> But ultimately, Seltz-Axmacher believes, the tools he’s developing will be good for truckers. He cites a new book by Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking, in which the chess great observes that middling chess players who play with the help of a standard computer are reliably better than either grandmasters or supercomputers by themselves. “I think humans and technology working together are always going to be better than either one alone,” Seltz-Axmacher says. “But maybe that’s just because I like humans.”
This is amusing because this stopped being true a long time ago. Even by 2007, it was hard for anyone to improve, and after 2013 or so, the very best centaurs were reduced to basically just opening book preparation (itself an extremely difficult skill involving compiling millions of games and carefully tuning against the weakness of possible opponent engines), to the point where official matches have mostly stopped (making it hard to identify the exact point at which centaur ceased to be a thing at all).
I've never really understood Kasparov's pro-biological opinion along those lines. I suspect it's a combination of an observation that was true at that time (that humans are better are intuition), and his own comment “But maybe that’s just because I like humans”.
If you think about it, AIs have a significant advantage in that their evolution is completely artificially guided. They can be focused on tasks in isolation, and the results can be observed and improved upon. Biological evolution does not have this luxury, overall the entire organism has to "work", and survive long enough to reproduce. Sure, current technology is in its infancy, but extrapolating into the far future, things are interesting.
This looks like trucking's version of off-shoring.
You get paid to train your replacements. If you don't train them, someone else will. It's a no win for them. They don't have pull or unions that commuter train operators have so it's not like they'll get to ride along and supervise the autonomous vehicle, in the long term. Instead, there may be an ops center somewhere in TX where operators intervene remotely when an irregular operating pattern pops up. Those will be fewer operators.
I am not a trucker but from what I understood from other truckers is that this can be seen as a benefit to them. There is a lot more effort as a trucker in managing the cargo than the driving. Lots of paperwork at pickup, drop off and in between checks. There is effort to ensure the security of the cargo. I think the expectation is that wages would stay the same and truckers stop driving and start managing. Keep in mind wages are already fairly low.
It doesn't help that human drivers are fundamentally unsafe (even if you restrict the discussion to sober drivers). Making computers safer than human drivers (not perfect) is enough for me to restrict human drivers to private tracks. I am not the only person who has lost a loved friend because of a careless driver.
I think the concept looks good. They will still use truckers for some parts of the trip (and will have to do so for a while). The good thing is that those truckers can work 8 hour shifts close to home. And it won't really be a topic for outsourcing because the latency would be too high, so control centers will have to be somewhat close to the truck (at least same continent).
Semi-autonomous driving of trucks could change the job for the better. It would cost a lot of jobs but then again, few people become truck drivers because they love being on the road for days. For most it's a job and they'd be happy to take another one. And there is currently little evidence that no new jobs would come up as they always have for past disruptions.
> Most people in Silicon Valley subscribe to either the first or second school. Much of the rest of the country, including many truckers, favor the third. "I can tell the difference between a dead porcupine and a dead raccoon, and I know I can hit a raccoon, but if I hit a porcupine, I’m going to lose all the tires on the truck on that side," says Tom George, a veteran driver who now trains other Teamsters for the union’s Washington-Idaho AGC Training Trust. "It will take a long time and a lot of software to program that competence into a computer."
Driverless trucks are a very interesting concept. Once they're on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. But getting through traffic congestions, busy multi-turn-lane intersections, and making sure you don't sideswipe someone who's hugging the line seems rather complex given the different trailer dimensions and blind spots, (un)marked lanes and everything else it takes to get to the highway.
Why would the automated system have blind spots though? If it is viable at $50,000 it is probably viable at $100,000 or $200,000 (automated trucks will roughly double the efficiency of driving because of more hours on the road).
I would think that a physics model would also give a reasonable automated system superior control over where the trailer is at a given moment (and to account for different trailers).
Don't forget what happens when people find out they can abuse driverless vehicles. Cutting them off, getting closer to them, slowing down in front of them, etc. God knows what commuters will do to them in the Boston area.
I wonder what % of truck driving is highway driving? If you are covering the trucks in cameras and you have the control software there already it seems pretty easy(relatively at least) to have someone take over via remote for the last mile.
AI sensors combined with some sort of 360 view VR with drivers for the last mile with full AI on highways/freeways would allow for progressive roll out of self driving technology. A lot of video to push down the wire though but probably manageable with modern codecs.
Driverless trucks aren't going to 100% perfect. They just need to be significantly safe and more reliable than humans.
Humans get sleepy, get emotional, zone out, and make all kinds of mistakes all the time.
The first generation of driverless trucks will still have a human as passenger to be backup in case of mistakes. You may be thinking, "What's the point if there will still be a human there? s/he might as well drive." Well, humans still need breaks and can help give feedback to Truck for it to improve.
The first generation won't be perfect, but it will be on its way.
> This is a company that employs truck drivers, is how the talk begins. The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings. Truckers have very different ideas and different experiences from people like you, Seltz-Axmacher continues. Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters. They will say things that you may find startling. Not in a malicious way, but because people from, say, rural West Virginia talk differently than people from San Francisco. Can you handle that?
It's good to see someone doing more than just talk about this sort of thing; both the employment aspect and the culture clash side of it. Compare that to say, how Google treats its ex-military drone contractors [1].
> "We hire truckers," Seltz-Axmacher tells prospective drivers right before offering them a job. "But we also have a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley. Everything you’ve heard about San Francisco—it’s all basically true. There is something called raw denim, and in San Francisco people wear it, which means that some of your colleagues will pay up to $300 for a pair of blue jeans. They sometimes drink $7 lattes, too. Many of your co-workers will not be from the U.S. They will have accents. Can you handle that?"
In my experience, the culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes. As a member of the latter, I take exception to this statement:
> “We basically have people from two worlds, neither of which has ever talked to each other,” says Seltz-Axmacher, who grew up in suburban Maryland. “That’s kind of what’s wrong with this country.”
Perhaps that's true of the founder's life experience, or true of the trucking industry, but most manufacturing jobs seem to be merging these cultures comparatively smoothly. I've been at a couple companies in the automotive industry, and been to hundreds of different plants, and everywhere you look there are blue collar technicians running the machines and white collar engineers building and automating the machines. The situation is not so bad as the article paints it outside the extremes of Ivy League PHD programs contrasted with the trucking industry.
With the amount of regulations in truck driving, I wouldn't be surprised if SV clashes with the culture and work ethic truck drivers have to endure. It's good to see this company hiring drivers themselves; those who are open to improving on this tech.
This is eerily like a scene from Player Piano, Vonnegut's first novel. Some smart engineers find the best machinist at a factory, use some machines to record his movements and process and then use them to program the robots that replace him, and everyone else in his position at the factory.
For those that haven't read it, the book is an interesting and prescient story about what the future of America looks like when nearly all human labor has been made obsolete.
I know it is novel to talk about blue collar workers working alongside phd grads who are specialists in this field... but surely any good system which needs to deliver a quality outcome needs to be built with domain expertise, in this case driving trucks. I just don't see why this is that exciting. I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this.
> I'd be bloody worried if developers writing vehicle AI weren't doing this
Me too. There's so much more than just driving. Just as an example, we truck drivers learn to anticipate possible problems based on other people's behaviors. Why anticipate? Because 80,000 lbs can take too long to stop, and people can die.
This is an interesting approach in the short term and could help bootstrap Starsky's business before the conversion to fully autonomous driving.
I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so. There's just too much money riding on this problem, and logistics companies are fairly ruthless about efficiency.
"I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so."
I hope so. Trucking is one of the toughest professions for a person to endure that I've ever seen. It destroys a person's body and mind...and you're lucky to end up making minimum wage when you account for how many hours they spend working.
It's a lot further away than 20 years. It really won't be practical for autonomous trucks to share the roads with passenger vehicles using the existing infrastructure. After a handful or more major accidents with multiple deaths involving autonomous trucks, there will be no public support for them.
And there will be major accidents with multiple deaths, since the average passenger car driver is so unskilled. No software can account for every idiotic move made by the typical car driver, and big trucks take a lot of room and time to stop. A few lawsuits later, all the financial gains will disappear for the trucking companies and drivers are back in the seat.
I could see in 20 years a system where computer assisted driving automates much of the trip, much like commercial aircraft operate now.
[+] [-] gwern|8 years ago|reply
This is amusing because this stopped being true a long time ago. Even by 2007, it was hard for anyone to improve, and after 2013 or so, the very best centaurs were reduced to basically just opening book preparation (itself an extremely difficult skill involving compiling millions of games and carefully tuning against the weakness of possible opponent engines), to the point where official matches have mostly stopped (making it hard to identify the exact point at which centaur ceased to be a thing at all).
[+] [-] danielbarla|8 years ago|reply
If you think about it, AIs have a significant advantage in that their evolution is completely artificially guided. They can be focused on tasks in isolation, and the results can be observed and improved upon. Biological evolution does not have this luxury, overall the entire organism has to "work", and survive long enough to reproduce. Sure, current technology is in its infancy, but extrapolating into the far future, things are interesting.
[+] [-] driverlessjihad|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mc32|8 years ago|reply
You get paid to train your replacements. If you don't train them, someone else will. It's a no win for them. They don't have pull or unions that commuter train operators have so it's not like they'll get to ride along and supervise the autonomous vehicle, in the long term. Instead, there may be an ops center somewhere in TX where operators intervene remotely when an irregular operating pattern pops up. Those will be fewer operators.
[+] [-] infecto|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluGill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlunkr|8 years ago|reply
You don't think so? Seems like an unmanned truck would be a great target for theft.
[+] [-] dx034|8 years ago|reply
Semi-autonomous driving of trucks could change the job for the better. It would cost a lot of jobs but then again, few people become truck drivers because they love being on the road for days. For most it's a job and they'd be happy to take another one. And there is currently little evidence that no new jobs would come up as they always have for past disruptions.
[+] [-] thatwebdude|8 years ago|reply
Driverless trucks are a very interesting concept. Once they're on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. But getting through traffic congestions, busy multi-turn-lane intersections, and making sure you don't sideswipe someone who's hugging the line seems rather complex given the different trailer dimensions and blind spots, (un)marked lanes and everything else it takes to get to the highway.
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
I would think that a physics model would also give a reasonable automated system superior control over where the trailer is at a given moment (and to account for different trailers).
[+] [-] ben_jones|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimos|8 years ago|reply
AI sensors combined with some sort of 360 view VR with drivers for the last mile with full AI on highways/freeways would allow for progressive roll out of self driving technology. A lot of video to push down the wire though but probably manageable with modern codecs.
[+] [-] timemachiner|8 years ago|reply
That's assuming nice weather conditions. Mudslides, flash floods, extreme code, ice, snow, etc. needs to be taken into consideration.
[+] [-] needlessly|8 years ago|reply
Humans get sleepy, get emotional, zone out, and make all kinds of mistakes all the time.
The first generation of driverless trucks will still have a human as passenger to be backup in case of mistakes. You may be thinking, "What's the point if there will still be a human there? s/he might as well drive." Well, humans still need breaks and can help give feedback to Truck for it to improve.
The first generation won't be perfect, but it will be on its way.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] empath75|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russdill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rfrank|8 years ago|reply
It's good to see someone doing more than just talk about this sort of thing; both the employment aspect and the culture clash side of it. Compare that to say, how Google treats its ex-military drone contractors [1].
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-military-contractor-google...
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|8 years ago|reply
> "We hire truckers," Seltz-Axmacher tells prospective drivers right before offering them a job. "But we also have a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley. Everything you’ve heard about San Francisco—it’s all basically true. There is something called raw denim, and in San Francisco people wear it, which means that some of your colleagues will pay up to $300 for a pair of blue jeans. They sometimes drink $7 lattes, too. Many of your co-workers will not be from the U.S. They will have accents. Can you handle that?"
In my experience, the culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes. As a member of the latter, I take exception to this statement:
> “We basically have people from two worlds, neither of which has ever talked to each other,” says Seltz-Axmacher, who grew up in suburban Maryland. “That’s kind of what’s wrong with this country.”
Perhaps that's true of the founder's life experience, or true of the trucking industry, but most manufacturing jobs seem to be merging these cultures comparatively smoothly. I've been at a couple companies in the automotive industry, and been to hundreds of different plants, and everywhere you look there are blue collar technicians running the machines and white collar engineers building and automating the machines. The situation is not so bad as the article paints it outside the extremes of Ivy League PHD programs contrasted with the trucking industry.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|8 years ago|reply
That's nice to see, since the change-the-world spiel is almost always howling bullshit.
[+] [-] thatwebdude|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbanek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] postnihilism|8 years ago|reply
For those that haven't read it, the book is an interesting and prescient story about what the future of America looks like when nearly all human labor has been made obsolete.
[+] [-] apapli|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhuser123|8 years ago|reply
Me too. There's so much more than just driving. Just as an example, we truck drivers learn to anticipate possible problems based on other people's behaviors. Why anticipate? Because 80,000 lbs can take too long to stop, and people can die.
[+] [-] randyrand|8 years ago|reply
I hope this is a joke. If someone literally cannot handle working alongside someone who voted for Trump, that is so sad.
[+] [-] jimbobob|8 years ago|reply
I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so. There's just too much money riding on this problem, and logistics companies are fairly ruthless about efficiency.
[+] [-] zdean|8 years ago|reply
I hope so. Trucking is one of the toughest professions for a person to endure that I've ever seen. It destroys a person's body and mind...and you're lucky to end up making minimum wage when you account for how many hours they spend working.
[+] [-] kstoneman|8 years ago|reply
And there will be major accidents with multiple deaths, since the average passenger car driver is so unskilled. No software can account for every idiotic move made by the typical car driver, and big trucks take a lot of room and time to stop. A few lawsuits later, all the financial gains will disappear for the trucking companies and drivers are back in the seat.
I could see in 20 years a system where computer assisted driving automates much of the trip, much like commercial aircraft operate now.
[+] [-] bluedino|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhuser123|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kstoneman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] shiftoutbox|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] driverlessjihad|8 years ago|reply
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