SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill to require human drivers on board self-driving trucks, a measure that union leaders and truck drivers said would save hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state.
I’m sorry, but do people actually think human drivers in autonomous vehicles will make them safe?
Imagine sitting and watching a robot do its job for hours - do you think you’d be attentive to safety problems after all that time?
And the human driver would certainly be used as a scape goat should anything bad happen.
Can’t put a corporation in prison when they kill someone.
This is a real thing, they are called operators and it is their job to oversee the cell, start and stop jobs, resolve bottlenecks, identify upstream problems and gracefully handle them, and emergency stop the system when needed.
Yeah, part of my job making car parts is as an operator for a cell. Im constantly moving, troubleshooting, doing minor maintenance, and actively engaged in the process.
A driver-operator would be sitting down doing mostly nothing. Totally different
I imagine they could do just as well having an operator sit in a cubicle all day flipping between video feeds of a dozen different vehicles. Then when manual control needs to be taken over they could operate it with a joystick or something and play truck simulator.
“Connection error: could not connect to truck, please reload and try again”
Oops, just crashed
It still drives on its own, connection is just to monitor or to help get out of situations it might get stuck in so traffic jams don’t occur. If connection fails it would have been no different than having no driver in the cab which Is the plan already.
Yes. Tractors already have a number of built-in visual and audible alarms when the onboard sensors detect things like veering, severe pitch, and traffic. Oh, that and it’s a driver’s job to watch and respond to road conditions.
Not to also mention that student driver teachers perform a job like this already.
Tractors aren’t traffic. That’s clearly very different.
Student driver teachers, meanwhile, are teaching. That’s more than simply watching for mistakes, which would be an inhumanly boring job that I honestly don’t think anyone could do.
Exactly. And student drivers are only active for like 20-30 min at a time. A truck would be active for hours at a time.
Instead of trying to build autonomous trucks, we should be building out rail and move more stuff and people that way.
Security guards watch empty parking lots/tvs all night long.
Yeah, but they don’t need to react within seconds when there is a problem. They can zone out and nothing bad will happen.
A driver-operator needs to be hyper vigilant at all times and react within seconds to any problems because at any moment the software could fuck up and kill someone.
Which is why this veto is retarded
My point is that autonomous trucks shouldn’t be on the road, with or without drivers.
This is a tech sub on lemmy.ml, prepare to be flooded by luddites afraid of all things tech. Eventually you learn subs only exist for the stuff people hates here, not the stuff people love.
The luddites have been proven right, but your strawman of the luddites is absolutely wrong.
Based
Username checks out and proves my point, lmao what are you even doing here?
I like technology. I think it can make our lives better, but some people, notably capitalists, often use technology to make our lives worse. When that happens, we should smash their machines.
Y’know it’s funny because one of the proposed benefits of lemmy was the decentralized nature of the forums meant you could pick from the ones you liked, yet I’ve subbed to 5 tech instances here and they are all exactly the same. Nothing but F.U.D. This will be the last remaining one I unsubscribe from, and even end up blocking because of the nonsense.
So, yeah, apparently that thing being a benefit was a lie when in reality it will just populate with the same people saying the same things.
Ah well…enjoy your echo chambers I guess!
It turns out that normal and common opinions remain so regardless of what servers you use. Shocking!
Or more likely, the people who hate something the most are more likely to post about it than people who love it or are ambivalent. No worries though, I blocked the forum so we won’t have to trouble each other anymore.
You also can want safety improvements before something becomes widespread without also “hating” it overall, you know.
The choice doesn’t have to be between “absolutely everything now”, and “never”. There’s a lot of room in between the two, and I see no reason to rush something, when unnecessarily rushing it could cost lives.
Have you considered that the children are right?
Can’t believe they bothered to try to pass it. From an outside quick glance, it seems like a brilliant idea. But then you have to remember WHY they’re doing this. They want to ship 24x7 and not have to pay a person. Slapping a co-pilot in there is counter-intuitive to their end game. Not to mention humans do NOT have the required attention span for this. We can often do stupid shit, completely sober, while driving, with DECADES of experience.
If the autopilot is even 80% effective, we’re going to get bored, sleep, read, fuck around on our devices. Maybe jerk off? Who knows?
We’re not ready for this step, not yet.
Bet they’ll be needing a lot of mechanics when the time comes, though.
Let’s hope they start making it easier for those mechanics then, lmao.
I used to want to get into the industry, but that stopped when I heard about all of the ridiculous things you have to move around to preform basic maintenance. That was bad before, but now? Woof.
Fun fact: this is illegal in many areas
Another fun fact: most shops just do it anyway
Companies will put the staff back in the trucks when it becomes apparent how easy it is to stop them and steal everything from the back.
Nobody is stopping trucks on the interstate. You could easily have one human minder escort 12-15 trucks outbound truck and a minder escort inbound trucks and spend most of the time on the interstate. Instead of a dozen drivers x 3 days you could use 1-4 hours of human labor total.
Imagine a system were one driver could transport hundreds of trucks worth of cargo at once on preset routes. What an invention that would be…
Would be easier if set on its own dedicated track.
Something like… a slightly slower Hyperloop! At those speeds, the “pods” wouldn’t need to run in a pressurized tube. I’ll name it “OKLoop”.
You could even have the whole thing start and stop with one set of controls.
Get this idea to Elon immediately. He’ll have XRails running all over the country by 2050, from San Diego, all the way to, ooh, Los Angeles I suppose. Can’t imagine it would get much further than that before he gets bored of the idea.
In the context of this discussion, switching to trains isn’t really going to address the idea of people raiding the cargo haulers, in whatever shape they’re in.
You’re right, but it’s because stealing cargo isn’t an issue. Trains are just a much safer and efficient method of transportation that also requires very few people.
Yes we know trains exist trucks are used in addition for obvious reasons that won’t stop being true when we dont need drivers
There’s nothing really stopping people from doing that to human driven trucks either. Besides, if it’s ‘capacity to make the choice of running someone over’ you’re after, just have a dude at a control center watching ten different trucks with remote control overrides. Something arguably they would do regardless for many reasons.
I’m more thinking it’s a lesser crime to rob a driverless truck. No chance of being shot by a yee-haw Trump trucker while doing so. No need to be armed.
Just slow to a stop in front, open the back, take what you want. It’s practically a victimless crime.
I don’t think this is likely to happen regardless. Occasionally trucks are raided, though it’s rare in the us. More often in some places where there’s a lot more instability. But I don’t think the reason it’s rare in general is ‘because there’s a human at the wheel’, especially not the concern that they may be armed.
Safety be damned! We have corporate profits to consider here.
Yes because theres nothing safer than a truck driver thats been awake for 24 hours because their schedule is so tight they dont really have time for sleep. /s
The actual issue is that autonomous driving will make millions of peoples’ jobs obsolete not that it couldn’t be as safe as a person driving if not more so.
There are two issues. First, self-driving cars just aren’t very good (yet?). Second, it will make millions of people’s jobs obsolete, and that should be a good thing, but it’s a bad thing, because we’ve structured our society such that it’s a bad thing if you lose your job. It’d be cool as hell if it were a good thing for the people who don’t have to work anymore, and we should structure our society that way instead.
Self-driving cars have been safer than human drivers for years. There are bugs but nothing like the bugs humans have. The roadblocks to adoption right now are public perception and legislation.
This can only end well. I can’t wait for the personal injury lawsuits to start rolling in.
Also, having worked in a warehouse, who the hell is going to hand over the paperwork? Do you know how many places don’t use electronics that talk to each other? Do you know how many times I, working at a modest size business, had to sign my damn name? Half the time it doesn’t even need to be there, they just use it to make sure somebody looked at the pallet of merchandise to make sure it was correct. This is going to blow up in everyone’s face, literally and metaphorically.
We’ve entered the Twilight zone. Where Ben Shapiro and Gavin Newsom are on the same side of a debate, and they’re fighting against Tucker Carlson and the unions.
Edit: piped link
“Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, head of the California Labor Federation, said driverless trucks are dangerous…” Well are they dangerous? Is there any data to back up that claim? And is there data to back up the claim that keeping the driver in the vehicle makes it safe again?
I hate this “save the jobs” attitude. How about we not save the jobs and pay them to get other jobs or even pay them to stay home?
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driverless trucks are dangerous
because trucks with drivers aren’t
._.
Having a required human driver in the trucks for if/when the self-driving portion of the truck suddenly bugs out or gets into a situation where it cannot get itself free would probably save them a lot of headache and business when suddenly that truck gets into a situation it cannot correct itself.
Hell, we’ve already seen times when that would’ve saved lives like the time self driving taxis ended up blocking an ambulance en route.
I wonder if these vehicles could be remotely piloted by a human when they become gridlocked, rather than have someone sitting in the cabin the entire time. Seems like just sitting in an autonomous vehicle while it drives long distances would be a particularly terrible job.
You could get payed to just sleep or play games, seems like a dream job for some people.
But remote controlled driving also seems like a pretty good idea, if it works reliably
that’d be the dream, but the pessimist in me sees the boss installing Spyware, eye tracker software, a sensor in my seat, twice a day video call check ins and a series of beaurocratic tasks that turn it into an 11 hour shift 6 days a week, and in their downtown offices rather than WFH.
Haha geez man, let’s hope that’s not the future we’re getting
I’d love it, I’d go back to school for one
Play so many video games
I think sleeping would negate the purpose though, you need to be able to see when something is wrong and take control of the vehicle
I guess you’re right on the sleeping part, might not be the best idea. But I’m sure if the trucking companies could skip sleeping time for trucks and allow the person to sleep while driving. They would 100% do it.
A loud siren/alarm or something could wake you up I guess if something goes wrong or if you’re nearing your destination
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Yes companies will definitely choose to pay more to keep people safe. 🙄
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Ah yes the ol “It’s cheaper sometimes to kill a couple people than employ a few more people” argument.
Haven’t heard that one in a while.
What is the going rate for a human life these days? 3 Full time employees? 4?
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Historically speaking, it’s sadly far from uncommon.
They just cross their fingers and hope that it never happens. Companies have a bad habit of deciding that they would keep more money paying for a lawsuit than they would keep by paying employees. If a company is worth billions, a few million is a drop in the bucket.
There’s a VERY good reason for many safety regulations. A lot of these regulations have been paid for with blood and death.
I wish we were better as a species, but here we are.
Nah you just accused human drivers of being meth-heads.
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Funny to see the argument being made here that this idea is crazy because people “don’t have the attention span” to monitor the robot driving the car. Like yes, that’s exactly the point, people suck at driving and maintaining constant attention, and they are worse than they were 10-20 years ago thanks to cell phones and screens. One in every hundred people you know will literally die due to this problem. For most people that means several people you knew in high school are dead because of people’s inability to drive perfectly all the time. That’s just deaths, many more will get injured or maimed. It doesn’t have to be this way. The only way out of it aside from somehow designing better humans is self-driving cars. They are already orders of magnitude safer than humans and have been so for years. Do they have bugs? Yes. But if we replaced every car on the road with a self-driving car right now we’d see the death and maiming rate plummet.
For context: we shut down the global economy for a virus with an estimated 1% mortality rate. It was necessary to avoid hospital overwhelm and give us time to develop countermeasures. That’s the same mortality rate as driving. Obviously drivers are not overwhelming hospitals because the deaths are spread out over a longer time period. But nonetheless I think it’s an interesting comparison.
\ this is a well-written comment that makes and argues several points relevant to the post and yet it got more downvotes than upvotes, which imho is some bullshit \
Fortunately it’s not something they actually have to worry about for decades.
TuSimple’s fleet of 40 autonomous trucks has been hauling goods between freight depots in Phoenix, Tucson, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, and San Antonio. These routes are about 95 percent highway, but the trucks can also autonomously handle surface streets, bringing their cargo the entire distance, from depot driveway to depot driveway. Its vehicles join a growing fleet of robotic trucks from competitors such as Aurora, Embark, Locomation, Plus.ai, and even Waymo, the Alphabet spin-off that has long focused on self-driving cars.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/this-year-autonomous-trucks-will-take-to-the-road-with-no-one-on-board
I think this is a pretty important point in practice. These trucks are hauling between depots and primarily on the highway, which is easy to map and fairly predictable without many obstacles like pedestrians and traffic lights. I would feel differently about an autonomous truck driving in the city.
