The real victims here are the truck stop sex workers. Sex workers can't make money on Patreon any more, what are they supposed to do?
I think sex workers may be one of those industries that is fairly stable if you know what I mean.
BadKen wrote:The real victims here are the truck stop sex workers. Sex workers can't make money on Patreon any more, what are they supposed to do?
I think sex workers may be one of those industries that is fairly stable if you know what I mean.
Sure, but much like the trucking industry, while the industry itself ain't going anywhere, the entities doing the work are up for a radical shift in carbon-content.
That program looks very disturbing.
I signed up for Channel 4 so I could watch it.
I always assumed for real long range travel that railroads were still the preferred method for shipping. If it is not, it is a bad thing to encourage even more trucks on the road, since rail is about 3 times more energy efficient, and much less costly to maintain than highways.
I always assumed for real long range travel that railroads were still the preferred method for shipping. If it is not, it is a bad thing to encourage even more trucks on the road, since rail is about 3 times more energy efficient, and much less costly to maintain than highways.
I think for raw goods that's the case, but not for manufactured goods? A quick google of Wal-mart and amazon distribution centers don't seem to show any direct rail connections.
LeapingGnome wrote:I always assumed for real long range travel that railroads were still the preferred method for shipping. If it is not, it is a bad thing to encourage even more trucks on the road, since rail is about 3 times more energy efficient, and much less costly to maintain than highways.
I think for raw goods that's the case, but not for manufactured goods? A quick google of Wal-mart and amazon distribution centers don't seem to show any direct rail connections.
A big thing from my brief time in logistics is to use a combo of rails and trucks. You use rails for the long part of the journey and then a truck takes it to it's final destination.
jrralls wrote:Without a driver, the article says it can make the journey in two days instead of four. That's a fairly huge time saver.
Huge savings in cost so it will setup a conflict between truckers and ...well everyone (consumers want to pay less, retailers and producers want to make more.)
I highly doubt any place will ever cut the prices of their products to reflect the savings, but they might hold off raising the price until it catches up.
farley3k wrote:jrralls wrote:Without a driver, the article says it can make the journey in two days instead of four. That's a fairly huge time saver.
Huge savings in cost so it will setup a conflict between truckers and ...well everyone (consumers want to pay less, retailers and producers want to make more.)
I highly doubt any place will ever cut the prices of their products to reflect the savings, but they might hold off raising the price until it catches up.
The grocery industry comes to mind. They are already riding the bleeding edge of what their customers can pay that the only way they can make up increases in production costs are by 'secretly' making products smaller. If this staves off another round of tiny cereal boxes and hard to scrape divots in my peanut-butter jar i'll be happy.
Have we ever examined self driving cars in light of the upcoming/currently on-going retail apocalypse? Because self driving cars will dramatically lower delivery cost, that’s beyond dispute correct? So if home delivery becomes even cheaper at the same time tons of drivers become out of work, that should have a cascading effect upon retail that will make the current collapse look like boom times.
Uber trucks start shuttling goods across Arizona — by themselves
Uber has been sending self-driving trucks on delivery runs across Arizona since November, the first step in what promises to be a freight transportation revolution that could radically reshape the jobs of long-haul truckers.After testing its technology earlier in 2017, Uber began contracting with trucking companies to use its own autonomous Volvo big rigs to take over loads as they traverse the state, it disclosed.
In Uber‘s current program, human truckers meet the self-driving truck at the Arizona border, which then takes their load across the state and hands it off to another human trucker. An Uber employee rides in the driver seat during the autonomous trip.
If one day both the technology and regulations play out in favor of self-driving trucks, two scenarios emerge.
The first would find self-driving trucks handling long-haul highway legs with no one at the wheel as they meet up with human truckers who then handle deliveries into city centers. The other possibility is Uber selling its technology to trucking owner-operators who then leverage it to sleep while the truck handles the bulk of long-distance driving.
Truckers make their money only when their rigs are on the road. They are also limited by law in terms of how much time they can spend behind the wheel, something a self-driving truck could impact positively.
"The big step for us recently is that we can plan to haul goods in both directions, using Uber Freight to coordinate load pickups and dropoffs with local truckers," said Alden Woodrow, who leads Uber's self- driving truck effort. "Keeping trucking local allows these drivers to make money while staying closer to home."
An Uber self-driving car hit and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz., Sunday night, according to local police.The Uber car was in self-driving mode when the accident occurred, but had a safety driver at the wheel as is the norm when testing autonomous vehicles.
Uber issued a statement saying that it was "fully cooperating with local authorities." The ride-hailing company has temporarily halted its self-driving tests in wake of the incident in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto, as is its policy following any accident.
The woman, who has not been named, was crossing outside the designated crosswalk at about 10 p.m. when she was hit, police said.
Sgt. Ronald Elcock, a Tempe police spokesman, confirmed to the USA TODAY Network that the car was in autonomous mode with a driver behind the wheel when it hit the pedestrian. There were no passengers in the car at the time.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi tweeted Monday that the company had "some incredibly sad news out of Arizona. We’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened."
This is the first known pedestrian death involving a self-driving car, which are being developed in part to drastically reduce the number of pedestrian deaths. Some 40,000 people were killed in traffic accidents last year.
The incident is sure to add fuel to concerns on the part of some activists, such as Consumer Watchdog, who feel the technology that allows the cars to sense their surroundings is not ready for prime time.
On average, a pedestrian was killed every 2 hours and injured every 8 minutes in traffic crashes in 2013. In 2013, pedestrian deaths accounted for 14 percent of all traffic fatalities in motor vehicle traffic crashes.
Kill a pedestrian every 2 hours and no one bats an eye. Kill one jaywalker with an automated car and the world loses its mind.
So, uh, what's the point of the safety driver if he can't stop the car from killing someone? Either the driver wasn't doing what they were supposed to be doing (paying attention) or the pedestrian did something dumb and would've been killed regardless of who (or what) was at the wheel.
I couldn't agree more but every news site has it as their headline right now because death sells.
So, uh, what's the point of the safety driver if he can't stop the car from killing someone? Either the driver wasn't doing what they were supposed to be doing (paying attention) or the pedestrian did something dumb and would've been killed regardless of who (or what) was at the wheel.
I wonder how insurance fraud will ramp up if people think they can dive in front of autonomous vehicles and get a large payout.
Nevin73 wrote:So, uh, what's the point of the safety driver if he can't stop the car from killing someone? Either the driver wasn't doing what they were supposed to be doing (paying attention) or the pedestrian did something dumb and would've been killed regardless of who (or what) was at the wheel.
I wonder how insurance fraud will ramp up if people think they can dive in front of autonomous vehicles and get a large payout.
Wouldn't plan on that as a retirement strategy if I was you. The autonomous cars are covered in cameras and sensors. The telemetry they'll provide will nip that kind of thing in the bud right wuick.
"Yer honor, this here death car tried to kill me"
"The footage clearly shows you hiding behind a parked car and leaping out in front of the car intentionally at the last second, and the telemetry data shows the autonomous vehicle applied maximum braking force the second you were visible to it. Case dismissed."
So, uh, what's the point of the safety driver if he can't stop the car from killing someone?
The purpose of the safety driver, in order of importance are:
1: PR, so Joe Public doesn't freak out about "killer robot cars"
2: Bug monitoring
3: Safety
Agreed that the reporting is very sensationalized, compared to other pedestrian deaths, but that doesn't make it an insignificant event. What's bothering me is the number of people reacting as if now is the time to start talking about safety and CAVs - the experts have been having this conversation for years.
What will be very interesting to watch is how state and local policy reacts. Arizona is famously hands-off, which is why everybody tests there (it's a big economic boon for the state). California just announced intention to allow testing without safety drivers next month. It's likely that will be walked back. Regulation is important to prevent fatalities such as this, and there's a lot to be said about the ethics of using a public space as a test bed for emerging technology, but too much pullback here will set the industry back even further. As Paleocon pointed out, this is hardly an infrequent event with humans at the wheel. I really want us to get to zero road fatalities, but it's not going to happen overnight. But the public perception is not so easily swayed by cold statistics.
Agreed that the reporting is very sensationalized, compared to other pedestrian deaths, but that doesn't make it an insignificant event. What's bothering me is the number of people reacting as if now is the time to start talking about safety and CAVs - the experts have been having this conversation for years.
What will be very interesting to watch is how state and local policy reacts. Arizona is famously hands-off, which is why everybody tests there (it's a big economic boon for the state). California just announced intention to allow testing without safety drivers next month. It's likely that will be walked back. Regulation is important to prevent fatalities such as this, and there's a lot to be said about the ethics of using a public space as a test bed for emerging technology, but too much pullback here will set the industry back even further. As Paleocon pointed out, this is hardly an infrequent event with humans at the wheel. I really want us to get to zero road fatalities, but it's not going to happen overnight. But the public perception is not so easily swayed by cold statistics.
The standard should absolutely not be "Zero fatalities" unless the goal is to kill automated vehicles as a concept. The standard should be "a significant improvement in fatalities over manually operated vehicles" and I don't think this event really threatens that particular goal.
While such accidents are very common for human-driven cars, I suspect that if you actually broke out the miles traveled for all of the self-driven cars and compared it to the amount of miles traveled by all human-driven cars every two hours you would find that this fatality actually happened relatively quickly, as in, not much (or any) safer than a self-driven car.
Which isn't unexpected in our early days, the benefit of self-driving cars is that dangerous behaviors/oversights can quickly be patched at a very large scale, while human-driven car "patches" require enormous law enforcement rollout and still aren't particularly effective.
While such accidents are very common for human-driven cars, I suspect that if you actually broke out the miles traveled for all of the self-driven cars and compared it to the amount of miles traveled by all human-driven cars every two hours you would find that this fatality actually happened relatively quickly, as in, not much (or any) safer than a self-driven car.
I'll take that bet, based on nothing more than the sum total idiocy I see on any given daily commute.
So I found that for 2016, there were about 3.2 trillion miles driven by cars in the US, and 5,987 pedestrians killed by cars in 2016. That works out to 1 pedestrian killed every 534,491,398.029 miles.
This article written a little after a fatal Tesla accident does it's own breakdown of why our current tiny sample size actually points to (Tesla) self-driving algorithms at the time being significantly less safe from a driver fatality standpoint than humans.
Switching over to actually completely self-driven cars (which Tesla's Autopilot is not) it looks like Waymo/Google had driven 4 million miles towards the end of last year, and Uber has driven 2 million as of the end of last year.
Conservatively extrapolating those numbers forward to estimate current driven miles for those three companies gives me a rough estimate of 5 million Waymo miles and 2.8 million Uber miles. 2010 had just under 3 trillion vehicle miles travelled and in that time had 5260 non-passenger (pedestrians, cyclist, etc) casualties (not fatalities). So that's 1.75 casualties every billion miles driven. So right now Uber and Google cumulatively are running 128 casualties every billion miles driven, more than 70x higher.
You are far more statistically likely to end up in a vehicle collision in the sort of miles the google and uber vehicles are driving than on the highway and long haul miles. I suspect that off the thousands of pedestrian fatalities attributed to vehicles, none of them happened on high speed interstates on which google cars are prohibited.
Control for similar driving scenarios and I am near certain you have a very different picture.
Conservatively extrapolating those numbers forward to estimate current driven miles for those three companies gives me a rough estimate of 5 million Waymo miles and 2.8 million Uber miles. 2010 had just under 3 trillion vehicle miles travelled and in that time had 5260 non-passenger (pedestrians, cyclist, etc) casualties (not fatalities). So that's 1.75 casualties every billion miles driven. So right now Uber and Google cumulatively are running 128 casualties every billion miles driven, more than 70x higher.
Props on the number-crunching, fella. I've got a couple of thoughts...
1: "casualties" is a tricksy metric - are the 128 casualties in question bruises or comas? Same question for regular cars. And that's a rhetorical question - I don't expect you to answer it, I'm just beardstroking about the statistic, and wondering whether the potential for zero inattention on the part of the self-driving car leads to an earlier response to a developing incident and therefore slower collision speeds and therefore less bad injuries for the self-driving car , vs the drunk guy who t-bones someone with his foot still on the gas pedal.
2: An interesting statistic would be the rate at which those 128 self-driven casualties occurred. Because I don't necessarily *expect* the safety record of self-driven cars to be better at this point (as you mentioned upthread), but I do expect the rate at which incidents occur to be nosediving as development continues.
You are far more statistically likely to end up in a vehicle collision in the sort of miles the google and uber vehicles are driving than on the highway and long haul miles. I suspect that off the thousands of pedestrian fatalities attributed to vehicles, none of them happened on high speed interstates on which google cars are prohibited.
Control for similar driving scenarios and I am near certain you have a very different picture.
Isn't that prohibition only for no-human-in-car driving? I don't see anything about freeway driving being prohibited because of State law. This article talks about the rarity of seeing self-driven cars on the freeway in AZ and certainly doesn't mention is being illegal.
It seems a bit disingenuous to include highway miles in an estimation of pedestrian fatalities per mile, seeing as highways are specifically designed to exclude pedestrians and self driving cars are not driving on highways (whether by choice or legality I'm not sure)...
Unfortunately I can't find any breakdown on the percentage of US driving that happens on or off highways.
Paleocon wrote:You are far more statistically likely to end up in a vehicle collision in the sort of miles the google and uber vehicles are driving than on the highway and long haul miles. I suspect that off the thousands of pedestrian fatalities attributed to vehicles, none of them happened on high speed interstates on which google cars are prohibited.
Control for similar driving scenarios and I am near certain you have a very different picture.
Isn't that prohibition only for no-human-in-car driving? I don't see anything about freeway driving being prohibited because of State law. This article talks about the rarity of seeing self-driven cars on the freeway in AZ and certainly doesn't mention is being illegal.
A non trivial percentage of the google cars are incapable of highway speeds.
So a few thoughts based on the event, articles, and comments here (without quoting lots of text):
- There is a reason why Google/Waymo decided to stop with the "safety driver" behind the wheel foolishness, and decided to shoot for level 4 automation as a baseline. There were lots of headlines about it a year or so ago. The conclusion, after recording their own "safety drivers" for a while, was that they are anything but.
- Uber needs to have their license revoked. Period. They are one of the slimiest money-grubbing corporations out there.
- It does not surprise me in the least that it was Uber that killed someone. (see previous point)
- Uber is most likely years behind Waymo on the self-driving cars. I'm guessing that they built their platform on the early Google work that they stole, but didn't actually innovate beyond it. They also do not have the data that Google has (in the form of street view and AI research).
- I wish someone would hold them actually accountable for what they did. And not apply the labels and judgments to the industry as a whole.
This is a great discussion and they absolutely need to be held accountable. I'm running on fumes in the Charlotte airport right now but I wanted to clarify that my comment about zero fatalities was a reference to the Vision Zero and Towards Zero Deaths movements and not the standard I'd set for automated vehicles. But I think the AVs are what's going to get us there.
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