2y ago

California bill to have human drivers ride in autonomous trucks is vetoed by governor

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill to require human drivers on board self-driving trucks, a measure that union leaders and truck drivers said would save hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state.

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2y ago

apnews.com /article/california-self-driving-trucks-newsom-veto-b585941fa05fc2c6b3a1965bcec3ee73

124 comments

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?
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  Self-driving trucks will never be 100% autonomous. They will need a reliable data connection to a control center so humans can figure out how to deal with exceptional situations.
  There will probably be occasional stupid traffic jams until the technology is perfected. As long as they avoid murderous rampages, we should be okay.
- And the human driver would certainly be used as a scape goat should anything bad happen.
  
  Can't put a corporation in prison when they kill someone.
- 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.
- 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.
- This is a tech sub on lemmy.ml, prepare to be flooded by luddites afraid of all things tech. Eventually you learn subs only exist for the stuff people hates here, not the stuff people love.
  
  The luddites have been proven right, but your strawman of the luddites is absolutely wrong.
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.
  
  There's going to be a lot of conservative men clamoring for UBI, or more likely, cutting off their own nose to spite their face.
- The whalebone hoop-skirt industry would like to vociferously disagree!
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.
- Let's hope they start making it easier for those mechanics then, lmao.
  I used to want to get into the industry, but that stopped when I heard about all of the ridiculous things you have to move around to preform basic maintenance. That was bad before, but now? Woof.
  My buddy had to do a recall replacement, that took many hours. The manufacturer however, decided that it should only take less than half of that time, so they only paid him for the time that they wanted to pay for. Not for the actual number of hours that it physically took to disassemble and reassemble the thing, but instead what was convenient to them. Nope.
  
  Fun fact: this is illegal in many areas
  Another fun fact: most shops just do it anyway
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.
  
  Where are truck drivers staying awake for 24 hours? In the US, there are daily and weekly limitations and rest requirements, including a mandatory 10hr consecutive rest period every day.
  https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/how-many-hours-a-day-can-truck-drivers-drive
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
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  a debate
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
"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
  ..
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.
  
  Yeah, basically it's a way to avoid using trains
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
- Yes companies will definitely choose to pay more to keep people safe. 🙄
Companies will put the staff back in the trucks when it becomes apparent how easy it is to stop them and steal everything from the back.
- Nobody is stopping trucks on the interstate. You could easily have one human minder escort 12-15 trucks outbound truck and a minder escort inbound trucks and spend most of the time on the interstate. Instead of a dozen drivers x 3 days you could use 1-4 hours of human labor total.
  
  Imagine a system were one driver could transport hundreds of trucks worth of cargo at once on preset routes. What an invention that would be...
- There's nothing really stopping people from doing that to human driven trucks either. Besides, if it's 'capacity to make the choice of running someone over' you're after, just have a dude at a control center watching ten different trucks with remote control overrides. Something arguably they would do regardless for many reasons.
  
  I'm more thinking it's a lesser crime to rob a driverless truck. No chance of being shot by a yee-haw Trump trucker while doing so. No need to be armed.
  Just slow to a stop in front, open the back, take what you want. It's practically a victimless crime.
- Companies who make alarms clocks should have to pay for all the knocker-upper jobs lost! Automation has been affecting the workforce for centuries, and it isn't going to stop any time soon.
  
  However the effects are becoming increasingly dramatic as more and more of the population finds themselves in an economy with no jobs for them. Eventually UBI will become necessary once we hit the tipping point.
Funny to see the argument being made here that this idea is crazy because people "don't have the attention span" to monitor the robot driving the car. Like yes, that's exactly the point, people suck at driving and maintaining constant attention, and they are worse than they were 10-20 years ago thanks to cell phones and screens. One in every hundred people you know will literally die due to this problem. For most people that means several people you knew in high school are dead because of people's inability to drive perfectly all the time. That's just deaths, many more will get injured or maimed. It doesn't have to be this way. The only way out of it aside from somehow designing better humans is self-driving cars. They are already orders of magnitude safer than humans and have been so for years. Do they have bugs? Yes. But if we replaced every car on the road with a self-driving car right now we'd see the death and maiming rate plummet.
For context: we shut down the global economy for a virus with an estimated 1% mortality rate. It was necessary to avoid hospital overwhelm and give us time to develop countermeasures. That's the same mortality rate as driving. Obviously drivers are not overwhelming hospitals because the deaths are spread out over a longer time period. But nonetheless I think it's an interesting comparison.
- meta] this is a well-written comment that makes and argues several points relevant to the post and yet it got more downvotes than upvotes, which imho is some bullshit /meta]
Fortunately it's not something they actually have to worry about for decades.
- I think this is a pretty important point in practice. These trucks are hauling between depots and primarily on the highway, which is easy to map and fairly predictable without many obstacles like pedestrians and traffic lights. I would feel differently about an autonomous truck driving in the city.

124 comments