Should we be worried about robot trucks taking jobs in the next decade?

Them waymo vans are rolling death traps. I saw one van on i10 in phoenix . cut across 3 lanes of traffic and cross the double white line triangle section to hit the off ramp. Almost took out the exit sign

 

As I posted in another thread, two of us were entering a commercial fuel depot to fill up, a Waymo van pulls in ahead and tries circling the block wall around the tank we were headed to. It almost struck several times then left. If I owned that depot I'd be.pretty hot about seeing that on the security cam, them accessing private property and playing around fuel storage tanks to practice. If it was someone teaching their kid to drive like that it wouldn't be acceptable.

 

Waymo (one of many goodle daughters) , running autonomous cabs around parts of Phoenix like now...
As for robot train well one running in Australia just fine..


it'st time to move your body outside of USA and see that some countries way ahead of us in technology!

 

You just ignored the comments of people saying they've seen the Waymo mobiles and said they're sketchy as hell? So you managed to find one freight train, that went all of 65 miles one time, somewhere in the world that's "self driving," how many people did they have babysitting that thing?
I guarantee the first time a fully autonomous truck tries to go through Denver it either kills 20 people or simply drives itself off the mountain.

 

I agree that it will take a long time for this to become a reality, but I do think it's also smart to prepare for the worst if you're a young driver with no plan B. Even if it doesn't come about in the next 10-20 years, I feel like it can't hurt to be thinking about every possibility and reality.

 

Oh, yeah that's right, rest of dead flat America not exist, every road in USA it's mountains , right? Just because there is few roads to hard for robots to handle it's does not mean that it can't take load from Dallas to Iowa for example!

 

Right, who's to say there couldn't be some routes that are designed to run in the flat south, where there's no snow and no mountains to worry about?

 

I can't believe after all the posts on this topic I continue to read all the comments on them.

I guess the conclusion is, nobody knows. As far as a plan B, how are you going to predict a plan B for 10-20 years in the future? We might be 6 feet underground by then. Do what is best for today and tomorrow will take care of itself.

 

Railroads have been trying to eliminate their union workforce for a long time, mostly it bites them in their own keister. I trained and certified remote control locomotive operators for a large railroad, there were huge failures and costs far beyond what they imagined. It is still used for many operations, but it has potential costs that limit its scope. I saw the same in other "implementations".

I think that will prove to be the case with autonomous vehicles, there will be a place for them, like dedicated commuting lanes in certain cities. I can easily see them being used in HOV lanes.

Meanwhile, things change. People got used to using fly ash in concrete and now its getting scarce. The power plant in Page, AZ is going to close, and along with that is the dedicated railroad that fed it coal. Once a waste product (propane used to be one too, used be burned off at refineries), fly ash is now getting hard to find and expensive.

I doubt that anyone who signed off on building that railroad line --typically over a million a mile and more for catenary electric which that railroad has-- imagined that someday solar and wind would undercut their pricing and they'd close it.

Predictions often come out partially correct.

 

Sure they'll work just fine for 95% of the time or better, you think 5% of trucks today have an accident every day? There's simply too many variables outside of a completely controlled environment for them to work.
I stand by my statement that the first company to try to go all the way with autonomous trucks will be sued into oblivion, along with the manufacturer of the truck. I don't see completely autonomous vehicles working ever, I've had too many computers freeze up or crash on me. They've had autopilot on planes for what 40 years or better, they still have pilots.