this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 109 points 1 year ago (14 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Dirk_Darkly 51 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It's almost like more than one thing can be bad. Autonomous cars are just a shitty bandaid solution that doesn't fix the problem.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 26 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Exactly. We should instead get autonomous trains, and fix our cities to be train friendly.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Autonomous cars are the only viable solution in the near to mid term. Human drivers are awful. Building out mass-transit and transport infrastructure is a generations-long process and very politically unpopular. Autonomous vehicles will have issues that can only be ironed out in live testing. Which sucks but that's how all innovations go.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Autonomous cars are decades away from hitting any level of meaningful saturation. Might as well work on the more practical solutions....

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's more practical? Redesigning all of US's cities to work without cars? High-speed cross-country rail? Mass transit in every town?

That's more practical than passing regulations that allow the few companies even attempting automation to test it? This is just a "if it's not perfect don't do it" mentality that stops any attempts at progress.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I live in the land of bad drivers, and long haul truckers almost NEVER cause accidents. The cause is almost always a passenger vehicle, even if a truck is involved. Truckers get trained.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Eezyville 4 points 1 year ago (15 children)

They would be more likely to stop the accident from happening if they were there as opposed to not being there.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Anyone who uses FSD on their Tesla would happily tell you it’s not even close to being safe yet. Hell if anything I’m MORE attentive when using the autopilot because it can be so sketch sometimes.

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[–] p1mrx 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And the human driver would certainly be used as a scape goat should anything bad happen.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can't put a corporation in prison when they kill someone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We could.

Might be better to just put the executives of those corporations in prison instead tho. I keep hearing how they're worth their enormous salaries so they must be the ones responsible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But you can't. Corporations are formed specifically to protect the people behind them from legal accountability. The CEO/ board can really only be punished for crimes against the corporation (embezzling, not trying to make money for shareholders, etc.) Even when the corp. very obviously causes deaths, it will just declare bankruptcy and reform under another name. Johnson & Johnson was sued for killing people because there's asbestos in talcum powder, so they spun off the talc division into a different company, and then had that company declare bankruptcy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Wasn't entirely serious. However if "corporations are people" then maybe they should face the same penalties people do.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Connection error: could not connect to truck, please reload and try again"

Oops, just crashed

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It still drives on its own, connection is just to monitor or to help get out of situations it might get stuck in so traffic jams don't occur. If connection fails it would have been no different than having no driver in the cab which Is the plan already.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 8 points 1 year ago

Exactly. And student drivers are only active for like 20-30 min at a time. A truck would be active for hours at a time.

Instead of trying to build autonomous trucks, we should be building out rail and move more stuff and people that way.

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