It seems evident to me that once these machines prove their value in both safety and efficiency, the companies that insure trucking firms will compel/persuade them to switch from human to self-driven vehicles.
These machines can safely convoy closely in one lane leaving other lanes free, will obey traffic laws and courtesy rules, and never get sleepy.
The disruption of the trucking industry is one that we will have to watch closely for its likely economic and political effects.
Its one step of many imagine we have a fully automated supply chain from Producer -> Consumer without much human interaction. And it will happen in the foreseeable future as this is just cost efficient.
Many jobs will disappear without replacement and we have nearly no discussion in the general public on how to solve this problem.
An interesting point: our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing. Eg, making torches. Then he sells his torches to a farmer in exchange for some food so that the farmer can work after dark to make more food. And he sells his torch to a miner so that the miner can go in deeper tunnels. And so on. Simplified extensively, but at the heart of it, this is what we do.
So our whole economy is built around this concept of making one thing others want, and then getting them to give you things you need in exchange. What happens with automation where a single person can use automation to make everything he needs without having to barter his work for the work of others? The entire system - the entire economy - becomes unnecessary.
Is it possible that's where we're rapidly heading and maybe there isn't even a problem - just a movement to end 'economy' that we've relied on for a few thousand years?
None of the automation that we're seeing is making it possible for one person to make everything he needs. Automation is increasing the returns to capital and making it possible for corporations to produce things with fewer employees—none of that implies that you'll suddenly be able to make things yourself.
If anything, increasing automation increases the returns to scale. You might conceivably build your own torch. But you're certainly not going to purchase a million dollar torch-making machine.
Automation poses a threat to the traditional economic model, but on the supply side not the demand side—you'll still be buying as much as before, you just probably won't have a job.
However, at Plethora (my company) and others like ReThink robotics, etc. are lowering the barriers to automation so that small entities (people / firms) are able to develop products - which will put competitive pressure on current firms - driving price down and/or features up.
Plethora does this by removing the setup costs of manufacturing so you can do short runs affordably and actually be "agile" in your production.
ReThink does it by making it easy to automate existing SMB production lines - meaning small firms can automate what they have or rapidly reconfigure with lower setup costs.
Haha - yea, there's a lot of work to do for sure. I'd argue also that just robotics isn't enough - cell design and machine interfacing is actually way more time than the robot programming itself.
That would require a change to the current economic model, the comment I replied to seems to indicate that Automation was not a threat to demand at all, but if everyone is out of work, demand for non-essential goods will be 0, no one will want a iphone if they do not have food.
So Automation is a threat to both supply and demand...
Automation is not a threat to demand in the sense that people won't stop demanding products because they are making them at home (as OP ridiculously claimed). Rather, automation will drastically change the economics on the supply side.
You're absolutely correct that unless managed well this could lead to mass poverty (and hence decreasing demand). I'm optimistic we will eventually find some solutions, either in the form of basic income or higher-order work.
History would seem to indicate we will go the Way of Elysium not Star Trek....
Most of the world will live in poverty (just like today) and a increasingly smaller group of humans will live in extreme luxury.
While idea's like UBI would be nice, the point to implement them I believe is past... They should have been created decades ago. If we wait until 20% or more of the jobs are replaced by automation, it will be to late for most people... Poverty will be the future... Poverty is the future for most.
Poverty is the reality for most people 100 years ago, and for all of history.
It's just in the last few hundred years where we've actually moved people out of poverty that we've come to the idea that people shouldn't be in poverty. Before that, it was just assumed that everyone besides the rulers were in poverty. And if you read stories from the time, there's never any idea that it could change or that peasants could all be royalty.
Stories from pre-1500 that involve wealth are all generally about an extremely lucky peasant being married up to royalty, and that was pretty much the only way to move up from poverty. Well, that or war.
'Stuff' is a smaller part of our economy than you might think. Software, Entertainment, Healthcare, Lawyers, Land, Prestige, etc.
Even then raw materials don't show up by magic. So, automation might get rid of low end restaurants, factory's etc but it's going to take high end AI to really kill 'the economy' as we think of it.
I think raw materials are actually going to be easier to automate. Australian mines already have self-driving trucks and US farmers have been at the forefront of UAV use.
Mines are a factory that use raw materials they don't make them. Consider some Ore in ground is raw martial gold is the end product. So, as long as people still value land gold is not going to be free.
I don't think you have to reach for "economics won't exist" to see the serious problem that schemes like Basic Income would hope to address.
> our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing.
As technology advances, the amount of preparation any of us needs to specialize in something useful/valuable skyrockets.
Rather amazingly, 1% of the population of the US are truck drivers or work directly for trucking companies. With families, we're talking about closer to 2 or 3% of the population of one of the most advanced nations on the planet.
What's the skills and preparation gulf between a truck driver and the person who obsoleted him? Same goes for manufacturing (which is thriving in the United States, but with lights-out machining, where one person babies and maintains a pod of CNC machines) and many other fields.
We need less and less wet robots, and retraining them is close to impossible already -- it may eventually be completely impossible due to specialization.
Economics will never disappear because many goods are fundamentally scarce. Fortunately, the necessities of life really aren't, so the economy could conceivably be pried away from its current position as holder of both carrot and stick (I'm defining "stick" as "withholding the necessities of life" here) and reduced to simply offering carrots. This would be an extraordinary improvement and would put capitalism on course to actually live up to the "consensual transaction" and "monotonic improvement" rhetoric so frequently brandied about by the younger members of the capitalist camp. And the communist camp? Well, people owning the means of production is what their philosophy was about all along. If it becomes practical to achieve such a state of affairs without government enforcement then the controversial and historically failure-prone side of their beliefs becomes moot. Capitalism and communism become more or less compatible, which will be no surprise at all to the people who have familiarized themselves with both schools of thought but possibly a bit of a shock to anyone who took the highly polarized rhetoric surrounding the issue at face value. In any case, this type of thing has been thought about and discussed before at great length, but there's a strong taboo hanging over the discussion which makes it easy to inadvertently ignore.
> a single person can use automation to make everything he needs
This would require a large amount of infrastructure per person. An intermediate target would be the point at which communes become viable -- share the heavy infrastructure across some number of people larger than 1 but smaller than 8 billion (or 300M if you think the US government is already sufficiently protectionist). The macroscopic trends of "increasing automation capability" and "decreasing market value of many peoples' labor" make it inevitable that this will happen at some point, the big question is when. It's possible we're approaching or have passed the tipping point but don't know it yet because we haven't invested enough effort in developing infrastructure optimized for decentralization, which is the opposite of what current market structures require. Also, there are a few big social sticking points, namely specialists who are necessary at the margin but who are still treated well by the traditional system (doctors). If workable alternatives can't be developed then the whole endeavor will have to wait until the market turns on them as well. One way or another we'll get past the issue, but getting around the social problems could take decades longer than getting around the industrial problems.
The big danger is that we don't get to the point of viable decentralization before the automation economy makes enough people redundant to create large-scale human misery and political unrest. Arguably this has already happened, but it can get a lot worse -- and I sure hope that we don't get a chance to find out just how much worse that is.
IMO people forget that a human being, as a general-purpose problem solving automaton, is actually a relatively cheap resource. You can make a human being -- at this moment still the most complex object in the universe -- perform tasks for $10/hour.
Insurance premiums are a function of losses. Automated trucks will reduce losses and reduce premium. It's not going to just reduce drivers, it's going to put a dent in the insurance industry. Companies like Geico could lose 40% of premium according to a KPMG report I can't link to because I'm on my cell.
This could also affect the amount of capital available to the economy as insurance companies invest their premiums.
If the consumers are unemployed, where will they get the cash to buy the products? If they're not buying, from where do the producers find the consumers?
EDIT:
Fiction ahead:
Companies automate to sell to consumers. Consumers are put out of jobs, become unemployed, and no longer purchase as much as they used to. Companies that invested capital to build their automation infrastructure for too little return will go broke. The only automation that is profitable to build is automation the serves other owners of automation. The world's economy will separate into two, one small population, the owners of automation who trade amongst each other, and the automation-less, formerly unemployed labor.
The automation economy will require huge inputs of commodities, metal, wood, silicon, and everything, to fuel their own never-ending desires, for ego-building rocket projects, moon colonies, etc.
The automation-less labor will take up service jobs to serve each other, as people are wont to do. People in this economy will live with similar technology as today. But in the future they will be considered impoverished and backwards. Same kind of society, except having to compete with the automation economy for commodities. In fact, commodities like gold and silver, and perhaps even more common ones like copper and iron, will be so valuable, and with society constantly near unrest due to wealth inequality, they may be nationalised by government. Labor will be hired to strip the earth of commodities, to be shipped off the automation trillionaires. The income will be distributed as welfare payments to automation-less labor, to purchase services and goods from each other as well as a share of the commodities the automation-less economy are selling, and bits and pieces of technology from automation economy. In effect, land with resources become the last piece of real capital these people own.
In the automation economy, people are mostly self-sufficient.
In the automation-less economy, people are more dependent than ever on others.
It will be a continuation of the present human civilisation's trend - Where originally all humans were more or less equal as hunter gatherers, in the twenty first century, humans were separated into developed, developing and undeveloped economies, where there are entire countries full of the one percent richest.
In the end, the automation and automation-less economy becomes the final culmination of this trend. There are several thousand people who control the vast majority of the world's capital, and the rest unwashed masses, backwards and impoverished - the undeveloped, automation-less economy.
Already in California, I see shops catering to middle-income consumers dying and being replaced by shops catering to the very poor or the very wealthy.
The challenge to keeping the consumer side of the economy seems to be creating a class of consumers who 100-200K but still spend most or all of it. That doesn't seems to be as hard as one might imagine in a city like San Francisco.
I don't think insurance is the main motivation here. Getting rid of the human element has a certain appeal to it from a management point of view though.
The problem with trains is the last mile: you obviously can't drive them to every store etc that needs a delivery. But the process of loading and unloading containers from ships to trains (and trucks) at ports is getting more and more automated as well.
Throw the fraction of the money used for promoting and developing self-driving and platooning, coupled with the cost of building roads to public transport, trains, tracks and ships and you will have a much more efficient albeit less cool system.
Tangential, but letting (semi) self-driven convoys on the road is quite irresponsible, imagine the headlines if they were to get in an accident.
If they did it for the sake of this challenge then it is an added risk imo, so yes (the real alternative is no human operated traffic at all). Some people believe a controlled car hack on a highway is safe, or at least not substantially more dangerous than everyday highway business, some car just break down on the commute.
The last mile is where automated trucks are least likely to work, though. They have to deal with local streets, pedistrians, cyclists, poor roads, unmarked roads, all the things that are most difficult for automated vehicles.
Fortunately, autonomous trucking doesn't have to solve many of the tricky last mile problems before it becomes immediately economically advantageous. You could imagine local depots just outside of the city center where platoons pull into to switch from autonomous to human drivers.
Truckers would only have to work inside a local area rather than deal with the logistics of long haul routes and drive challenging surface streets rather than the soul numbing monotony of long interstates.
What the mentioned platooning achieves though, is rapid re-grouping once a truck joins or leaves the platoon. Imagine that you save 10-20% of fuel within a platoon (as pointed out in the article), then precise scheduling entering the highway at the right time makes suddenly sense.
Fuel consumption is about the last thing you want to bring to the fore when comparing trucks to trains. You could take all the diesel in a truck, burn it in a oil power plant and use the generated electricity to power a train. You would go much further.
Trains are much more heavily constrained by grade, radius and stopping distance than trucks are. You can't build a railway to every door. And they're far more expensive. Their main advantage is in axle weight.
The US trucking industry is ripe for disruption. The role of a driver is minimal as it is: s/he has to just steer the truck along the highway, with periodic fuel stops. There's nothing preventing an automated system from doing the same. Self-driving cars may be years away, but self-driving trucks which automatically attach themselves to trailers, drive 2500 miles and drop them off, only to do the same in return, 24x7 ? That'll be huge.
Keep in mind that the role of a modern truck driver covers far more than just hauling a trailer on the freeway. Drivers also have to navigate city/suburb streets to an actual end destination (usually a warehouse), work with the loading dock workers, sign paperwork, etc.
Personally, I think we will see a system where trucks like this do all the long-distance driving and stop at a drop-off location just outside cities. Then the role of truck drivers changes to that of delivering cargo the last mile to the final destination (the part that's much harder to automate). That, too, will eventually be automated, but not for a while.
You don't need to transport the driver for that, you can have workers residing in the cities to finish the work. But you still have to pay them, so you gain nothing at all. We already have quite a few more or less useful driving aids, I just don't get the obsession of making it fully autonomous. Legislations are lacking behind tech, ethics problems won't go away either, autonomous trucks could be prime target for hacking etc.
I don't understand how it doesn't save money. If the human drivers are only driving the last few miles and working with loading operations, they can handle many more trucks in a day than they can currently, so the number of drivers needed drops quite a bit. Salaries for those drivers might go up, but not enough to compensate, so the trucking companies stand to benefit.
Let's say a popular shipping route is 300 miles from dock to warehouse, of which 280 are "easy" open road perfect for automating. For the sake of example, let's also say it takes half an hour at the loading/unloading point on either side, the 20 "city miles" take an hour to drive, and the middle 280 miles take 4.5 hours to drive. The total time is then 6.5 hours for a single truck, all of which is currently human labor.
Now let's say the truck drives itself the middle 280 miles, and the human driver is handling the rest. Whereas before the human driver would have been able to handle a single truck in 6.5 hours, the end point operations now only require 2 hours of driver time per truck, so we've cut the need for 2/3 of our human driver hours because one driver could handle 3 trucks in the same time as before. With good scheduling and tracking, that means we've also cut the need for 2/3 of our human drivers.
Obviously it's more in favor of human drivers for shorter hauls, and more in favor of self-driving trucks for longer hauls.
I kinda think this too. One thing that's particularly hard is driving through snow on a mountain. Even going through Tennessee is a challenge. I don't automation is there yet, and probably won't be for a while. Clean roads, where we know what's going on seem to be the way of automation right now.
If you don't train your humans to drive in bad conditions and good, they won't help here either.
When you see how crowded European truck stops are you realize that parking a truck there is probably the ultimate challenge for an autonomous driving system.
This system might allow two drivers to drive a convoy of maybe six trucks across a long distance of highway, but it doesn't provide much benefit over the existing road-trains that they use in Australia - and they've never been used in Europe.
The thing that strikes me about this is less to do with highway safety and more "how many assets can a company put in the hands of one human to guard?". It seems like it would be none too difficult for hijackers to box off the tail end vehicle and slow it to a halt giving them ample time to loot it before the driver even got a chance to stop the rest of the convoy. The looters could be gone without even needing to confront the driver.
This would be an arms race between truck companies and looters, with companies leveling up in security on their trucks.
But in this case I am not sure the problem is so different than with a human driver. I can't imagine a employee risking to get beaten up/shot just to save the cargo from a group of robbers for instance.
I think though that this makes a difference from the criminal's point of view. Performing the operation without threatening the driver makes it theft instead of robbery (?), which is significantly less serious from a legal point of view.
I've wondered why rail isn't automated. Trains have accidents but they have a (mostly) 1D, simple existence. Cars and trucks are mostly 2D, with many more variables and one-off situations. Fix rail accidents and you get a huge win.
A lot of trains are to various degrees. A lot of passenger services are entirely automatic with a conductor just shutting doors and checking tickets.
Freight trains probably aren't worth automating right now. Trains are huge, only one guy there, probably useful to have him there anyway if there is a mechanical fault (vs blocking the line for hours while the nearest person flys/drives to the train).
What if one car merges infront of one of the following trucks and slows down a bit? What do these trucks do at construction sites (we have quite A few of those on German autobahns)?
This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant, the speed is set by the driver (it doesn't really matter if the speed is set by the driver in the very first vehicle IMO), and It only handles very simple roads
> The trucks did not travel in platoon for the entire journey — only on motorways when traffic conditions were "normal" — and each vehicle, even those following the lead truck, had a human driver on hand.
Also, the convoy formed a network and explicitly communicated with the goal of not just driving autonomously but also recognizing cost savings:
> a Wi-Fi connection keeping their braking and acceleration (but not steering) in sync.
The lead trunk has indicators that the convoy is platooning, sure some people with interfere with it but for the most part when drivers start to recognise this on the road they are mostly going to stay out of the way.
>This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant
So? It's the first step in removing a human driver. Are you assuming that this technology is not going to ever improve? The end game is a head office operator that controls a network of 50 trucks across a country remotely. It's just a matter of time until they get there.
In the year 2020 a 12 year old girl could operate a fleet of 50 trucks through an open source NPM package (orders, planning, monitoring). You'd never suspect when you see her in person.
> This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant, the speed is set by the driver (it doesn't really matter if the speed is set by the driver in the very first vehicle IMO), and It only handles very simple roads.
It's not better or worse, it's different. The main difference is that the trucks in the convoy talk to each other and can thus drive more efficient manoeuvres than a Tesla can because of that. Also not sure how this is related to Tesla given that Tesla does not actually manufacture trucks.
Each truck in the platoon needs to be able to drive competently on its own, right? I don't think one driver can change lanes for an entire platoon, and each truck will have to adjust its speed to allow for other cars merging in and out.
If that's the case, why plan to have a driver at all? Just for navigational purposes?
i was just wondering about the distance between these vehicles, and if that really would add up to some amount of finite-non-zero fuel savings as well ? for example, the lead vehicle just pushes the air away, and the rest following close by in the "slip-stream" experience less overall air resistance...
Totally pointless. I like truck drivers driving trucks . Not out of work angry and with nothing to do . Ohh and on a sid driverless trucks sound a lot like a train . Why not just use freight trains ?
For example if rail handles long range transport to distribution hubs and actual truck drivers transport last mile . What's wrong or bad about this idea ? again I don't see the point in wrecking the lives of truck drivers.
These machines can safely convoy closely in one lane leaving other lanes free, will obey traffic laws and courtesy rules, and never get sleepy.
The disruption of the trucking industry is one that we will have to watch closely for its likely economic and political effects.