Do you believe that the wealth/income disparity would decrease if instead of employing one worker to drive a truck, each box was hand carried by 1000 workers? Unless the more cost-efficient delivery companies prevent competitors from entering the (now leaner) delivery market, the result of a decrease in the marginal cost of production is more, better quality, cheaper goods whose price decrease benefits those who are at the margins the most (the group you seem to be wanting to help and who would hurt the most by artificially increasing the cost of delivering goods).
You might not agree with his proposed solution (it's UBI), but Andrew Yang's book 'The war on normal people' is a really good well researched exploration of this issue (and other industries too).
I think a UBI is sort of inevitable to ensure society transitions peaceably into this new era - this round of automation appears to be falling well short on new industry creation compared to prior iterations. It's something I'd love to see get a wider adoption as otherwise I'm pretty :shrug: on Yang.
Or a half full view: tens of billions, possibly more, will be paid to the same truckers in their new, more fulfilling and healthier occupation?
I don't know which scenario will play out. Neither do you. We'll have to see. Better yet, strive to make my scenario the reality. Complain about automation wouldn't help.
What I fear is that the new, more fulfilling occupations you describe will go to the next generation of non-truckers, not those who lost their jobs.
If you spent your whole life driving trucks and it's what you're good at, can you really transfer to a new occupation that's more fulfilling and well-paid in older age, or will you just be left unemployed or stuck with a worse job?
I think more automation is absolutely the future but we need to find some way to take care of the people who are left behind, and not just say "oh they'll get some other job".
complaining about automation sure will help, there's even a US presidential candidate polling >1% whose ideas about how the government supports its citizens were greatly inspired by - you guessed it - people losing jobs and not getting them back due to automation.
the idea that an individual can somehow strive to change capital capturing massive swathes of business and not sharing those proceeds with those they have sidelined is pretty laudable.
i appreciate your optimism but i would consider it more on the unrealistic side, especially given that truck drivers probably aren't gung ho about studying for years to get retrained given most of them don't have college degrees in the first place.
> i appreciate your optimism but i would consider it more on the unrealistic side, especially given that truck drivers probably aren't gung ho about studying for years to get retrained given most of them don't have college degrees in the first place.
That doesn’t mean we should create or endorse make work projects, jobs that could be faster, cheaper and more efficient when automated. Society has a responsibility to these people, which is why I support both basic income and job retraining programs. It’s the humane way to make progress without fear.
We know how the scenario plays out because we've seen the effects of automation playing out for the last 20 years. These fantasy jobs that people have been talking about since NAFTA never materialized. For working people home, health and general insecurity have skyrocketed along with household debt as wages have stagnated and fallen. We can either deal with reality as it exists or keep spinning ideological fantasies until the situation reaches a breaking point.
Yes, assuming we have a World with infinite resources then your suggestion would be compelling. As we could just manufacture more, and move these people in to other industries, producing ever more stuff for the people higher up the wealth scale.
How do you think that's going to play out with energy production becoming problematic due to climate change, with water becoming hard to come by even in some Western regions, with resources like sand (!) growing in short supply.
Oh, sure, we'll just buy our way out with our endless resources and our ever increasing consumption. WCGW.
The real "half full", ie optimistic, outlook is that we find a way societally to do something like UBI, or spread jobs across more people (3 day week, etc.), or something else, without having to get there through violent revolution or similarly disturbing means.
You're right, I don't know _the_ answer, but I do know it's not greater consumption (ie shift truckers in to a job producing something else), unless we first solve energy production in a massively transformative way.
Are we really going to have the same conversation every single time something about automation is mentioned. I'm just mindblown how hostile people suddenly became to the very same process that has been enriching our lives since the first industrial revolution.
Have we previously lived in a society that was more friendly to unemployed? Because automation has been happening for a while, people got displaced from their jobs for a while....
>I'm just mindblown how hostile people suddenly became //
I welcome automation, I don't welcome the income disparity that goes along with it. Automation needs to serve mankind, not only serve the currently wealthy who can "own the means of automation" to coin a phrase. No longer is the issue owning the means of production, but that the capitalists can owner the tools, and the [robotic] workers. Where does that leave the proletariat (the current workforce)? It leaves them useless to the Capitalists. In Capitalism that which doesn't aid profit becomes valued at zero -- and people can't live on zero, even if that means wealthy people can have their parcels delivered without any human intervention.
We can't rely on perpetual growth to get out of it, we're getting to the crunch. What worked before worked because we discovered energy production that seemed limitless, but coal isn't limitless. "But we found oil, surely that's limitless?".
Automation, electronics, washing machines, sewing machines etc have been a way out of poverty. human labour will be worth more. And prices of goods will go down, so the poor can buy more.
Why is there so much emphasis on wealth disparity when there's substantial evidence that life is significantly getting better for the poor regardless of this disparity? This is just one example off the top of my news queue: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/05/18/american-...
The phrase "A rising tide lifts all ships" gets routinely mocked, but the data seems to indicate that is is true. While inequality has risen over the past several decades, quality of life even for the poorest quartile has improved.
> The T-Pod has permission to make short trips - between a warehouse and a terminal - on a public road in an industrial area in Jonkoping, central Sweden, at up to 5 km/hr, documents from the transport authority show.
>
> Einride would apply next year for more public route permits and was planning to expand in the United States.
So, not as sensational as the title would lead you believe.
Whoever claimed that Jönköping is in central Sweden needs some kind of measuring device, it's quite clearly in the south. Even if the northern half is comparatively sparsely populated it still counts as part of Sweden.
It's like when people say anything more than an hour north of NYC is "upstate".
You kind of need to have a "there is no land beyond the beltway" world view to wind up working for most media outlets anyway (not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg) so this is "central Sweden" by that yard stick.
I believe this is what is referred to as central Sweden because it lies in the middle of Sweden's two major cities, Stockholm and Gothenburg. Similarly, Austin is considered Central Texas, Dallas is considered North Texas, etc. even though that isn't extremely accurate looking at a map.
Is it not the first fully autonomous truck, if not vehicle, used in a "real life" scenario that is not just a closed-off portion of a street ? That is the real interesting point, regardless of the speed or the actual location.
The rule is clearly stated in the swedish article that during these drives a person must be present with one hand on the controls just I'm case. Same saftey net, really, remote or not imo makes no difference
Slight difference that makes it all the more interesting: the remote controller watches 10 vehicles at once. I feel this is the same difference as a manned vs unmanned subway, because it means reliability is good enough that you don't need one human per vehicle. Each vehicle is a little bit more autonomous.
Also, the safety net inside the vehicle is clearly just for testing purposes, while the remote safety net is something that can be done in production.
The remote controller can not only watch 10 vehicles at the same time, but also go home at the end of a 6 hours shift and handle the vehicles to another driver without even stopping.
Probably drivers from the local transit union. I've seen/read about (union) activists doing some crazy things and it wouldn't surprise me that someone or some people would try to show with their life that this is a bad idea and therefore shouldn't replace a human driven system.
Do you have any data to back the assertion that this was about unions?
My gut says that it’s more probable that it was the hacker news crowd trying to test the technology, but I have to admit to have absolutely no data to support this assertion, either.
Was it on the streets, with no traffic blocking ? I took the same kind of shuttles as part of an experiment, but it was on a very specific path that was shared with pedestrians, not on the road.
They ran a test in Gothenburg as well at one of the university campuses. And while some of the roads they ran on where technically public car roads, they where small back roads across campus that see very little car traffic.
It’s not like many kids are planning to be truck drivers. It is a job that people wander into. The bigger problem will be those that are doing it when the job goes away, as well as continued pressure on the job market as a whole (what will pop up to replace the portion of the labor pool that would have driven trucks before).
I think truck drivers (especially long haulers) are safe for at least 10-20 years. But yeah, truck are probably the first road vehicles to be reliably automated.
Actually, I think that long haulers are going to be the ones that first suffer. When you need a human there anyway to sign/unload/etc, then having that human also be a driver isn't such a huge problem. With long-haul the only thing that the human really needs to do is drive, and then, if needed, you could have a staging area to get the truck into the city… in much the same way that road-trains are dealt with.
For OTR use the human driver costs you tons of money because the regulations that go with the human driver force the truck to be stationary a large fraction of the time. That's the market they're (eventually) targeting, not local delivery where the driver usually also has responsibilities having to do with the cargo.
For the use case mentioned in the article the human driven option is going to be cheaper because the human driven truck goes faster. Going 10km/h results in basically the same throughput as having two trucks (yes I know there's other "per trip" overhead, that's not the point).
Assuming the battery could be swapped out in a few minutes, then traveling at a 1/3 of the speed of a human driver displaces the cost of one driver on a regular shift of 8 hours. But on a 24/7/365 schedule (weekends and holidays too) even 1/4 the speed will cover wages. Reversing this, an Electric Truck with battery swap or on-road charging going 25km/h displaces the cost of 1 driver traveling 100km/h for equal distance.
There was an electric car startup (now defunct) in Israel which built a network of "swap stations" so drivers of their cars could do long drives without spending hours at charging stations. The process was a bit like going through a carwash: it was completely automated and couldn't have taken more than 5-10 minutes.
Yes Better Place! Obviously there were a lot of problems with that business, but my cousin was an early-adopter, and it was pretty fun from a user perspective while it lasted. In retrospect superchargers are at a much better place (no pun intended) in terms of the speed/complexity ratio.
Truck drivers in the EU can't spend more than 90h driving during any given two weeks, and they usually go 80-100km/h, so the break-even point in terms of time alone here would be around 22-27km/h.
My take is that at 30km/h they would make a very compelling case - since that's the minimum highway speed in some countries.
Having automated trucks clogging one lane at 30km/h would be disastrous for PR, and I imagine it would have a very negative impact on traffic in general. As far as I'm aware, the safest and most efficient scenario for highway traffic is to have cars and trucks traveling at equal speeds.
You get better throughput with less speed in dense environments, see pedestrians and bicyclists. The problem with highways is that they are optimized for speed and sparse environments.
> My take is that at 30km/h they would make a very compelling case - since that's the minimum highway speed in some countries.
In NL it is 70 kph, and if you go that fast you are a danger to other drivers. What country has 30 km/h as the minimum highway speed? And what do the highways there look like? Do people actually go that fast on the highways or is that the speed that won't get you ticketed if you drive on the shoulder with an SMV?
Looking at that route it looks like the sort of public road nobody would actually travel on unless they worked for DB Schenker at those facilities or were desperate to avoid the more direct and better marked roads across that industrial estate
A giant leap for regulators, perhaps, since it's technically a public road, but looks like the standard move around company facility use case proposed for autonomous vehicles rather than anything comparable with transit haul or a taxi service.
> A giant leap for regulators
Yes, this is the big one. The low speed and short distances involved are excellent arguments to allow it, and this opens up for more advanced projects in the future.
It reads like the speed limit isn't due to the system but due to the permit they got from the government. Another article says the truck has a top speed of 85 km/h
These industrial parks look like the perfect semi enclosed environments to start using these level “4” vehicles in production. Plenty of wide open lanes and clear paths, not too heavy traffic and no random tourists gawking at them or being put at risk.
I have been resistant to the idea of government/state support for people who are losing jobs to automation, because I think people will adjust over the long run and focus on more digital jobs. However, in the nearer term, there does seem to be a bigger case to be made for some sort of support since trucking a top occupation in the US, and #1 in most states.
In 10 - 20 years it seems concerning to think that 2 - 3 million people will be out of traditional work with little or no education. Additionally, young people will not have that occupation as an option. Any industry that large (including traditional diesel truck manufacturers, truck stops, gas stations, truck mechanics, etc.) will be drastically impacted, all in a relatively short time span.
Should there be some help? Should the government be rapidly retraining truck drivers for something else in the next few years?
The primary barrier to social safety nets is the cost, and the ideological idea that government should not take more from its productive citizens to cover that cost.
If the largest organizations are effectively optimizing humans out of the costs, then wouldn't their profits correspondingly increase? And as the demand rises for the safety net, along with corporate profits, it seems so would the argument to take a portion of those profits to cover the nets. Maybe to the point of breaking the ideological barrier.
So wouldn't the businesses most harmed be those who continue to employ humans, as they'll have to pay the increased profit taxes as well as their employees?
> Additionally, young people will not have that occupation as an option.
What if the young already believe that?
It's anecdotal but I know someone that worked temporarily at a trucking company at the reception of their office. She's been told by the staff that they have quite a bit of trouble recruiting drivers. She didn't saw that many that came for an interview, but one of them didn't even had a driver license for trucks. They did an interview for someone that couldn't even do the job yet.
I can't see how legislation can be changed in 10 - 20 years either. Uber is 10 years old and still have trouble in MANY markets, not only against the laws but also against Taxi drivers. Even automatic trucks won't solve everything, thus companies that will use them will need both drivers, and a strike would be much worse to them than for Uber right now.
What about airplane and trains? Why do they still have drivers if automating them is much easier (and already actually done)?
Personally I can't see this industry no longer needing drivers for at least 30-40 years. Which isn't too bad with the current shortage of younger drivers.
Truck drives lose their jobs to automation. C programmers are superseded by java programmers, and then Rust/Go. Simplex optimization jobs get swept away by CPLEX, and later tensorflow. 20 years ago Visual Basic was all the rage, and 20 years before Cobol. Lots of people find themselves obsolete because, you know, the world changes. What's so special about truck drivers that they need government assistance?
To be honest, my guess would be that a typical truck driver is more resourceful than a typical javascript programmer. Take a look at [1] where a truck driver asks for advice how to switch careers and become a welder. You'll be impressed: the guy goes from asking a question to having his welding rig in two months.
My problem with UBI is that it somehow doesn’t seem to be such a good idea to pay people to sit around and do nothing - except perhaps get too deep into social media. At the same time, I do see some benefit to the Danish-style garden leave where one gets about 80% of their former salary to bridge them to their next gig.
In parts of central Europe, I've found it easier to just speak English even when I know what I want to say in the native language. Lots of people from other countries who are also there getting by with English only, and people are so used to speaking English with foreigners that they're not used to hearing their own language in a foreign accent.
Eg. Flemish people normally speak Dutch, French en English.
Sometimes, you see a Wallonian ask direction in dutch and they "hate" you, because you respond in French and they want to learn Dutch.
Fyi, hate is a too strong word of course. But you see them thinking: oh come on, respond in Dutch because I'm learning it and your not helpful for that.
I try to learn enough of a language to be polite (Hello, Please, Thank You, How Much, "I don't speak ____") but I found I could make myself understood in much of Europe with English. The only exception was Spain, but fortunately, I do speak Spanish conversationally.
I'm sure that everyone in Sweden speaks English. But posting the message in English gives the impression that the native (and therefore supposed "default") language is not good enough for some purposes.
In my country we would post such a message in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Is there some aversion in Sweden to having the same message posted in multiple languages?
Are the street signs posted in Swedish or English?
It's an interesting situation, but most likely the company language of whatever company put together the truck is English.
Road signage, and other official signage is primarily posted in Swedish.
Swedish is very good for writing your next tome of epical poetry, it can be quite beautiful, but it's also rather unwieldy in many contexts.
It might actually not be the most commonly used language in a few generations, as the kids have already begun mixing Swedish and English something fierce.
Street signs use symbols. Street signs actually spelling out "No left turn" instead of a crossed out arrow are very rare outside US. Where text is really needed its in Swedish.
Thank you. Many Israeli signs need text clarification, and those are all in three languages. But we due use very similar signs to those found in Europe, which I believe is a standard of some sort.
Come to think of it, driving in Europe one does see very few signs with text.
Almost everyone of driving age in Sweden speaks English with complete or near fluency. I know there are a few who don't do well in class, and a few who are quite old, but maybe less than the number of tourists.
This is what I expect for the first set of automated for freight. There will be designated on/off ramps for automated trucks. Some human will drive them there and park them. The trucks will drive across interstates and get off at another designated on/off ramp and a human will drive them to the warehouse.
This removes a lot of the risks associated with automation and reduces the biggest expense of having long haul driver teams.
Not sure I buy the remote-controlled-by-humans idea personally.
I mean, to remotely drive a car at 30mph, you either need to emergency-stop any time the control signal drops out (in which case you'll constantly get rear-ended) or you need a control system so good it can keep going even through signal drop-outs (in which case why do you have the remote control anyway) or you need an immortal data connection that never suffers drop-outs or so much as 100ms of latency (i.e. orders of magnitude better than what we have today).
I mean, you could do "Human remotely controls the vehicle at walking pace" easily enough, as you could stop all you liked without people hitting you. But we'd need lots of changes to the roads to support a mass of vehicles going that slowly.
The car only needs to emergency stop if the "self-driving" has a sudden disengage feature which relies on transferring control to a human in miliseconds. If it's actually "self-driving" and can handle uncertainty in a more reasonable way it's not so much a problem.
How does the air force manage with remote controlled drones piloted a half a globe away? I guess flying is a bit different as it is much easier to automate than driving, but still.
The Big Sky Theory [1] means (unless you're in the Blue Angels) a plane can almost always keep going straight forward for 20 seconds with no worries. No risks of a child running out or a vehicle 2 seconds in front suddenly braking.
This doesn't apply to a vehicle driving a city street.
I would say that is something truckdrivers spend a lot of time avoiding, by exprience and professionalism. The same can not be said about driverless tech companies, everyone really want to be first, that makes children and other soft targets losers.
There are technological solutions that help truck drivers to drive safely but they are actively fought by truck producers. No one is a saint, but I promise you that truck drivers spend alot of their time worrying about you and me.
My argument is a variant of "better the devil you know".
Airspace is much less crowded, much more controlled, and military drones don’t need microsecond response—their missions are largely ISR with the occasional extrajudicial bombing with a lag-time > a few seconds anyway.
Sorry, I was not saying remote controlled. I was saying fully autonomous but only from interstate to interstate with specially designed and designated on/off ramps. They would drive highway speeds (except in traffic).
Wouldn't it make more sense to make the automated trucks more accessible in case of the AI going on a rampage? I mean how do you even get into the cab?
If it was more normal looking you could at least smash the window. But they even protected the tires.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/convoy-flexport-automating-t...
There are tens of billions that can be carved out with automation. Electrics near large urban areas will definitely help air quality.