Waymo Is Teaming Up With Uber On Autonomous Trucking (theverge.com) 37
Waymo and Uber, former legal foes and bitter rivals in the autonomous vehicle space, are teaming up to speed up the adoption of driverless trucks. The Verge reports: Waymo is integrating Uber Freight, the ride-hail company's truck brokerage, into the technology that powers its autonomous big rigs. This "long-term strategic partnership" will enable fleet owners to more quickly deploy trucks equipped with Waymo's autonomous "driver" for on-demand delivery routes offered by Uber Freight, the companies said.
Waymo describes the team-up as a "deep integration" of each company's products, including a jointly developed "product roadmap" to outline how autonomous trucks will get deployed on Uber's network once they are commercial ready. Until then, Waymo says it will use Uber Freight with its own test fleet to better understand how driverless trucks will receive and accept delivery orders. But the partnership goes beyond just beta testing each other's technology. Waymo said it will reserve "billions of miles of its goods-only capacity for the Uber Freight network" in a capacity commitment meant to underscore the seriousness of this partnership. The report notes that Alphabet's Waymo sued Uber in early 2017 over allegations of trade secret theft and patent infringement. The two sides reached a settlement agreement about a year later. "Uber later admitted that it misappropriated some of Waymo's tech and vowed to license it for future use," adds The Verge.
Waymo describes the team-up as a "deep integration" of each company's products, including a jointly developed "product roadmap" to outline how autonomous trucks will get deployed on Uber's network once they are commercial ready. Until then, Waymo says it will use Uber Freight with its own test fleet to better understand how driverless trucks will receive and accept delivery orders. But the partnership goes beyond just beta testing each other's technology. Waymo said it will reserve "billions of miles of its goods-only capacity for the Uber Freight network" in a capacity commitment meant to underscore the seriousness of this partnership. The report notes that Alphabet's Waymo sued Uber in early 2017 over allegations of trade secret theft and patent infringement. The two sides reached a settlement agreement about a year later. "Uber later admitted that it misappropriated some of Waymo's tech and vowed to license it for future use," adds The Verge.
This cannot end in a good way (Score:1)
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Are they? Humans kill 40,000 people in traffic accidents every year just in the USA. 1 million worldwide. And that's not quantifying the massive economic cost from people who are injured. People get distracted, fall asleep, get suicidal, etc. Sorry but humans can't be trusted with vehicles. Humans with guns kill less than 15,000 people every year, and we want to ban guns. Why shouldn't we ban human driven vehicles ASAP? Driving a vehicle is not even protected in the constitution, yet we allow people to do
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How about you let the truck driver worry about that? Humans are adaptable, they will learn new skills. There are a variety of things they could do. All the stuff that is transported cheap will need people to install or design them for example. Ultimately, we will need a universal basic income system. After all, a truck-driver job if you force a company to hire truck drivers because they aren't allowed to use autonomous vehicles .. it becomes the equivalent of charitable welfare or universal income paid by t
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...if you force a company to hire truck drivers..
I'm not sure how you got that out of my comment.
We could have the trucking company just pay a tax that is the equivalent of a truck driver salary and provide that as income to unemployed truck drivers. I am sure the trucking company would prefer doing that than having to deal with employees anyway.
Out here in the real world businesses don't like paying tax, and try to avoid it if they can.
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Right, so make it so they can't avoid it.
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So close to getting the point, yet you still missed it. Any currency's value relies on the goods and services that they can be traded for. Doesn't matter if it's imaginary internet money or the real kind, the laws of economics still apply.
If producing/offering goods and services required paying employees significantly more than they'd earn from sitting on their ass and collecting UBI, your money is now worth proportionally less.
Re: This cannot end in a good way (Score:2)
That makes no sense. The money is generated from the robotâ(TM)s work. If what you say is true, slave plantation owners would have been broke because it is impossible to live off work done by people or things other than yourself. Robots generate goods and services, some of the fruits of which can be distributed as a minimal baseline income to everyone including people who do not work. Is that impossible?
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Okay, let's imagine three scenarios:
In scenario A (we are here), we've got the corporations with their automated workforce, and they aren't taxed at a higher rate to fund UBI (because there's no UBI in this scenario). What do the companies do with that savings? It varies, but we do know what they're not using it for. They're not using it to buy more groceries, houses*, or other things that consumers buy and businesses don't.
In scenario B, we've got your proposed "robot tax" and everyone now has extra mon
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Your scenario B assumes only a fixed amount of goods will be available. Scenario B is actually complicated. With robots, there is an increase in supply. An increase in supply creates downward pressure on prices. Rent can definitely go up, but the price of manufactured goods will drop due to ease of manufacture and distribution. Rent will go up *ONLY* because there is a limit on how many housing units are allowed to be built. Rent is high due to artificial scarcity. But with the robot economy, new housing an
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We could have the trucking company just pay a tax that is the equivalent of a truck driver salary
That is a great idea! We should also tax flush toilets to pay all the domestic servants no longer employed to empty chamberpots. We could put a meter on the flapper valve to record each flush.
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Right, it's an "externality", as economists call it. It's "not my problem", as the wealthy and the corporate execs say.
Who the fuck is going to buy anything if they're living in their cars? Are you for BMI? If not, you're just a slimeball who wants to be rich, and doesn't care about anyone or anything.
And your understanding of how the economy, and the world, works is too simple for a little kids' comic book.
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Did you read my entire comment? I care more about human beings than you do. For one thing, I don't want them to do mindless and useless things.
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I'm wondering what all those truck drivers are going to do for a living once they're no longer needed for driving.
That not a real issue since there is a severe shortage of drivers.
And one proposed model is to have the autonomous trucks drive the really long stretches (the easier low hanging technology fruit) and human drivers take over at transitions into local traffic occur at depots.
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I'm not actually against self-driving vehicles, I just don't think the only problem is going to be with the actual robots.
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According to my quick search that is still 3.5 million Americans.
55 million Americans get a new job every year.
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I'm wondering what all those truck drivers are going to do
They could sit around and read about economic fallacies with all the chambermaids replaced by flush toilets and switchboard operators replaced by phone dials.
Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org]
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I'm wondering what all those truck drivers are going to do for a living once they're no longer needed for driving.
Drivers will be needed for non highway driving. The first driverless trucks will be highway only, with humans picking them up and dropping them off outside the city. That will be true for years, giving plenty of work for aging drivers and for young drivers to consider other careers instead.
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The problem with trucking is pretty much confined to OTR - over the road, aka long distance truckers. The carriers for this are screwing over the truckers badly to the point there is a shortage of drivers because they only people they can get are the people they can screw over.
The older drivers who are wiser end up doing local trucking - driving stuff around a city between warehouses and stores
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There is also an environmental cost to humans driving. Machines can drive efficiently and don't need to worry about sleep or eating, so time pressure is lessened. They could reduce drag by running in convoys.
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It also means individual trucks can be smaller and carry lighter loads.
Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the axle weight. So even a small reduction can make a big difference.
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Second, at least in the US, kids are not tolerant of anything but pristine working condition
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The routes should be made public. (Score:1)
So we can avoid using them.
Freeway driving is simple compared to cities (Score:3)
So why haven't the automated driving software designers sought to get it accepted there first, rather than mess around focusing on replacing taxi drivers?
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Teslas have been driving autonomously on freeways for years.
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True - but not legally unattended.
The James Gang (Score:2)
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You've just leaked the script for The Fast and the Furious 10
old wounds (Score:1)
Nothing mends old wound like piles and piles of money.
Oh, it sounds awesome (Score:1)