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?
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Have you never seen the traffic jams caused by these things getting confused and not being able to figure a way out?.... the drivers there so people don't get stuck behind them for an hour while someone from fuckyoutech comes out to fix it.
No, but I have sat in a traffic jam caused by a human driver who caused a multiple car pile up because they wanted to be slightly ahead.
It's almost like more than one thing can be bad. Autonomous cars are just a shitty bandaid solution that doesn't fix the problem.
Exactly. We should instead get autonomous trains, and fix our cities to be train friendly.
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Autonomous cars are the only viable solution in the near to mid term. Human drivers are awful. Building out mass-transit and transport infrastructure is a generations-long process and very politically unpopular. Autonomous vehicles will have issues that can only be ironed out in live testing. Which sucks but that's how all innovations go.
Autonomous cars are decades away from hitting any level of meaningful saturation. Might as well work on the more practical solutions....
What's more practical? Redesigning all of US's cities to work without cars? High-speed cross-country rail? Mass transit in every town?
That's more practical than passing regulations that allow the few companies even attempting automation to test it? This is just a "if it's not perfect don't do it" mentality that stops any attempts at progress.
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That's fair, but I was more concerned about an accident being caused where the "driver" has seconds to react to a mistake the car is making. After sitting doing nothing for hours there's no way they'd be attentive until it's too late.
They would be more likely to stop the accident from happening if they were there as opposed to not being there.
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And the human driver would certainly be used as a scape goat should anything bad happen.
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
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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.
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union leaders and truck drivers said would save hundreds of thousands of jobs
There might be good reasons to have human drivers in autonomous trucks, at least for a while. But “saving jobs” is not one of them.
It certainly is one of them. You can’t virtually close an entire sector of jobs all at once without serious repercussions to the economy.
Yeah, if it comes with a tapering requirement over several years I think it's an excellent idea that saves jobs and also helps ensure safety.
It wont be all at once. Those changes usualy go very slow. Especialy in the buisness sector.
Target. Walmart, Amazon, UPS,Lays, Annheiser-Bush …just a few companies who have already begun testing automated replacements. If you think they aren’t all biting at the bit to pull the trigger on this the second they can, you’re naive. They’ll see insane overhead price reductions and increased productivity, all leading to higher profit margins. The slow change already started years ago. You can retrofit an existing big rig for less than half the salary of a driver and utilize 3x the work hours.
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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.
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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.
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"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?
driverless trucks are dangerous
because trucks with drivers aren't
._.
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
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.
I think the plan for a lot of trucks is for them to do the long haul part without a driver. But the "last mile" is done by drivers that drop the load, do the paperwork and back to the depot to snag another trailer.
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
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