<story><title>Truckers Working Alongside Coders Trying to Make Driverless Trucks</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-22/these-truckers-work-alongside-the-coders-trying-to-eliminate-their-jobs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ben_jones</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t forget what happens when people find out they can abuse driverless vehicles. Cutting them off, getting closer to them, slowing down in front of them, etc. God knows what commuters will do to them in the Boston area.</text></item><item><author>thatwebdude</author><text>&amp;gt; Most people in Silicon Valley subscribe to either the first or second school. Much of the rest of the country, including many truckers, favor the third. &amp;quot;I can tell the difference between a dead porcupine and a dead raccoon, and I know I can hit a raccoon, but if I hit a porcupine, I’m going to lose all the tires on the truck on that side,&amp;quot; says Tom George, a veteran driver who now trains other Teamsters for the union’s Washington-Idaho AGC Training Trust. &amp;quot;It will take a long time and a lot of software to program that competence into a computer.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Driverless trucks are a very interesting concept. Once they&amp;#x27;re on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. But getting through traffic congestions, busy multi-turn-lane intersections, and making sure you don&amp;#x27;t sideswipe someone who&amp;#x27;s hugging the line seems rather complex given the different trailer dimensions and blind spots, (un)marked lanes and everything else it takes to &lt;i&gt;get&lt;/i&gt; to the highway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paganel</author><text>&amp;gt; Cutting them off, getting closer to them, slowing down in front of them, etc.&lt;p&gt;My brother is a lorry driver who frequently crosses the Turkish - Bulgarian border with his truck (as in once every 2 weeks). Once or twice he caught refugees (or whatever you want to call them) trying to get inside his trailer by cutting through the thick textile material that covers it, while he was awaiting at the border. You generally do not whant people mixing with your industrial equipment while the truck drives at 90-100 km&amp;#x2F;h. In other cases it happened to him that other people had stolen diesel gas from his tank while he was asleep during the mandatory break (this happened somewhere in Western Europe, I forget where).&lt;p&gt;And leaving aside all this, assuming that bad people won&amp;#x27;t suddenly stop stealing and generally doing bad stuff to unattended expensive material (like trucks and the things that the trucks carry), being a truck driver you&amp;#x27;re also doing lots, and lots of bureaucracy work. I once shared the cabin with him as a passenger during one of his routes, while we passed two European borders. The amount of paperwork he had to fill in was mind-blogging, I half-jokingly told him that his job looks more like a clerk-job than being an actual driver. Now, lots of clerk jobs have already been automated, I know that, but it mostly happened in the private sector, inside private companies doing business with other private companies. But once your clerk-like job involves having to do business with several State-like entities things become a lot more complicated, with legislation changing once every 6 months, being very diverse from State to State etc.&lt;p&gt;What I&amp;#x27;m trying to say is that theoretically the self-driving problem looks achievable for trucks, but once you get into the messy details things become a lot more complicated.</text></comment>
<story><title>Truckers Working Alongside Coders Trying to Make Driverless Trucks</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-22/these-truckers-work-alongside-the-coders-trying-to-eliminate-their-jobs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ben_jones</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t forget what happens when people find out they can abuse driverless vehicles. Cutting them off, getting closer to them, slowing down in front of them, etc. God knows what commuters will do to them in the Boston area.</text></item><item><author>thatwebdude</author><text>&amp;gt; Most people in Silicon Valley subscribe to either the first or second school. Much of the rest of the country, including many truckers, favor the third. &amp;quot;I can tell the difference between a dead porcupine and a dead raccoon, and I know I can hit a raccoon, but if I hit a porcupine, I’m going to lose all the tires on the truck on that side,&amp;quot; says Tom George, a veteran driver who now trains other Teamsters for the union’s Washington-Idaho AGC Training Trust. &amp;quot;It will take a long time and a lot of software to program that competence into a computer.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Driverless trucks are a very interesting concept. Once they&amp;#x27;re on the freeway, I would think most automation would work (relatively) well. But getting through traffic congestions, busy multi-turn-lane intersections, and making sure you don&amp;#x27;t sideswipe someone who&amp;#x27;s hugging the line seems rather complex given the different trailer dimensions and blind spots, (un)marked lanes and everything else it takes to &lt;i&gt;get&lt;/i&gt; to the highway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluGill</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t forget that the driverless vehicle will have tracking. Expect to get a ticket complete with video if you do things like that. If you are costing the trucking company money they might be willing to send people to court against you as well (taking you to court might not be worth it, but the teach people a lesson aspect might make it worth it anyway)</text></comment>