First Driverless Semis Have Started Running Regular Longhaul Routes (cnn.com) 147
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston. On Thursday, autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed "Aurora Driver." Aurora's new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.
"We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly, said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora, in a release on Thursday. "Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads." The trucks are equipped with computers and sensors that can see the length of over four football fields. In four years of practice hauls the trucks' technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company's self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck. Aurora is starting with a single self-driving truck and plans to add more by the end of 2025.
"We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly, said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora, in a release on Thursday. "Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads." The trucks are equipped with computers and sensors that can see the length of over four football fields. In four years of practice hauls the trucks' technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company's self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck. Aurora is starting with a single self-driving truck and plans to add more by the end of 2025.
Oh good several million more unemployable people (Score:5, Interesting)
Every year a productivity increases but wages don't. Eventually the service sector economy will collapse. Remember folks all those blue collar jobs in plumbing and HVAC people keep saying are the bee's knees are service sector jobs. They depend on other consumers and workers able to pay for them.
And there isn't any superfuturistic new jobs on the horizon to replace all the work we are automating. This isn't like buggy whip manufacturers going to work at the car factory. There is no car factory. There is no replacement job for what's being automated. It's not progress it's automation. So the usual thought terminating cliches don't apply.
Something has to give and so far it looks like we're just going to descend into techno feudalism while a bunch of old people insist it's not happening.
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And there isn't any superfuturistic new jobs on the horizon to replace all the work we are automating
We're going to need a lot of Mars settlers. I'm sure the first attempts will lose all hands. The next group will be told the previous group hasn't filed any complaints, so they must really be enjoying themselves. No other job has zero complaints! Don't forget our generous 100K bonus at the end of your first year! All training performed in route. Sign up now, seats are limited. Follow Kate Perry into space.
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The money people save from cheaper transportation of goods will help them move to a bigger house. Demand for more homes means the unemployed truck drivers can work in construction.
Re: Oh good several million more unemployable peop (Score:2)
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Diesel techs will be eating well for awhile yet.
Children of Luddites, Not Luddites (Score:3)
There is no replacement job for what's being automated.
Yes there is. You need people to manage the fleet of automated lorries, to develop and maintain the AI systems that drives them and to build the larger number of vehicles that it will now be possible to deploy. Yes that's still fewer people than currently drive lorries but that was also the case with the transition from horses to cars: horses needed massively more people to house, care, feed an clean up after them than cars, the car factory jobs were a small fraction of the jobs they replaced.
What you a
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There is no replacement job for what's being automated.
Yes there is.
Not anymore. This time mental work (well low-level mental work) is getting automatized. That has never happened before.
Computers (Score:3)
This time mental work (well low-level mental work) is getting automatized. That has never happened before.
Really? Look up where we got the name "computer" comes from. There used to be teams of people called computers hired to do calculations for companies until all of that was automated by electronic computers.
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Given that your average person can barely manage basic Algebra, I would save that team of calculators was not low-level.
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Oh sure, it has happened in small-numbers specialties. If you had any actual intelligence, you would have seen that as an obvious limit to the statement.
You already have fleet managers (Score:2)
This is the exact same nonsense I heard when llms started becoming a threat to jobs. We were told we were all going to be prompt engineers. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard and of course those jobs don't exist. It was just something people told us to try and calm us down so we didn't demand any social changes.
Also it d
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Productivity to do what, exactly?
You say that the technology is takin jobs here and there and that this will free up the people to be productive elsewhere.
Where? Putting tiny screws into an Iphone? Lol.
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That was the great grandchildren of the Luddites who founded the first successful unions, 70 years of chronic underemployment, 3 generations. The problem is that often looking at history is like using a telephoto lens, things look closer together then they really are/were.
Things are often more complex then a quick look at history shows. The Luddite times was also a time of enclosing the commons, which forced a lot of people from farming to city life, at a time when there wasn't enough work for all. Also one
Re:Oh good several million more unemployable peopl (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Unless a significant part of the productivity increases go back to the people, the whole thing will collapse. The super rich are a symptom of a massive, massive problem. In particular the US needs to stop worshiping the great God Mammon.
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The super rich buy more than poor people, but not really that much in comparison of how much wealth they have. Most of their money is in stocks. And when they earn more money, they buy more stocks.
I don't think that it really matters that much do we have 1% owning all the stocks, or 50% owning all the stocks. You won't solve any problem by giving those stocks to 50% and thus getting rid of the super rich. You would still have the rich and the poor.
So your alternatives are:
1. Everyone owns stocks and gets mo
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There are way more alternatives. Limiting your thinking is not conductive to finding solutions. For example, what about a property task that reaches 100% for the parts of property that go above, say 50M. Voila, people can still get rich, but "super rich" is a thing of the past. This obviously only serves as an example.
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> For example, what about a property task that reaches 100% for the parts of property that go above, say 50M.
Then you move to another country, like people are already doing when the tax gets high enough. You can not tax super rich, because they can move.
It is not that I limit my thinking. I have tried to find other solutions for years, but failed to do so. But fair enough, there is one other option which I knew, but which I did not mention.
3. Make an international tax contract with all of the countries a
It's not going to collapse (Score:2)
If you get out of line they just send in the drones and they bomb you back to the Stone age.
The 1% figure
Churn (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you have any idea what the turnover rate is for long-haul tractor trailer drivers? The majority of new drivers move onto another career in less than a year.
Do you know what the average life expectancy is for a truck driver? 61 years [ccjdigital.com]. That's 16 years less than the US average.
Do you know what the turnover rate is? 91% of truck drivers work less than a year for a given company. [freightwaves.com]
Do you know how many NEW drivers will be needed in the upcoming years? 1 MILLION new drivers need to be trained [sdcexec.com], to replace those retiring and of course replace all the new drivers who quit.
That last statistic alone proves you are incorrect in your assumption, as a million self-driving trucks could merely replace those who quit and not displace a single worker.
Sure, there are people who make it a life-long career, like my uncle who died in his 60s after driving a truck all his adult life. However at any given time a large percentage of the truck drivers on the road are brand new, which makes them more dangerous because they are inexperienced.
It is not a great career, but extremely necessary, so people are lured in with big signing bonuses (like $16k and they only have to stay for 6 months), to find the job really isn't great and not many people can really identify with it enough to stick with it long-term.
Regardless, we're talking LONG HAUL trucking here, not the more regional or last-mile type trucking that cannot be easily replaced by AI. There are many truck driving gigs that require unloading as well, which obviously a piece of software cannot do.
My prediction is the long haul depot-to-depot type trucking can be done totally self-driving, however I think we'll see something similar to the marine cargo vessel type setting, where a local maritime pilot boards the ship to safely navigate it in and out of port. I can see self-driving trucks arriving at a city, a truck driver hopping in, and driving it those last several miles to the destination, then back out, and constantly doing that kind of rotation as the self driving trucks come and go.
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Obviously the statistic refers to long-term drivers. It's not like there's some sort of curse that anyone whose driven a truck is going to die early.
The three reasons:
Lack of health insurance since a lot of drivers are self-employed doing gig-work. Employers don't often provide health insurance, and also due to the church with drivers switching for the sign-up bonuses they often don't stay long enough for insurance to kick in.
Sitting long periods is really, really bad for you. The more studies that come out
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Well, before all those poor truck drivers lose their automation, the company will have to build its *SECOND* truck. They only have one right now. And then, they'll have to build their THIRD one. It's going to be a while before they put all the truckers out of work. It might even be about the time the sun starts to fade.
Re:Oh good several million more unemployable peopl (Score:4, Insightful)
Despite more people on the planet and more automation than ever before employment remains as low as ever.
He did not say there will be no/fewer jobs. He said be no/fewer middle class jobs. Have you seen what's happened to the middle class over the last 20 years or so?
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Your assertion that he is now talking about the middle class (seriously dude we're talking about truck drivers here)
It was literally the first line of his post: "I keep pointing this out but 70% of middle class jobs lost since the '80s got taken by automation not outsourcing. ".
Re: Oh good several million more unemployable peop (Score:4, Informative)
Thing with the trades, and I've family in them, is they're great in a good economy, when the economy crashes, they're shit. They depend on things like construction happening, things being built. They also have the same problem as so many careers, when the number of people getting into them grows larger then the job prospects, well wages crash.
We've had a good run since 2008 when the last big crash happened, but I remember my nephew talking about 2008. He was lucky to be union, which negotiated only a 33% wage drop. Other members of his family not in an union saw 50% wage drops if they were lucky enough to keep working.
Re: Oh good several million more unemployable peo (Score:2)
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Don't think about jobs, think about who will be the end customer and what are they going to buy. Food, shelter, clothing, weapons, energy, medicine, education, entertainment, science, etc. Most of these have upper limit of how much of it is needed. For example if we invent cure for all, we don't need any more health care than that. Or we can't really watch movies much more than 24h per day. As automation increases and people perhaps move to work as a youtuber, you will at some point run out of customers, be
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But at some point we will run out of things that we need.
An argument that has been repeated since humans were hunters and gatherers. We have objectively invented new things we need while at the same time massively increasing the amount of it we need due to population growth. We automate a farm to be 10x as efficient while creating 10x the target market for the food - it breaks even, and it has for millenia.
Maybe one day what you say will come to fruition, but you're absolutely deluded if you think that'll be in 20 years. I think maybe 2000 years would be a better
Re: Oh good several million more unemployable peop (Score:2)
Re: Oh good several million more unemployable peo (Score:2)
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Sounds like it's a good thing we're falling below replacement level then. With no jobs to keep most people busy, what do we need all these people for? We literally don't need to do anything about this as it will eventually be a self correcting problem.
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Do you like your country going up in flames? Because that is what "self correcting" looks like in this case. Idiot.
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Most people are not capable of switching jobs without significant help. Many are not capable of switching jobs at all. That is to a job on the same level. Anybody can switch to low-paying unskilled labor. But that is essentially it. You are in delusion about what an average person can actually do.
Firstly: Who said without help?
Secondly: Automation doesn't get switched on causing an entire industry to disappear overnight.
Thirdly: Either you agree that automation isn't a problem in society for jobs, or you need to make the claim that we haven't improved automation in the past 80 years - because objectively the unemployment rate hasn't changed.
We've been at this a while. If there is a doom scenario then point me to it, it would objectively have to exist already given how over the past 80 years we have
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There's a lot of people now doing gig jobs that pay shit. My parents, with little education made more money, adjusted for inflation, then I do. They had no problem buying a house. I had it harder with 20% mortgage rates but with a good job, you could still buy a house with a couple of years of higher education, even technical (trades) education, and that education was cheap. Today, the young can not buy a house unless they're at the top of the class and luck out at a good job, basically only the top couple
Re: Oh good several million more unemployable peop (Score:2)
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Just like there is a future in TV repair? Or like there is future in car repair? Once the product becomes cheap enough, you don't repair it, you just replace it with a new one.
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Many of us have to work these hours or we'll be unemployed or otherwise underemployed and all of us made poorer as a result. We've been duped by our corporate masters that we need to work 50+ with no vacation while the fucking Europeans get 4 weeks a year and still live a comparable (or better?) life then we do.
So while you are correct there is still plenty of work, if we do less of it, we'll effectively be making ourselves homeless. Given the response of California (largest state in the union, 4th largest
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Thing is that for most people, they can only be really productive for perhaps 6 hours a day and after 8 or so hours the opposite happens. I've worked long days where the next day the first half is spent fixing the stupid mistakes I made the night before from being tired.
Those 4 weeks of vacation is another thing that recharges people that is missing here.
So the question becomes, is it more productive putting in 12+ hour days all year or putting in 8 hour days 48 weeks a year.
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Not people, you need to tax companies. Companies can be owned by people, other companies, organizations or even countries. But everyone gets their money from companies.
Could Hardly Be Worse (Score:5, Interesting)
After having been run off the road 3 times on one summer on I-79 IN ohio, w. Virginia, and Indiana, its hard to imagine the robots doing a worse job. We need robots with cameras all around and lacking the apparent limitations of human drivers that don't look before changing lanes, Watching videos of trucks on Facebook, we can hope for a lack of combative attitude exhibited by drivers in said videos. It's not a war, its cooperative sharing of highways, except for a lot of truckers on Facebook that think they're driving a tank.
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Trucking and freight in general is a race to the bottom. Margins are thin and companies pay the bare minimum. If you show up and have a pulse they’ll help you get a CDL.
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Oh, HELL NO! (Score:3)
We can't keep Teslas from fucking up Autonomous Driving, and yet we're expected to share the road at 70 miles per hour with a 60,000 poundDriverless Semi?!?!?
Hell to the No!
Re:Oh, HELL NO! (Score:4, Funny)
Just stay out of Texas and you will be fine, not like there aren't enough reasons to avoid it already.
Texas: The One-Star State.
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You know it's Texas when the vision range is expressed as "the length of over four football fields".
Phht!!!
Perfect!
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Well said!
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Just stay out of Texas and you will be fine, not like there aren't enough reasons to avoid it already.
Texas: The One-Star State.
True!
Re:Oh, HELL NO! (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't keep Teslas from fucking up Autonomous Driving, and yet we're expected to share the road at 70 miles per hour with a 60,000 poundDriverless Semi?!?!?
Hell to the No!
Apples and oranges. Tesla's camera-only, no-local-knowledge system is vastly inferior to the other self-driving systems out there. Compare instead with Waymo, which has an outstanding safety record.
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Comparing an industry to the worst and most toxic performer in it is truly stupid. If all you know about autonomous driving is what you hear from Tesla I suggest you unlearn everything and start anew.
Unlike Tesla who insists on doing things as cheaply as possible, with as little testing as possible, with hardware that the entire rest of the industry deems insufficient, and with the goal of maybe matching a human at some point (while the rest of the industry's goal is to drastically surpass humans), the self
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Comparing an industry to the worst and most toxic performer in it is truly stupid. If all you know about autonomous driving is what you hear from Tesla I suggest you unlearn everything and start anew.
Unlike Tesla who insists on doing things as cheaply as possible, with as little testing as possible, with hardware that the entire rest of the industry deems insufficient, and with the goal of maybe matching a human at some point (while the rest of the industry's goal is to drastically surpass humans), the self driving industry outside of Tesla has a phenomenal track record.
Unlike humans, humans have a shit track record, and all advances in road safety have been the result of more technology thrown at the problem, not the fools errand of making a better human.
What's significant about 60,000 pounds? Think about it? That's what you're scared of, weight. What's weight mean for others on the road? Stopping distance. What a humans good at? Being impatient fucks. What a computers good at? Following programming. There's a reason I can't set my driver assistance system to follow within 1m of the car in front of me, and likewise 60,000 pounds is completely insignificant when a system is designed with its weight and stopping distance in mind.
Found the Tesla Dealer!
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>Found the Tesla Dealer!
Yeah, I can see a lot of Tesla dealers say:
>Unlike Tesla who insists on doing things as cheaply as possible, with as little testing as possible, with hardware that the entire rest of the industry deems insufficient
Lol. U lak readng comprhsnion?
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>Found the Tesla Dealer!
Yeah, I can see a lot of Tesla dealers say:
>Unlike Tesla who insists on doing things as cheaply as possible, with as little testing as possible, with hardware that the entire rest of the industry deems insufficient
Lol. U lak readng comprhsnion?
LOL, indeed!
Posting Too Late Error.
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Found the Tesla Dealer!
Found the guy who smokes weed before posting on Slashdot. I just shat on Tesla my entire post and you think that makes me a Tesla Dealer. Mind altering drugs can be the only explanation.
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Found the Tesla Dealer!
Found the guy who smokes weed before posting on Slashdot. I just shat on Tesla my entire post and you think that makes me a Tesla Dealer. Mind altering drugs can be the only explanation.
Sorry, Fatigue.
Not Weed.
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I'd personally rather share the road with these trucks, than human drivers. I live in Houston, so I just might get that opportunity.
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I'd personally rather share the road with these trucks, than human drivers. I live in Houston, so I just might get that opportunity.
This ought to be fun!
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Obviously, you haven't driven in Houston traffic, or you too would be happy to share the road with these trucks. In this city, there are about 180 accidents *per day.* Adding one automated truck to the mix, shouldn't increase one's odds of an accident by much!
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Obviously, you haven't driven in Houston traffic, or you too would be happy to share the road with these trucks. In this city, there are about 180 accidents *per day.* Adding one automated truck to the mix, shouldn't increase one's odds of an accident by much!
Talk about damning with faint praise!
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Tesla is cheap and refuses to use lidar and instead rely on regular cameras. Plus they aren’t beta testing on customers.
No; just with an unwitting Populace that shares the roads with them.
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The difference between Tesla and autonomous trucks is Tesla relies primarily on cameras only and these trucks rely on a panoply of sensors, including radars, cameras, and lidars. These are also dedicated to various ranges and views.
So one has a decidedly 2D view of the world to make decisions on, and one had a pretty damn good 3D view.
I suggest going to YouTube and watching Mark Roberâ(TM)s video
https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ?s... [youtu.be]
I do not care.
The Space Shuttle had Triple Redundancy. They have been down to ONE working System.
How many 100% Duplicate Control Systems does this system have? How many Duplicate Sensors?
And I Repeat: 60,000 lbs. X 70 mph. . .
1200 miles of testing? (Score:2)
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So like 6 trips?
Yes, like 6 trips on its own; after 10,000 trips with a person riding in the cab to supervise.
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Who cares about the trip count? Any graduate school freshman can program a robot to make identical trips when they have perfect knowledge of location and environment. Hell, high school kids do that with Lego robotic vehicles. The important number is how many edge cases came up. How many times was someone walking along the road? How many obstacles in the road? How many emergency vehicles? Any floods? Construction? Mis-painted road lines? Salt lines that look like road lines? If the car in front of
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I believe the trucks will be operating only on I-45. So the number of problems will be limited.
English? (Score:2)
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No (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, but in England a semi is half of a pair of houses with a party wall.
I've seen lots of semis on the roads in the UK, this sort being half of a temporary building on the back of a lorry, commonly called a PortaKabin but that's a trademark. When I say "lorry" I mean haulage vehicle, not a parrot, of course. 'Tain't what you say, it's how you say it. That's 'taint as in "it is not", not taint as in spoil.
English, possibly the most ambiguous language in the world, and hence ideal for legislation.
Long Haul? (Score:2)
Dallas to Houston is only 3 hours. Even airlines consider long haul to mean at least 6 hours.
But Texas is small. If it were in Australia, it would be our third smallest state.
Re: Long Haul? (Score:2)
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What a funny statement considering Texas is the 2nd most populated state in the USA. Apparently quite a few people want to live there. It's such a large and diverse state, I'm sure pretty much anyone could find some part of the state they would enjoy.
This says nothing about politics and that you could replace the word Texas with California and the same would be true.
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Apparently quite a few people want to live there.
Millions of Rio Grande swimmers can't be wrong.
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Its still better than flying though commercial though. The only way to get there under 3 hours is to contract a private plane or find some
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No, it doesn't take 7 hours to drive from Houston to Dallas or back. I live in Houston, I've driven to Dallas many times. Typical drive time is 3 hours, maybe 3.5, depending on your starting and ending point.
The only reason it happened? (Score:2)
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I'd rather face an automated driver on the road any day, than a lot of the human idiots I usually encounter.
Future article headline (Score:2)
Autonomous Truck Robbed by Highwaymen.
Fake news (Score:2)
"Semis," "trucks." So far there is EXACTLY ONE TRUCK. They hope to have more later. Some day.
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The speed of expand depends on the ROI.
I wonder ... (Score:2)
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That said short
Re: Dallas to Houston (Score:2)
They also need to stop at a barricade, listen to what the cop says, communicate back to him, and follow instructions
Re: Dallas to Houston (Score:3, Insightful)
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I doubt it.
Maybe authorities for the Houston to Dallas highway have special instructions on how to handle the single Aurora truck that plies the route. But if a cop has to communicate with many self-drive trucks of different types, how will these special procedures scale?
Will self-drive truck understand the meaning of the cop barricading the highway with his car? Will it obey his hand-signals directing all traffic to take the off-ramp ? Will it read the illuminated sign that says "Accident Ahead - take Deto
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Maybe authorities for the Houston to Dallas highway have special instructions on how to handle the single Aurora truck that plies the route.
But that's what this story is.
When a bunch of different types of trucks are approved for the same route, then we'll have a context in which to discuss the challenges and how they have, or haven't, responded to them. But that's a different story than this.
As for "accident ahead," I don't know about Texas but here in Oregon the State already provides the data on a website with detour mapping; before the actual sign trailer with the warning has time to get to the site. Doesn't seem like a real problem. They de
Re:Dallas to Houston (Score:4, Insightful)
The truck can have it's own 'weigh station' built-in, tire pressure monitoring (TPMS) is standard tech, also, Trucks have no spare tire and the driver is not equipped or able to change one anyway.
The docking can be done by local drivers, just like ships in ports.
Re: Dallas to Houston (Score:3)
Built in weigh station? Just like they let a human driver tell them how much the truck weighs, no need for 3rd party verification. Oh, wait....
Re: Dallas to Houston (Score:2)
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Dallas > Houston is a longer distance than Seattle > Portland.
Its just barely long enough that a round trip w/ load/unload times might not be possible for a single driver in a single day due to length of day restrictions.
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Or Spielberg's Duel
Weight of human centric truck cab (Score:3)
With driverless vehicles, they can simply lobby for removing all of the parts of the truck needed to hold the human driver from windshield, dashboard dials, A/C, seats, etc. etc.
It'd remove a couple (?) thousand pounds of weight, reduce the cost of the vehicle and improve fuel economy.
.
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You could reduce the cost perhaps 15-25% by removing the life support from the truck. Weight saving would be something like 2% - 10% depending on the load. You could expect something like 1% saving from the fuel due to reduced mass. With better aerodynamics you could get something like 20% savings in fuel.
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Wouldn't need a sleeper, that's for sure. Those things are several thousand pounds.
If there were fast chargers (300 kw) at the beginning and end of the drive, 3 hours is doable in an electric truck, at least the ones driven in Europe by the Electric Trucker on Youtube. His trucks typically have 500 kwh batteries and he gets about 1.2 km/kwh. Although that's at a more reasonable speed of 80 kph instead of 120.