight back to an analog truck for delivery.
Such a system, according to a new study out of the University of Michigan, could replace about 90% of human driving in U.S. long-haul trucking, the equivalent of roughly 500,000 jobs.
"When we talked to truck drivers, literally every one said, 'Yeah, this part of the job can be automated,'" explained Aniruddh Mohan, a PhD candidate in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and a co-author of the study. "We thought they would be a bit more dubious."
There are, however, a handful of big ifs. For one, the autonomous systems would have to figure out how to navigate in crummy weather far better than they can now. Second, regulators in many states still haven't cleared the way for robot rigs. Finally, there's the infrastructure to consider — all the transfer stations where the cargo would pass from the caffeine-fueled analog to the algorithms. Still, if trucking companies focused only on America's Sun Belt, they could fairly easily offset 10% of human driving, the study shows. If they deployed the robots nationwide, but in warmer months only, half of the country's trucking hours could go autonomous.
The article points out that as it is, the workforce of low-paid long-haul truckers "tends to turn over entirely every 12 months or so."
"At the moment, the industry is short about 61,000 drivers, according to the American Trucking Associations."
Such a system, according to a new study out of the University of Michigan, could replace about 90% of human driving in U.S. long-haul trucking, the equivalent of roughly 500,000 jobs.
"When we talked to truck drivers, literally every one said, 'Yeah, this part of the job can be automated,'" explained Aniruddh Mohan, a PhD candidate in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and a co-author of the study. "We thought they would be a bit more dubious."
There are, however, a handful of big ifs. For one, the autonomous systems would have to figure out how to navigate in crummy weather far better than they can now. Second, regulators in many states still haven't cleared the way for robot rigs. Finally, there's the infrastructure to consider — all the transfer stations where the cargo would pass from the caffeine-fueled analog to the algorithms. Still, if trucking companies focused only on America's Sun Belt, they could fairly easily offset 10% of human driving, the study shows. If they deployed the robots nationwide, but in warmer months only, half of the country's trucking hours could go autonomous.
The article points out that as it is, the workforce of low-paid long-haul truckers "tends to turn over entirely every 12 months or so."
"At the moment, the industry is short about 61,000 drivers, according to the American Trucking Associations."
Better solution (Score:2, Insightful)
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Exactly. Ideally trucks should just be the last mile solution to get goods from a train station or harbor to their final destination.
Re: Better solution (Score:5, Informative)
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Is speed really that much of an issue for freight trains? It seems like they would approach the speed of trucks, especially single-driver trucks that legally have to rest (stop) for 10 or 12 hours a day.
Doesn't most of the cargo spend weeks at sea before it even gets on the truck? Waiting an extra day for the train doesn't seem significant in the face of that. Maybe for a company that's cutting corners with extreme JIT inventorying. But if you're doing that, you deserve to go out of business anyway. They ar
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Even with multiple drivers, the trucks have to stop periodically for fuel. Imagine how these robot trucks will exit the highway, perhaps at sanctioned "robot only" fueling stations, to fuel up. Can you imagine the existing truck stops trying to retrofit part of their lots to handle robot-only drivers?
Perhaps making the OTR long haul trucks self driving would be a workable compromise. The driver could handle getting
Re: Better solution (Score:3)
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Unfortunately our rail system is severely outdated and in major need of overhaul.
Yeah, I would agree. How ironic that a "green" path forward is looking 100 years backwards at steam engine technology.
The rest of your complaints have far more to do with society dealing with shitty leadership. Trains or no trains won't cure that.
Re: Better solution (Score:2)
A trucking corridor with overhead electric wires is like a train that can accommodate railcars from multiple operators independently joining and leaving in the middle.
Re: Better solution (Score:3)
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A trucking corridor with overhead electric wires is like a train that can accommodate railcars from multiple operators independently joining and leaving in the middle.
The real irony here is all the unimaginative people talking about how we could make vehicles on rubber tires better when you could use the same technology to make trains better. If we power the railcars (as is already done in many subway systems) then using the routing parts of self-driving tech alone we could have trains that split themselves on the roll and separate out railcars which need to go to various locations.
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Building new railways is far more expensive for a company than paying more for a robotic truck. Suppose a robotic truck costs half a million dollars. A new railway would cost billions. And, since the rail cars can't just hop onto the roads when they reach their destination, it will be necessary to also build transfer infrastructure, depots where the rail cars can offload onto trucks. That offloading process also costs money to operate.
This price difference means that these railways would be built only in th
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The difference is, the roads are already there. The robot truck solution doesn't require new infrastructure to be built. The rail solution does.
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How many railroads could the USA have built for the cost of the F22 or the pointless "war" in Iraq/Afghanistan?
How many jobs would building the railroads create?
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The F22 and Iraq and Afghanistan may have been mistakes, but they have no bearing on the choice of building roads or railroads.
The US once had many, many more railroads than it does today. As it became cheaper and faster to ship things by truck, railroads became less economically feasible. Many existing railroads have been removed. In some states, old rail beds have been converted into bicycle or snowmobile trails. These economic realities haven't changed. Railroads are still built in places where it does m
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Our roads are already congested. We can't fit a bunch of new robotic trucks on them without adding more lanes, and that's expensive, especially in urban areas.
Let's get trucks off the roads and onto grade-separated rails where they will stop tearing up the roads and blocking traffic.
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These robotic trucks wouldn't add traffic, they would replace existing trucks that are already on the roads. Better yet, these robot trucks could more easily drive at night, when human drivers are less inclined to want to drive. This could actually result in a helpful reduction in congestion.
In those urban areas you speak of, it's extremely expensive to build those grade-separated railways. Money for these projects doesn't just grow on trees.
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The article says we need 61,000 more truck drivers.
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Sure. But if trucks become robotic, that doesn't mean there will suddenly be 61,000 more trucks on the road. These trucks will be prohibitively expensive for many companies. And the reality is, things that need to get shipped today, are getting shipped. So that "need" seems a bit manufactured to me.
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There certainly are trucking companies that mistreat their drivers. But is that really the norm? Do you have a source?
Truck driver wages today average about $60K. https://www.zippia.com/semi-tr... [zippia.com] That may not be as much as, say, a good software developer, but it certainly is enough to live on in most places, and it doesn't take a college degree to become a truck driver.
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Building new railways is far more expensive for a company than paying more for a robotic truck.
We had railways going everywhere. Then we built the interstate highway system and abandoned many of them (and not in an organic process either, the change was deliberately driven by standard oil, general motors and others) and the rails and railbeds have degraded to the point that they are unusable.
However, choosing not to restore them is choosing not to invest in a sustainable transportation future. Rubber tires are inherently inefficient and polluting. As well, rail lines' lesser maximum allowable grade m
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Right, seems like I saw the conspiracy argument on this thread once or twice. It's a conspiracy, man!
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Right, seems like I saw the conspiracy argument on this thread once or twice. It's a conspiracy, man!
The extent to which you have been brainwashed is frankly just pathetic, and I would pity you if your kind of thinking didn't mean we can't have nice things. In actual fact, conspiracy is among the top lead charges recorded in the convictions of matters filed in U.S. District Court [syr.edu] &mdash 397 convictions in January 2022 alone. This whole idea that conspiracies are rare has been planted in your head by deliberate efforts of ongoing and successful conspiracies, who have a vested interest in making you beli
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Conspiracies exist. They have been with mankind since the beginning of mankind. They exist in every country, even yours. So why hasn't your country succumbed to this diabolical plot? The reality is, conspiracies have limits. Conspirators do not control the world. Yes, they do control corners of it, but conspiracies always sow the seeds of their own undoing. Conspiracies are always about gaining money or power through unethical means. Because of this, conspirators always eventually turn on each other. So no,
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Because no one in the automation industry wants to sink billions of dollars into the R&D involved with self-driving (in general; the costs specific to long haul trucking are probably a fraction of that) in hopes that owner/operators will agree to buy one of their machines to replace themselves at some point in the future. Large wealthy corporations can promise payments in the amounts that would compel companies to undertake such R&D efforts in the first place.
And even if truckers DID own the robots
Re: Better solution (Score:3)
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While driving a subcompact and stopped to make a left-turn across oncoming traffic, I was rear-ended by a railroad engineer driving a '74 LeSabre who fell asleep at the wheel. It was his sixth accident in two years.
My father looked into his rear-view mirror while sitting in line at a stop light just in time to floor his accelerator and twist the wheel to run into a parking lot to get out of the way of a trucker who then plowed through all five vehicles that had been in front of my father. The trucker had be
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You seem awfully pessimistic about the progress of technology. Yes, it will happen, safe or not.
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And even if truckers DID own the robots, they (and their families) would do so in perpetuity, essentially ending truck driving as an occupation. A retired trucker isn't going to bequeath his self-driving truck to a new upstart upon retirement. He'll keep it repaired and/or updated and pass it on to his heirs
Nah, the industry would just lobby for laws making old systems illegal.
I don't know why people forget about stuff like regulatory capture when imagining visions of the future, but it doesn't just go away because you forgot about it.
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It's possible, but either way, you'll have an entitled class owning the robots and people looking to break into the industry at an entry level having no chance to compete whatsoever without massive amounts of backing capital. You won't just be able to go out, lease or finance your own automated truck, and compete with the people that already own automated trucks.
Autonomous trucks only on major highways (Score:2)
sounds like a bad reinvention of railroads.
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sounds like a bad reinvention of railroads.
If we want to avoid collisions, we could hook the cars together! And I'm sure we could solve the AI navigation issues by letting them run on physical tracks!
Genius!!
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Not even remotely close to being true. There are already numerous reasons why trucks "only on major highways" are chosen by shippers nationwide over rail. Simply automating them doesn't change that calculation in any way that somehow makes trucking redundant to rail.
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There are already numerous reasons why trucks "only on major highways" are chosen by shippers nationwide over rail.
By far the biggest reason is that we don't have enough rail, so it doesn't go to enough places. And we don't have enough rail because it was deliberately shut down by a proven (convicted!) conspiracy in this country, and never rebuilt. Mind you, the auto companies kept the rail going into their factories, because they know what they pretended wasn't true: rail is the most efficient way to keep heavy freight.
Simply automating them doesn't change that calculation in any way that somehow makes trucking redundant to rail.
Right, we would have to rebuild/restore the rail lines that we destroyed/abandoned, at truly massive
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It's not just that we don't have enough rail. It's that rail is grotesquely inflexible.
As to the rest of your argument, you're moving far outside the scope of this story. Truckers exist, and automated trucks will put them out of existence. Rail isn't even in the equation. You can shake your fist at the trucks, but they aren't going anywhere.
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It's not just that we don't have enough rail. It's that rail is grotesquely inflexible.
Grotesquely? You're really reaching into the bag of scrabble tiles there. Frankly, it's not a supportable statement. Rail had far more flexibility when we had more rail, and we did in fact used to have more rail. And when we started building the interstate highway system, rail offered far more flexibility than did the roads of the time, and if we'd spent the money on rail systems we could have had the best in the world. But that's not what happened. Instead, greed won the day.
Rail isn't even in the equation.
That is foolish and wrong. We d
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sounds like a bad reinvention of railroads.
Furthermore, an entire genre of music would have to be rewritten.
join the queue (Score:3)
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Maybe we should just shop at the shipping yard.
Re:join the queue (Score:4, Informative)
Who will they deliver all those goods to when no one has a job?
Lump of labor fallacy [wikipedia.org]
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That's not what this fallacy is about.
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That's not what this fallacy is about.
Yes it is. From the linked wiki page: "The term is also commonly used to describe the belief that increasing labour productivity, immigration, or automation causes an increase in unemployment."
Automation does not cause unemployment. It moves people to more productive jobs and increases our standard of living.
Truck drivers will find new jobs just as bank tellers did when they were replaced with ATMs, switchboard operators with phone dials, or chambermaids with flushing toilets. None of those led to mass
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Not everyone can move to more productive jobs, as those are being taken away by automation too. Anything higher skilled is a non starter so they end up unemployed then homeless.
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People have been making the same Chicken-Little predictions for 300 years and they have always been wrong.
Please explain why "This time is different."
How are truck drivers fundamentally different from switchboard operators, scullery maids, and weavers? All of those jobs disappeared, yet living standards rose and we have a full-employment economy.
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More vague handwaving.
Name something a high school-educated truck driver can do today that can not be automated away. Human labor is getting quite expensive in the United States, and the incentive to automate away as much of it as possible is strong. There may come a day when you hope to start a new, innovative business, and instead of concluding that you'll need some low-level employees to operate your new business, you'll rightfully be able to buy machines to pull the whole thing together. You might ev
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Please explain why "This time is different."
What's different this time is that machines and automation are closing in to equality or superiority over human beings in all areas of capability, at a price point comparable to the human's.
Humans are quite versatile, but they're still biological entities, with limited capabilities. They can do physical work, intellectual (non-creative) work, creative work, maybe a few other types. In all those areas machines have either replaced or are challenging humans.
For physical work, the humans have already been obso
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People have been making the same Chicken-Little predictions for 300 years and they have always been wrong.
If you leave out the times when such a description (not prediction) was right. At the start of Industrial Revolution there was a 70 year period, from 1770 to 1840, in which unemployment was a permanent feature in Britain after the textile industry jobs began vanishing. The Poor Law, work houses, and the Napoleonic Wars filled in some of the gaps, and the pathetic slums that Dickens describes were not works of his imagination.
The industrialization created impoverished classes and debt peons in countries arou
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Technological unemployment has bee
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Probably the hospital zones, where all the hit-and-run victims of those driverless trucks will be...
Loading and Delivery Pain Points. (Score:2)
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What makes you think no one has a job? You aren't born with a barcode on the back of your head that designates you a truck driver for life.
The world has automated away many jobs while maintaining incredibly low unemployment. By getting rid of busywork people can focus on jobs that provide other value to the human race.
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Don't worry, we're working on getting rid of the rest of the jobs. And with wages going up, the game is afoot!
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Re:join the queue (Score:5, Insightful)
In the US, anyone who really wants a job can get one. Businesses are scrambling to compete for people. They are paying for retraining and raising pay. Unemployment is extremely low. People might have to do work they haven't done before, but the jobs are there, and they will continue to be there after trucks become robotic.
It will take a long, long time to move to widespread use of robotic trucks. It's not like, all of a sudden, nobody will want truck drivers any more. How long has Google been working on self-driving cars? Many years. The technology exists, but adoption will be slow. This will give truck drivers plenty of time to retire, or learn to do some other kind of work.
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Just because there is an average replacement time of 10 years or so, doesn't mean that all truck owners will suddenly stop buying traditional trucks. The new robotic trucks will be significantly more expensive than regular trucks, both to purchase and to maintain. This cost will slow adoption. Also, the technology isn't going to suddenly be able to handle all use cases. It will take decades to improve the technology to the point that it will be widely usable.
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In the US, anyone who really wants a job can get one.
But will it pay a living wage? Because if it doesn't, it doesn't solve their problems.
Businesses are scrambling to compete for people. They are paying for retraining and raising pay.
A truly minuscule percentage of businesses are doing this. Most jobs still don't pay enough to live on. Even a casual glance at the want ads will prove that. Your comment is misleading at best. For most people there are no meaningful jobs available, only shit ones that won't pay their bills and leave them going ever further into debt to cover their costs. It might also be noted here that wage theft in America exceeds direc [epi.org]
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In the US, anyone who really wants a good-paying job can get one. People turn down these good jobs for a number of reasons, including a wish not to relocate or retrain. But the jobs are there. Many go unfilled.
The US Census Bureau says that the median household income in the US is almost $70K.. https://www.census.gov/library... [census.gov].
Is 70K enough to live on? Not in San Francisco or New York, but in most places in the US, it's plenty. No, you're not going to make a living wage flipping burgers at McDonald's. If y
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The US Census Bureau says that the median household income in the US is almost $70K
Yes, that's because of all the homes with multiple wage-earners, which used to not be necessary in this country. Granted, that situation was temporary, and predicated upon our disgraceful behavior regarding WWII. However, it does not speak to the availability of good-paying jobs.
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Who will they deliver all those goods to when no one has a job?
For sure. I mean who could forget Amazon's "Black" year, when COVID hit and everyone stopped spending due to dozens of shuttered industries.
I mean shit, their stock was only up by 30%. Talk about crushing the bottom line. Think of all the people they had to fir, er I mean hire...
Precedent (Score:3)
The short trip from a factory or distribution center to an interstate is usually far more complicated than the next several hundred miles. The same is true once the machine exits the interstate.
What you need in the middle between the short high-intensity bursts of activity at the start and at the end of the journey is called an autopilot.
That's exactly how air travel works: the pilot and copilot do 15 minutes of work at take off and at landing, then engage the autopilot and crack jokes during the boring hours of flight in-between.
The risk for truck drivers - as for airline pilots - is that today's autopilots are perfectly able to carry out the entire journey from beginning to end. Planes can already pretty much fly themselves from taxi-out to taxi-in, and trucks will soon be able to drive themselves from loading dock to loading dock.
Matter of fact, trains have been technically able to drive themselves from beginning to end for even longer. But I believe psychologically, airline or train passengers want to know there are real people in charge if shit goes wrong. But I'm not sure anyone gives a shit about the safety of freight or whether trucks are manned by real human beings.
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The risk for truck drivers - as for airline pilots - is that today's autopilots are perfectly able to carry out the entire journey from beginning to end. Planes can already pretty much fly themselves from taxi-out to taxi-in, and trucks will soon be able to drive themselves from loading dock to loading dock.
Boeing 737 Max clearly states it's not always the case. The autopilot is only as good as the equipment and the programming. Maybe one day we can devise an AI that never fails to replace humans.
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What you need in the middle between the short high-intensity bursts of activity at the start and at the end of the journey is called an autopilot.
Who is "you"? If you mean what the truck driver needs, sure. But what everyone else needs or at least wants is for there not to be a truck driver during that period, so they don't have to be paid.
Of course, what actually makes sense is to use rail. We need to restore our rail network, and use it for long-haul freight. Rubber tires are inefficient and polluting. Going over mountains is less efficient than going around them. Self-driving for many vehicles is more difficult than for a few, especially if in the
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The World Where... (Score:2)
The world where no one works and no one dies. Just don't expect any handouts.
--
Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake! - Joe Biden
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What makes you think no one will work? Just because one tedious job is eliminated (and that will take decades), doesn't mean all jobs are eliminated. We as a society eliminate jobs and replace workers with robots constantly. The auto industry, and farming, are two great examples. 70% of Americans used to be farmers, now just 2%. Yet somehow we have an unemployment rate around 3-4%. As long as people want things, jobs aren't going anywhere.
American solution (Score:2)
That’s why the rest of the developed world has railways. One freight train is like a lot of trucks, densely packed that travel over perfectly straight lines, connecting the most important hubs. Those trains last much longer than trucks, are cheaper to maintain and are more energy efficient.
Yes, you might even robotize the machinist, but at that scale it just doesn’t make much difference in terms of costs.
Because the USA’s railway system is not that useful, solutions are sought to automate
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Railways can carry a lot of freight, true. The volume is high, but so is the latency. A truck can get goods from one place to another in hours, by train it takes days. Nor do trains typically stop at your company's back door. This means that depots have to be built and operated, that transfer cargo from the train to trucks, and vice versa. These depots are expensive to build and operate.
Europeans think rail is a great option because the distances are relatively small. In the US, cities are spread much, much
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Railways can carry a lot of freight, true. The volume is high, but so is the latency. A truck can get goods from one place to another in hours, by train it takes days.
For some goods, that matters very much. For others, it does not matter at all. So that objection makes only partial sense.
Nor do trains typically stop at your company's back door.
Trains USED to stop at the back door of every company that would benefit from it. A network of nationwide and local rail used to offer extremely good coverage. In many American cities and towns the rail is still there, albeit old and rusty and on compromised rail beds. And what's more, the freight docks are often still there, right on the rail line where goods could be pulled off the train trivially. What's missing is the trains, and they're missing because of a proven and convicted conspiracy to eliminate rail transit in America (both passenger and freight) so as to provide additional profit to America's oil, rubber, and car companies. It was NOT because businesses didn't want to use rail, it was explicitly because some industries wanted to make more profit, and didn't give two fucks how it affected the nation.
Europeans think rail is a great option because the distances are relatively small. In the US, cities are spread much, much farther apart,
And yet rail lines used to serve those cities, until they were shut down in the name of profit.
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Ah so it's a vast conspiracy then. OK, enough said.
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I'm currently in a train which is doing 185mph. The problem isn't that rail is inherently slower than road.
TFS talks about building depots to hand over between human-driven vehicles and automated vehicles, so you need to explain why this isn't a red herring.
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Freight does not travel on high-speed rail, even in your country. Only passenger trains do. Even if it did, the time from station to station isn't the real time cost, it's the transfer time from the station to trucks, and the queueing that is required. Rail is high volume but high latency.
These "truck depots" would essentially be equivalent to truck stops. These are already widely available in the US.
Could != would (Score:2)
And maybe driving along an interstate is a comparatively straightforward task to automate. Driving in traffic through town, or along a muddy / icy road into some random loading yard isn't a straightforward automated task. So if you need a human for that "final mile", and now you add in
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Of course they'd save money. Long haul truckers have mandatory downtime, to the point where they often drive in teams just to keep the truck moving. One automated truck can replace multiple salaries. This truck can stay on the road 24/7, stopping only to refuel or to report a mechanical failure (or to drive itself into a repair center, if possible).
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Supply and Demand (Score:3)
It's amazing how a shortage of goods and services leads to higher prices everywhere except labor. If the industry needs more truckers, have they tried offering more pay?
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Nah... (Score:2)
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...self-driving trucks cannot become a thing unless the simple question of who is legally responsible if the software makes a mistake and kills someone is answered.
Vehicles have had software-controlled safety systems for 45 years.
Software bugs have caused many accidents and several deaths.
So this question was answered long ago.
The manufacturer is liable if the software causes an accident. Duh.
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There is a difference between technical malfunctions and software actually making decisions.
Legally, there is no difference. The manufacturer is responsible for either.
the manufacturer would have no answer to give as to why it won't happen again.
So? We don't take cars off the road because they aren't 100% guaranteed to never blow a tire.
Accidents happen. Software defects have killed people in the past and will kill people in the future. The world will keep turning.
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Perhaps a company could be formed that agreed to accept to pay for the consequences of any potential accidents, in return for a monthly or annual fee.
Perhaps we could come up with a new name for this type of company, such as INSURER.
Class War (Score:2)
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Yes. They will or they'll be fired by their bosses and replaced with an endless procession of programmers until finally the bosses find ones that will do the job.
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Yeah fat chance. "AI" programmers like Visual Studio have been generating all kinds of repetitive code for decades. Yet with all that increasing automation, there is still a desperate need for more programmers. Automation is getting better all the time, but it still only makes sense to automate the most routine types of work. If have seen nothing to indicate that AI or automation can or will ever be able to solve actual challenging problems, or create solutions for problems that haven't previously been addr
Just an idea... (Score:2)
where human drivers handle the tricky first leg of the trip and then hitch their cargo up to robot rigs for the tiresome middle portion
That's what railways are for.
Well, OK (Score:2)
GrumpyCatGood.jpg
Hazmat rules will need a change (Score:2)
Some cargoes require a hazardous materials certified driver. So those loads will either have to stay manual, or the rules will have to be changed.
Or I suppose the hazmat person could just be a passenger with the truck doing the driving.
Hooray! (Score:2)
As a long time slashdot user, I feel occasionally obligated to rejoice at the perspective of humans, which I deem flawed in comparison to machines, getting replaced by robots!
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The US has a freight rail network that covers the entire country. The problem with rail is that it's slow. A truck can get from one city to another in hours. Even a trip across the entire 4,000 mile length of the country can be done in under 60 hours, assuming the driver doesn't need sleep. Shipping goods by rail takes days or weeks, and only makes sense economically when there is high volume. Railways have already been built in every place where they make economic sense. That leaves out many places where t
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The US has a freight rail network that covers the entire country.
No, it does not. It used to, before a conspiracy between oil, rubber, and auto companies [wikipedia.org] to shut down active rail lines in order to produce profit for their industries.
Railways have already been built in every place where they make economic sense.
Then they were abandoned, to produce profit for a few, and fuck the needs of the many. Enjoy your Kool-Aid(tm). You clearly drank it all, and are now worshiping corporate America, which can do no wrong in your book, because it always makes intelligent and sustainable decisions.
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Ah yes, it's a conspiracy! Of course!
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Ah yes, it's a conspiracy! Of course!
We know beyond any doubt that it was the results of a conspiracy, because the principal members were convicted of it in court. Conspiracies are the norm and not the exception. Every monopoly deliberately abusing its market position is a conspiracy, for example. That means Microsoft, PG&E (whose deliberate, illegal, and secretive actions have actually killed dozens or hundreds of people) and so on.
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QAnon is here.
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QAnon is here.
Oh, is that where they've been hiding? At your house? Makes sense.
The rest of us can understand that a group consisting mostly of standard oil and general motors was actually convicted of a conspiracy to deliberately shut down functional and profitable rail systems against the public interest.
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Conspiracies exist. But conspirators do not control the world. This is not the Matrix. Your Standard Oil and GM conspiracy did exist, but SO no longer exists, and GM doesn't have the power it once did. We've moved on. You can't blame all that ails our country on an event that took place nearly 100 years ago.