Machines can’t replace us at everything and we certainly shouldn’t try for such a thing. Some jobs need to be done by humans.
Such is the case with truck drivers. Autonomous vehicle technology needs a lot of work. Safety is the main concern in avoiding accidents and not causing any. When a car rearends another then the consequences can be severe. But imagine it’s not a computer driven Tesla that hit you; it was an 18-wheel freight truck.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story about how an autonomous driven truck had a bad accident in a test run: “The semi-tractor truck abruptly veered left because a person in the cab hadn’t properly rebooted the autonomous driving system before engaging it, causing it to execute an outdated command. The left-turn command was 2 1/2 minutes old—an eternity in autonomous driving.” The truck had human passengers to make sure everything went ok and it still went bad.
The article explains that “The truck also shouldn’t respond to commands that are even a couple hundredths of a second old… And the system should never permit an autonomously-driven truck to turn so sharply while traveling at 65 miles an hour.”
That’s a huge fail. Those fully loaded trucks on the highway are running 80,000 pounds at 65 mph, which is enough force to squash cars with ease. We’re not ready for this.
The worst stretch of highway in America is that little bit of I-95 from Richmond to Arlington. It’s full of congestion, long delays, and terrible drivers. The constant stop-and-go and the constant zigzagging from others makes for a dangerous trip for any driver. A computer is built on incredible technology that makes sense, so it’s tough for it to compute idiocy. Some fool with a Maryland license plate makes the most irrational lane change possible during a brief break in that bumper-to-bumper parking lot, and a computer driven freight truck at 80,000 pounds will be able to slam on the breaks and avoid cracking that guy like a crab? I don’t know.
Problems on I-95 are real and frequent. And when things are really bad there, they attract national news. Senator Tim Kaine knows. He was stuck in a prolonged jam up from a snowstorm that kept him on I-95 for over 20 hours. Extreme as that is, will an autonomous driven truck be able to handle those kinds of conditions, or will it be that much harder to clear the road when all those trucks out there are driven by a computer?
Computer driven trucks are not ready. They need a lot more testing. And when they are deemed safe, I’ll still say no. Some things are too risky and filled with too many variables for a computer to handle. The idea of turning over every job to a machine is a terrible idea, one that would render humanity less important. Let’s draw the line at computer driven big rig trucks; we’ll keep those jobs for humans.
