California bill to have human drivers ride in autonomous trucks is vetoed by governor
California bill to have human drivers ride in autonomous trucks is vetoed by governor
California's Democratic governor has vetoed a bill that would have required human drivers to be on board self-driving trucks.
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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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?
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. We should instead get autonomous trains, and fix our cities to be train friendly.
Ban all cars. bus, tram and trains need to be so great that you can actually stand driving in them. But they’re only important for winter or when it rains mostly anyway. Otherwise you take the bike, ebike or scooter. We would need to find a solution for carrying lots of groceries obviously. Remember when people hat little trollies behind them when grocery shopping?
(Obviously in summer a disabled person would still ride them. Not trying to be ableist here)
Ban all cars
Hard disagree here. Mass transit should win because it's more convenient, not because it's the only option.
I'm in favor of car-free zones, rerouting cars around city centers, tolls in busy areas, and in general making car transit less convenient, but it should still be feasible to get where you're going in a car. The problem is that we've made our cities car-centric so mass transit is forced to be inconvenient, and that should be reversed.
But I will never accept banning cars, because that's how you get the worst of both worlds.
Okay. I agree that i was a bit far with my phrasing. I should have said „in city centers“. I live in a city and I don’t see a reason to use or even own a car 9/10 times (if the transit is good, which it isnt in my city).
But I‘d like to address something else here. If we had no cars, we would take a lot longer to do things and become much less productive and less stressed, which is becoming a big problem rn.
So, maybe a conpromise between both our ideas would be good. I‘d like to achive throwing a wrench in our capitalist steam machine turning our planet to a pile of shit.
I should have said „in city centers“
I like how Amsterdam does it, check out this video (whole video and channel are worth watching) that discusses how they force cars to go around the city center instead of through it to avoid a lot of conflict with pedestrians.
However, that kind of thinking shouldn't be exclusive to "city centers," it should be the default way we plan cities. Make mass transit super effective in the core of the city or town, connect everyone to those hubs, and provide a way to get around and into (but not through) city and town centers via cars so people are encouraged (but not forced) to use mass transit.
Ideally, anyone living in a reasonably densely populated area should be able to get everything they need w/o a car. That should be the goal, and a lot of the solution is to use mixed zoning around transit hubs (i.e. businesses on the ground level, apartments above) and feed into that with roads that connect lower-density areas. The vast majority of your businesses should be close to transit hubs, and the vast majority of your busy roads should be away from city centers.
we would take a lot longer to do things and become much less productive and less stressed
I don't think that's true, and I think you're looking at things with rose-colored glasses.
200 years ago, most people were subsistence farmers, and that's around the time that started to end. See this Wikipedia article:
Even by 1750, low prevalence of hunger had helped provide American Colonists with an estimated life expectancy of 51 years...
...
Social and economic conditions changed substantially in the early 19th century, especially with the market reforms of the 1830s. While overall prosperity increased, productive land became harder to come by, and was often only available for those who could afford substantial rates... by 1850, life expectancy in the US had dropped to 43 years, about the same as then prevailed in Western Europe.
This got worse as the US industrialized in the late 1800s, and people adapted:
By the turn of the century, improved economic conditions were helping to reduce hunger for all sections of society, even the poorest. The early 20th century saw a substantial rise in agricultural productivity; while this led to rural unemployment even in the otherwise "roaring" 1920s, it helped lower food prices throughout the United States. During World War I and its aftermath, the U.S. was able to send over 20 million pounds of food to relieve hunger in Europe. The United States has since been a world leader for relieving hunger internationally
These days, starvation isn't really a thing in the US, and it has been replaced with "food insecurity," which is more about consistency and quality of food, not whether someone can survive on the amount of food they're getting. So the stress related to food has improved due to productivity and has been replaced with an economic/distribution issue instead of a production issue.
I could go on about different types of stressors, like risk of death, dangers from natural disasters, etc, but I think I've made my point. Increased productivity has made a ton of things better, and we're now at a life expectancy of >80 years old, compared to leading the world at 51 years old some 250 years ago.
If we look at life 100 years ago, life was hard, and certainly full of stress.
Here are some other interesting links to look at:
- daily life of a farmer 100 years ago
- ~200 years ago, ~90% of people were farmers
- 100 years ago, the idea of "stress" wasn't universally understood or agreed upon
These are obviously extreme examples, but my point is that innovations in productivity generally improve peoples' lifestyles. Even the poorest Americans can travel to the other side of the country and back if they wanted, and most people own smartphones. If we look at today, the stressors are very different from even 50 years ago.
So, would you like to go back to how things used to work? I'm guessing no, but I obviously can't speak for you.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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I‘m a little surprised by the sheer size of your comment. Thank you for your effort.
I agree that there are many good ideas and nuances to use in this situation. I really like how much thought you‘ve put into it.
Where I don’t agree is the 100 yrs ago theme. You‘re taking what I said and interpret it in a way I didn’t intend. I meant we as people should become less productive and neither we as a population nor living like 100 yrs ago.
Example: being less productive as in not being on the phone with a customer while driving to work alone in your own car so as to be there early, able to pick something up your boss demands and making sales for the company but instead waiting for the bus, not being on the phone and not slaving for your boss while on unpaid time.
Does this example make more sense?
And being less productive does not mean we have no modern medicine, cutting edge computers but less luxury. The vast majority of our surplus productivity goes into the 1% and luxury items. Yachts, Jewelry, etc. part of this surplus happens because both people in a 2 person household work and still get along the same or less than 1 earner households did back in the 70s.
Yeah, I can be a bit wordy. If it's too much, you can skip everything up to the last quotation where I talk about income in the 70s vs now.
My point is, the thing that got us from subsistence farming 200 years ago to almost nobody being farmers today is productivity. With a tractor and combine harvester, a single farmer can do the work of dozens, if not more. That farmer's life is more complicated because equipment failing has a lot more impact, but they also get to benefit from the labor of others.
Stress is very different between then and now. In the past, stressing about how to feed yourself was just part of life. Today, stress is largely due to artificial deadlines with generally lower stakes (e.g. you won't starve, you'll just lose possessions or a position of influence).
I believe stress is an internal motivator to be more productive. If we reduce the requirement to be productive, we'll just stress about other things, like how much more productive we could be. If you want proof of that, visit an elder care facility or something where literally all needs and many wants are taken care of, and you'll find the residents still experiencing stress (e.g. if the nurse is later than usual, or they don't have appealing items on the menu).
So stress is a relative thing, not some kind of absolute we can "fix" (generally) by changing workload or something. So I don't think "we" collectively need to slow down (that just reduces progress we make), but there's certainly a level of relative stress that's too much for an individual, so individuals may need to slow down.
The vast majority of our surplus productivity goes into the 1% and luxury items
And who makes those yachts, jewelry, etc? Those are specialized jobs, so that luxury spending creates high quality jobs that would otherwise not exist.
100 years ago cars were a thing only the rich could afford. If you compare then to now:
- cars cost less (can get a get reliable car for $25-30k)
- people earn way more (minimum wage is ~2x more than the lower bound the article mentions)
- most people own cars
If you don't believe me, here's an inflation calculator that largely matches the article's numbers.
both people in a 2 person household work and still get along the same or less than 1 earner households did back in the 70s
That's just not true. Here's a graph of real personal income since the mid 70s (real means after taking inflation into account). In 1974, the average worker made ~$27k in 2021 dollars, and in 2021, the average person made $40.6k. That means the average person makes ~50% more than they did 47 years ago.
People work more not because they have to (things are cheaper and we earn more), but because they want to spend more. There are just more things to spend money on today than in the 70s, and finding those things is easier than ever with the Internet. We compare ourselves to influencers, not to what we actually need.
The problem imo isn't with productivity, but with lifestyle expectations. For example, these days everyone needs a smart phone, yet my sister's family has never had one. They're not poor (my BIL is a professor, and they have a newly 4k+ sq ft home), and they have teenagers at home, they just never felt the need to own one (though their 16yo is getting pretty adamant about needing one). They also have one car (BIL bikes several miles to work, and they live on a steep hill). The money they save goes to other lifestyle choices, like spending the entire summer living abroad with the whole family (they have a large family, so airfare alone is super expensive). That's obviously an extreme example, but I think it illustrates my point well that many of our "needs" are just justifications given the expectations of others.
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.
Autonomous cars are decades away from hitting any level of meaningful saturation. Might as well work on the more practical solutions....
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.
You're just an angry douche putting words in my mouth. Never said they can't roll out automated cars. Just said they might as well work on the more practical long term solutions.
Permanently Deleted
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.
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.
They would be more likely to stop the accident from happening if they were there as opposed to not being there.
"More likely" is not likely. Autonomous vehicles shouldn't be allowed on the road at all.
At the current level of autonomous vehicle abilities, I agree with you, in a broad sense. Vehicles will need to still be able to differentiate between shapes, even during bad weather. Weather like blizzards, sudden downpours, heavy fog, dust storms, and the like. You still have to be able to see to safely pull off of the road.
Until we can guarantee with 100% certainty that they can truly drive without aid, I completely agree that these vehicles would not be safe on their own. Weather is very well known for being unpredictable at times. Life in general is also known for being unpredictable at times.
What happens if the sensors are unknowingly damaged? What happens if someone is wearing a costume that makes them look like a giant cereal box instead of human-shaped? What happens if there's a software glitch at a bad time? What protections are there to guarantee that it doesn't happen? Are those protections temporary? How often should they be reviewed?
It should be OK to acknowledge that we aren't quite there yet. Yes, it seems cool and all, but it's silly to risk lives over impatience. If it will happen, it will happen. Forcing it to happen sooner than it should could very well lead to it being banned altogether, especially if enough people die or get injured as a result.
IMO, anyone who causes serious crashes from using these things in "fully autonomous" mode should be charged as if the vehicle wasn't autonomous. As if the accident was caused by sleeping behind the wheel or texting while driving. The company should be charged similarly in that scenario, as their programming and marketing would also play a part in the crash.
Hey, if they're truly safe, none of these charges would actually happen. If there isn't an "oops" death in the first place, there won't be an "oops" death to investigate.
We could just not allow autonomous vehicles.
Ever? What kinda conservative bullshit lol
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.
Hell if anything I’m MORE attentive when using the autopilot because it can be so sketch sometimes.
I doubt you're more attentive than someone who is literally driving lol
I drive 150-200 miles/day. I’m definitely zoned out for the most of it lol
And zoning out would be much worse with computer assistance!
Actually cars should be abolished for this very reason - humans can never be truly safe drivers, they always get bored and zone out.
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.
And the human driver would certainly be used as a scape goat should anything bad happen.
Can't put a corporation in prison when they kill someone.
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.
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.
Wasn't entirely serious. However if "corporations are people" then maybe they should face the same penalties people do.
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.
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
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.
"Connection error: could not connect to truck, please reload and try again"
Oops, just crashed
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.
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.
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.
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.
Security guards watch empty parking lots/tvs all night long.
Yeah, but they don't need to react within seconds when there is a problem. They can zone out and nothing bad will happen.
A driver-operator needs to be hyper vigilant at all times and react within seconds to any problems because at any moment the software could fuck up and kill someone.
Which is why this veto is retarded
My point is that autonomous trucks shouldn't be on the road, with or without drivers.
This is a tech sub on lemmy.ml, prepare to be flooded by luddites afraid of all things tech. Eventually you learn subs only exist for the stuff people hates here, not the stuff people love.
The luddites have been proven right, but your strawman of the luddites is absolutely wrong.
Based
Username checks out and proves my point, lmao what are you even doing here?
I like technology. I think it can make our lives better, but some people, notably capitalists, often use technology to make our lives worse. When that happens, we should smash their machines.
Y’know it’s funny because one of the proposed benefits of lemmy was the decentralized nature of the forums meant you could pick from the ones you liked, yet I’ve subbed to 5 tech instances here and they are all exactly the same. Nothing but F.U.D. This will be the last remaining one I unsubscribe from, and even end up blocking because of the nonsense.
So, yeah, apparently that thing being a benefit was a lie when in reality it will just populate with the same people saying the same things.
Ah well…enjoy your echo chambers I guess!
It turns out that normal and common opinions remain so regardless of what servers you use. Shocking!
Or more likely, the people who hate something the most are more likely to post about it than people who love it or are ambivalent. No worries though, I blocked the forum so we won’t have to trouble each other anymore.
You also can want safety improvements before something becomes widespread without also "hating" it overall, you know.
The choice doesn't have to be between "absolutely everything now", and "never". There's a lot of room in between the two, and I see no reason to rush something, when unnecessarily rushing it could cost lives.
Have you considered that the children are right?