California Senate approves ban on autonomous trucks::California’s State Senate this week passed a bill which, if signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, would require autonomous semi-trailer trucks to have a trained human safety operator whenever they operate on public roads […]

  • Gnothi@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Just wait until they secretly replace the trained human safety operator with this:

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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    11 months ago

    I’ve seen enough dashcam footage from truck drivers being cut off in traffic and nearly causing a major accident or running over people that this seems like a pretty wise decision until the technology matures.

    Trucks have a huge amount of momentum, they can’t just slam the brakes like on a Tesla. Humans aren’t particularly good at split second decisions but I feel experienced truckers definitely have better guts on how to react than a computer. Fully support requiring someone to keep an eye on it for now.

    • El Barto@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You’d be surprised at how quickly a truck can brake to a complete stop.

      But you’re right regardless. It’s the momentum what makes them dangerous. If a car taps another car for half a second, the damage might be catastrophic. A semi doing the same? Yikes.

      • oatscoop@midwest.social
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        11 months ago

        “The humans brain is currently better at understanding edge cases, dealing with incredibly odd situations, and predicting other human’s behavior than AI” is more of a fact than a feeling.

        Self driving AI doesn’t notice the driver passing them is nodding off or screaming while giving it the finger. It doesn’t pick up the subtle clues that another driver is drunk or distracted. It can’t see that a load in a pickup truck it’s following isn’t properly secured and predict it falling off.

        Self driving AI currently struggles with fairly common situations. It’s not ready to be in charge of something as deadly as a semi-truck.

      • baccano@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I thought the Teamsters were the trucker union and were relatively powerful…

        • Radium@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          Teamsters have a freight division but the total teamster membership was 1.3 in 2015 and there were 3.6 million truckers in the United States in 2020, so I wouldn’t say most truckers are in a union.

          Teamsters doesn’t disclose what percent of their membership is made up by their freight division

          • legopika@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            11 months ago

            Don’t forget that the package division(ups) is a large chunk of their membership.

            According to their website “The Package Division is the union’s largest division, serving hundreds of thousands of members throughout North America.”

  • kriz@slrpnk.net
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    11 months ago

    They’ll just go secretive and underground like in that Simpsons episode