Will self driving trucks hit the roads with nobody on board or will they keep a human supervisor? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by FortuneMisteller@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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According to the news self driving trucks are about to hit the road with no driver on board.

But according to this book that is not going to happen. The author says that the real purpose is to get rid of the skilled drivers and replace them with underpaid button pushers.

Will they really do that? What's going to be the situation few years from now?

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[-] MondayToFriday@lemmy.ca 32 points 6 months ago

I see at least four big problems with having drivers that sit around to supervise the AI.

It's a mind-numbing boring task. How does one stay alert when most of the stimulus is gone? It's like a real-life version of Desert Bus, the worst video game ever.
Human skills will deteriorate with lack of practice. Drivers won't have an intuitive sense for how the truck behaves, and when called upon to intervene, they will probably respond late or overreact. Even worse, the AI will call on the human to intervene only for the most complex and dangerous situations. That was a major contributing factor to the crash of Air France 447: the junior pilots were so used to pushing buttons, they had no stick-handling skills for when the automation shut off, and no intuition to help them diagnose why they were losing altitude. We would like to have Captain Sullys everywhere, but AI will lead to the opposite.
The AI will shut off before an impending accident just to transfer the blame onto the human. The human is there to serve as the "moral crumple zone" to absolve the AI of liability. That sounds like a terrible thing for society.
With a fleet of inexperienced drivers, if an event such as a snowstorm deactivates AI on a lot of trucks, the chaos would be worse than it is today.

[-] FortuneMisteller@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

You assume that it will be either the self driving software in charge or the button pusher taking the wheel. You did not consider that the button pusher might have a foot on the brake, but instead of taking the wheel he might have to enter some commands.

Like the case where there is a road block ahead and the button pusher has to evaluate whether it is safe to move forward or not, but he wouldn't take the wheel he would tell to the driving software where to go. In similar cases he would have to decide whether it is safe to pass aside an obstacle or stop there. Even in case of a burglar trying to get on board he would have to call the police and then give some commands to the driving software.

The idea at the base of the question is that in the future the AI or whatever you want to call it might be always in charge for the specialized functions, like calculating the right trajectory and turning the wheel, while the human will be in charge to check the surrounding environment and evaluate the situation. So the Ai is never supposed to be deactivated, in that case the truck would stop until the maintenance team arrives.

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this post was submitted on 02 May 2024

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