Has the Autonomous Trucking Revolution Arrived?

The person who got run over for interfering with the truck

If someone crashes into a bus stop at 75 mph and kills a family, who gets sentenced to jail?

(The answer is no one: https://abc7.com/post/mary-fong-lau-crash-driver-killed-fami...)

This is a hard question - but less overall deaths is more important than the correct punishment.

Grandparents (the earliest cause)

In short, yes. Plenty of people don't have USPS-recognized addresses, homeless or not.

I mean, if you're living in the truck that you're driving across country, back and forth, and your parents have passed, where would you put as your address? You don't have an apartment you're renting, because that would just be a waste of money since you're never there.

You can have a mailing address without having a domicile.

“Non-domiciled” commercial drivers licenses are licenses issued to foreign nationals as described by the article.

Autonomous driving is orthogonal to the type of engine used.

From your link:

> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".

> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".

> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.

It has happened with Waymo and recently Tesla (somewhat). From there to self driving trucks with the same capability doesn’t seem that far off. Especially if there’s money to be saved. Between the electric fuel and the driver pay I would think these things would be 80% cheaper than the alternative.

  > keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town.

I'm not sure humans have reached Level 5 autonomy either; many of them can't handle the full range of conditions humans drive in and occasionally need other humans to step in and help them.

Level 3 or 4 is more than enough to get most of the commercial benefits.

Good (or bad, IDK) thing only level 4 is required for autonomous trucks to run everywhere.

What about the vehicles driving regular people around Austin right now with no steering wheel or pedals?

The robot drivers will be worse than the human ones?

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/semi-truck-driver-dead...

I'm pretty cynical and pessimistic, but I do not see this happening.

It's going to be funny when there are more fatalities on the roads where people are trying to avoid the robot trucks...

Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.

I'm continually shocked that people criticize autonomous vehicles along these lines... like where do you live in the US that gives you such a high opinion of human drivers? Daily dipshit human driving behaviors and a frequent cadence of bad accidents or fatalities seems the norm across major metro areas.

If more robots can drive we can actually have a hard test to pass for driving. Right now basically anyone can drive because it is too expensive to tolerate it being any different given the extent with which transportation and the economy in America is built around cars. The only people who will manually drive are people that really want to. Which is how it should be. You shouldn't be operating a vehicle if all you really want is just to appear x miles away while being able to dick around on your phone or fall asleep or whatever is causing all the lazy driving behaviors we all see around us everyday.

Why over-index on a handful of autonomous driving related fatalities? How many humans kill other humans in cars? Do we ban all cars? Why do you think robot cars will necessarily always be worse drivers than human ones?

  > Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.

Roughly 40,000 people die in motor vehicle crashes each year in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...). This is something that we accept as normal; people who drive or ride in cars routinely take steps to minimize their chances of getting into an accident, because they are aware that this is a very real possibility, while still accepting the small risk that they'll die on a road because they or someone else drove a car unsafely. There's also enough political opposition to private car ownership to

In short, "autonomous cars scare humans off the roads" (or even "most major roads are legally for autonomous cars only, private cars are legally banned on them") is something that a substantial number of people are openly and actively hoping for, because they expect it will save about 40,000 lives a year in the US (and more worldwide).

I personally have qualms about this because I don't like the idea that people will be dependent on autonomous cars - likely controlled by some far-away authority - to get around. On the other hand, 40,000 American road deaths per year, that's a lot of preventable death.