RE: What will happen to truck drivers when self-driving vehicles take over?

According to your article:

By some estimates, the industry lacks some 30,000 truckers, with that figure expected to grow to nearly a quarter-million by 2022.

If they don't like it they can go back to Europe to live in Communist Russia.

Millions of trolls have been put out of work by spam bots. I feel their pain.

Millions will lose their jobs, but the overall economic gains will more than make up for those losses.

I wouldn't be surprised if truck drivers tried to get laws passed to protect their jobs. When standardized shipping containers were introduced, the longshoreman's unions fought them and delayed their use for decades. Standardized shipping containers have done more to boost trade and global economic growth than pretty much anything.

The benefits we get from driverless cars are probably going to be greater than the internet or cell phones. There are going to be a few million who lose out from them, but billions will gain tremendously.

is what will become of surgeons once that industry is robotized?

50 years from now people will be shocked that we used to let humans cut into patients.

Self-driving vehicles will never be allowed on public roads. People who think they will don't grasp the difficulty of applying artificial intelligence to the real world of people and random events.

Even drone aircraft are generally remote-controlled, not fully autonomous. They operate where there are few people to crash into and kill and few unexpected things to happen. The roads are the opposite, many people and many unexpected things. AI cannot handle this and probably never can.

And if autonomous cars were legal, you could get run over by a reckless vehicle and nobody would go to jail because it was just a computer malfunction. The manufacturer would just pay a fine or something. That is not enough incentive to drive safely and should never happen. It should also be legal to preemptively destroy autonomous vehicles in the name of public safety.

The counter to this is: just how good are human drivers...? And if you want to sharpen that: how good are human drivers after a night of drinking?The quicker these technologies come to fruition the better. With that said, society needs to figure out a way to maintain those that are displaced and more importantly, the growing proportion of society that will not be working full-time rigorous jobs.Solution: move them to the center of the country.

Bad Wigins wrote:

Self-driving vehicles will never be allowed on public roads. People who think they will don't grasp the difficulty of applying artificial intelligence to the real world of people and random events.

Even drone aircraft are generally remote-controlled, not fully autonomous. They operate where there are few people to crash into and kill and few unexpected things to happen. The roads are the opposite, many people and many unexpected things. AI cannot handle this and probably never can.

And if autonomous cars were legal, you could get run over by a reckless vehicle and nobody would go to jail because it was just a computer malfunction. The manufacturer would just pay a fine or something. That is not enough incentive to drive safely and should never happen. It should also be legal to preemptively destroy autonomous vehicles in the name of public safety.

Bad Wigins wrote:

Self-driving vehicles will never be allowed on public roads. People who think they will don't grasp the difficulty of applying artificial intelligence to the real world of people and random events.

Even drone aircraft are generally remote-controlled, not fully autonomous. They operate where there are few people to crash into and kill and few unexpected things to happen. The roads are the opposite, many people and many unexpected things. AI cannot handle this and probably never can.

And if autonomous cars were legal, you could get run over by a reckless vehicle and nobody would go to jail because it was just a computer malfunction. The manufacturer would just pay a fine or something. That is not enough incentive to drive safely and should never happen. It should also be legal to preemptively destroy autonomous vehicles in the name of public safety.

This is inaccurate. The technology already exists to make automative cars safer than human drivers.

Many lives will be saved as car accidents will be reduced, but it will make us even more auto dependent, hurting our cities and the environment.

There will be a lot less idiots on the road because

1 truck drivers like to drive side by side to hold up traffic

2 they are slow and don't move over

3 they tailgate and speed excissively

I can't wait for this to happen. All truck drivers are scum

The Guru Matt James wrote:

The technology already exists to make automative cars safer than human drivers.

No, it doesn't. There is technology to augment human driving and make it safer, but there is no AI proven to safely direct a car in real-world traffic.

AI fails not just for lack of creativity. People seem to think that it can function successfully as a complex decision tree controlling real-world objects. They don't realize that complexity itself leads to failure - too many things can go wrong, so something always does. This is one reason why highly autonomous robotic spacecraft have a high rate of failure. The longest-lived ones, Voyagers 1 and 2, are among the oldest and simplest.

Get a robot-battle programmer's game like T-robots and see for yourself. Successful AI sets a simple pattern and repeats it. Fancy code gets owned fast.

I'm positive the cars won't be completely self driving...the cars will have self driving capability, but will still be able to be driven manually by humans. Basically a better form of cruise control, for extended drives on highways or simple scenarios.

How would evasive maneuvers work? What about car chases?..or directions to something/driving somewhere that isn't an address or presently undefined? What if the system itself breaks down on the middle of the interstate?

Not to mention the security factor. People have proved they can hack self-driving cars, a very scary idea. Cybersecurity for this innovation going forward is going to be a huge deal. It's also impossible to sufficiently account for the human factor and countless random situations that can pop up.

It will be beautifully efficient when the only humans with jobs are executives. Self-driving vehicles will destroy millions of jobs. I don't know about anyone appreciating drones taking off and landing in their yards, but amazon, having already thrown everyone working in a bookstore out of work, is trying to use drones to throw UPS drivers out of work by 2015. What benefit exactly do we get when there are no jobs?

Lots of time to sit around and buy stuff off of the Internets. (sarcasm)

jjjjjjjj wrote:

What benefit exactly do we get when there are no jobs?

jjjjjjjj wrote:

It will be beautifully efficient when the only humans with jobs are executives. Self-driving vehicles will destroy millions of jobs. I don't know about anyone appreciating drones taking off and landing in their yards, but amazon, having already thrown everyone working in a bookstore out of work, is trying to use drones to throw UPS drivers out of work by 2015. What benefit exactly do we get when there are no jobs?

Machines aren't going to be replacing creative work anytime soon (read this:

if you want to knw why), they'll replace the tedious, awful work that makes people hate their lives. Maybe the future will look the way Japan's going, with a shrinking population as the need for a big labor pool goes away. Maybe we'll change our education system to focus on things that can't be done by a simple program.

Driverless cars are a pipe dream up there with hoverboards. Can we do it? Of course. The technology is there. But why? Who makes the requisite money for this to be something worth pursuing? Freight companies? Granted. So... do THEY pay for the changeover? The refitting/refleeting? Who is the first large-scale adopter? How will they make it fiscally worthwhile?

What if the system goes down (which it will)? Does freight stop? No, they will need to maintain a fleet of driver cars in case of this. More $$$. What about hackers? The system will be hacked. Who insures this?

Another case og Google with waaaaay too much money on is hands, inventing the classic solution in search of a problem.

Finally... how many peple will REALLY want to give up the freedom of driving their car? And how will libertairians feel now every trip can be logged by corporatons or government? Poorly, I presume.

The irony of this all is that not only are robots going to "take" our jobs, they're going to "take" our bodies; and we'll be the ones to happily offer them.

Resistance to becoming a cyborg will be, as has been said rather famously, futile.

The technology is getting smaller, more powerful, and closer to us all the time. Becoming a cyborg is only a matter of moving the technology within the body. It's happening already.

You probably think with all your heart you'd never do such a thing. The problem is, people like me can't wait to. Once we do, you aren't going to want to be left behind. You'll either get on board or become the equivalent of a fly.

They will get more sleep, take fewer amphetamines, have fewer accidents, and make as much money.

Self driving semi trucks won't happen in my lifetime. I'm in my mid 40's. Think about it, the agriculture industry hasn't even perfected self driving tractors in fields where there is absolutely nothing to hit so how can you take an 80,000 lb vehicle and put it on an interstate with other drivers?

I don't know if anyone understands how difficult it would be to do all the things a trucker does besides driving like, checking the load and vehicle, adjusting for weather, adjusting for accidents on the road, fueling up, mechanical failures, not to mention the paperwork with log books and manifests.

More importantly, what will happen to great truck driving songs like Six Days On The Road, Tombstone Every Mile, Big Mack's Off The Block, etc.?