> How is it that commercial aviation, surely a much more technically challenging endeavor than ground transport, is relatively safe, while commercial trucking is responsible for more than five thousand deaths per year? The simple reason is that commercial aviation is highly regulated, and the overseeing government administration is relatively well-funded.
The roads on the ground are vastly more complex than the highways in the sky, and the density of human pilots a few feet away is vastly higher. At the same time ground transport is handling ~600x more tonnage and ~6x more drivers per ton. To say the death difference is simply regulation ignores a lot.
I just found out my state is letting autonomous semi trucks drive on its highways. I think the years since we've seen teslas kill entire families have been rare but have happened will pale in comparison to what these trucks will do to us.
I feel like given the danger these vehicles represent that their location should be published publicly so that humans can avoid the highway when they are near and possibly plan alternative routes.
Also, I believe that part of the "plan" is to eventually once the technology hits it limit of effectiveness (cant get any better but is still deadly), flood the highways with enough of them and autonomous cars to scare humans off the roads. There will be a tipping point where humans wont feel safe driving on the roads with these vehicles in large enough numbers (because they arent).
At that point we will be paying taxes for robot highways, and to fund liability protections for tech companies.
How is that a thing? They don’t have an address but can get a commercial driver’s license. What do they put on the form for an address “patch of woods by I-95”, a PO box?
I mean, if you're living in the truck that you're driving across country, back and forth, and your parents have passed, where would you put as your address? You don't have an apartment you're renting, because that would just be a waste of money since you're never there.
Heh I-95 has a few thoughts on what is and isn't "viable" that it's absolutely going to share with the "highway autonomous" touts and I'm betting they won't enjoy the lesson.
> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.
I'm not sure humans have reached Level 5 autonomy either; many of them can't handle the full range of conditions humans drive in and occasionally need other humans to step in and help them.
Level 3 or 4 is more than enough to get most of the commercial benefits.
IMO the "failure rate" is obvious enough to be tracked, but I worry that we won't be paying enough attention to differences in error type/impact/recovery.
We've learned a lot of ways to predict, mitigate, and recover from human errors, and the equivalent ecosystem may not exist for nonhuman ones.
Level 5 means "people inside are purely passengers and never have to take steering wheel". For humans, being level 4 means that because of some road condition, driver gets out of the car and asks someone else to drive - either one of the passengers, or some sort of emergency 3rd party service.
I never did this myself (except while learning how to drive). And I don't think I've heard about my friends doing this either. Turn around because the road was impassable? Sure. Pass the wheel to someone else? nope.
That means a lot (most?) human drivers are "level 5 autonomous".
It has happened with Waymo and recently Tesla (somewhat). From there to self driving trucks with the same capability doesn’t seem that far off. Especially if there’s money to be saved. Between the electric fuel and the driver pay I would think these things would be 80% cheaper than the alternative.
Electric semi tractors are impractical in all but drayage use cases (port to warehouse short haul). Even then, they require specialized yards and hours to charge, and they are twice as expensive as diesel tractors. Refueling a diesel truck takes minutes. Plus the electrical grid impact to supporting the charging of these trucks, keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town.
For autonomous trucking, you’re grossly underestimating 1) how dangerous these trucks are. A small rear end accident with a car does some damage, a small rear end from a tractor with 80k pounds of cargo kills people. 2) They are hard to drive, hard to navigate in cities, require inspections constantly for roadworthiness and safety. Sure having a tractor pull a load on a few hundred miles of straight empty highway in Texas is doable today, having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers.
3) Plus no one knows how to legislate or regulate these things. If a robot tractor kills someone, who is at fault? The vehicle maker? The autonomy software maker? The carrier? There are already nuclear verdict lawsuits for these types of situations with human truck drivers that can be tens to hundreds of millions of dollars I.e. shut down a carrier bad. You think a bunch of octogenarians in congress know what the hell to do with any of this stuff?
I say all of this while also fully agreeing that consumer autonomy seems to have been solved or is on its way to being solved, I’d bet in 5 years it will be weird to get an uber and there’s a person actually driving. Commercial heavy duty trucking is a whole different class of problems that goes well beyond “can the software do it”.
Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers
Fully autonomous is a long ways off, but semi-automated can't get here fast enough. Drive a comma.ai equipped car over a long road trip or other advanced driving aid, and just feel how much less frazzled you are after driving for a few hours.
could we automate the predictable, tedious sections of long drives on interstates but let humans take over for the complex 'last mile' navigating through towns and to the final destination?
those drivers could spend their lives working locally (and sleepin at home), develop deep regional expertise, and be able to handle the hardest part of the job without the fatigue from a cross-country drive.
The roads on the ground are vastly more complex than the highways in the sky, and the density of human pilots a few feet away is vastly higher. At the same time ground transport is handling ~600x more tonnage and ~6x more drivers per ton. To say the death difference is simply regulation ignores a lot.
I feel like given the danger these vehicles represent that their location should be published publicly so that humans can avoid the highway when they are near and possibly plan alternative routes.
Also, I believe that part of the "plan" is to eventually once the technology hits it limit of effectiveness (cant get any better but is still deadly), flood the highways with enough of them and autonomous cars to scare humans off the roads. There will be a tipping point where humans wont feel safe driving on the roads with these vehicles in large enough numbers (because they arent).
At that point we will be paying taxes for robot highways, and to fund liability protections for tech companies.
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/semi-truck-driver-dead...
How is that a thing? They don’t have an address but can get a commercial driver’s license. What do they put on the form for an address “patch of woods by I-95”, a PO box?
(The answer is no one: https://abc7.com/post/mary-fong-lau-crash-driver-killed-fami...)
https://xkcd.com/605/
> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.
"No one really thinks Level 5 autonomy (full autonomy in all situations with no remote assistance) will happen any time soon"
Level 3 or 4 is more than enough to get most of the commercial benefits.
We've learned a lot of ways to predict, mitigate, and recover from human errors, and the equivalent ecosystem may not exist for nonhuman ones.
I never did this myself (except while learning how to drive). And I don't think I've heard about my friends doing this either. Turn around because the road was impassable? Sure. Pass the wheel to someone else? nope.
That means a lot (most?) human drivers are "level 5 autonomous".
For autonomous trucking, you’re grossly underestimating 1) how dangerous these trucks are. A small rear end accident with a car does some damage, a small rear end from a tractor with 80k pounds of cargo kills people. 2) They are hard to drive, hard to navigate in cities, require inspections constantly for roadworthiness and safety. Sure having a tractor pull a load on a few hundred miles of straight empty highway in Texas is doable today, having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers. 3) Plus no one knows how to legislate or regulate these things. If a robot tractor kills someone, who is at fault? The vehicle maker? The autonomy software maker? The carrier? There are already nuclear verdict lawsuits for these types of situations with human truck drivers that can be tens to hundreds of millions of dollars I.e. shut down a carrier bad. You think a bunch of octogenarians in congress know what the hell to do with any of this stuff?
I say all of this while also fully agreeing that consumer autonomy seems to have been solved or is on its way to being solved, I’d bet in 5 years it will be weird to get an uber and there’s a person actually driving. Commercial heavy duty trucking is a whole different class of problems that goes well beyond “can the software do it”.
Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers
those drivers could spend their lives working locally (and sleepin at home), develop deep regional expertise, and be able to handle the hardest part of the job without the fatigue from a cross-country drive.