Republicans are eagerly anticipating self-driving semi-trailer trucks which will kill millions of middle-class jobs.
Republicans are eagerly anticipating self-driving semi-trailer trucks which will kill millions of middle-class jobs.
You can't really say "unions" though - the train companies have no incentive to innovate because they are a distributed monopoly. You can't decide which rail company to use when shipping a product.
800 dude wrote:
Actually, the reason we don't have autonomous trains is cost. The railroads have heavily resisted implementing Positive Train Control, (which is a semi-autonomous system), because it's expensive to implement (and expensive to litigate which railroads pay what proportion when the tracks are shared under complicated agreements that go back decades). There's no question that PTC is way, way safer. Almost all railroad accidents are caused by human error, and most could be avoided with PTC.
I actually work in PTC testing for a Class 1 railroad. PTC does not run the train, it only stops the train in the event that the engineer is not complying with a signal or some other type of speed restriction. So as you said, it is semi-autonomous, but only in the sense that it can stop the train. GE does have a system called Trip Optimizer that can actually run the train, which is used somewhat up in Canada, but isn't used in the US.
The reason trains aren't automated yet, as other people have pointed out, is just money. There are many huge companies working on automated cars, because it's going to be a huge market and the profit possibilities for whoever wins are massive. There is no such market for automated trains. The only reason railroads are spending any money on PTC at all is because they're being forced to. Right now, the cost to roll out a fully automated system is just more than what they spend on train crews. Even if there was a fully automated system to run the train, they're still going to have to pay a human being to be there in order to have someone to hold accountable. Society is decades away from feeling comfortable with a 10,000 ton HAZMAT bomb rolling through their town without someone at the controls. Also, as others have mentioned, railroad unions are fairly powerful. It's one of the few jobs where someone without a college education can make six figures. They're going to fight until the bitter end.
So to answer the question regarding trains.... we could easily design and build an autonomous train right now, much easier than autonomous cars, but the economic incentive to do so doesn't yet exist. As soon as it does, we will have autonomous trains.
fatbody wrote:
we could easily design and build an autonomous train right now, much easier than autonomous cars
Neither is easy. Not as difficult, maybe, because train tracks are close to being a closed world, but enough unexpected things can happen that it's impossible to be reliable.
When your AI reacts badly to something unexpected, the only recourse is to add algorithms to check for and react to the event. But the extra algorithms just make more unexpected behavior possible. The more complex you make a program, the more ways it can and will fail.
The one way AI can be reliable is if you nail everything down around it so there is no way for it to screw up. Fixed robots standing by a conveyor belt in a factory, yes. Robots moving around freely, never.