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August 24, 2020 10:52 am

Are We Ready for Driverless Trucks?

Two million truckers move 70% of America's goods. But hundreds of thousands of their jobs could be disrupted away, reports Jon Wertheim on the CBS news show 60 Minutes, in "a high-stakes, high-speed race pitting the usual suspects — Google and Tesla and other global tech firms — against small start-ups smelling opportunity." One of those startups is TuSimple, and their company's chief product officer points out that an AI driving system never gets distracted or falls asleep at the wheel:Chuck Price has unshakable confidence in the reliability of the technology; as do some of the biggest names in shipping: UPS, Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service ship freight with TuSimple trucks. All in, each unit costs more than a quarter million dollars. Not a great expense, considering it's designed to eliminate the annual salary of a driver; currently around $45,000. Another savings: the driverless truck can get coast-to-coast in two days, not four, stopping only to refuel — though a human still has to do that... Jon Wertheim: How far are we from being able to pick up the specific cars that are passing us? "Oh, that's Joe from New Jersey with six points on his license. Chuck Price: We can read license plates. So if there was an accessible database for something like that, we could... Test Driver Maureen Fitzgerald: This truck is scanning mirrors, looking 1,000 meters out. It's processing all the things that my brain could never do and it can react 15 times faster than I could. Most of her two million fellow truckers are less enthusiastic. Automated trucking threatens to jack-knife an entire $800 billion industry. Trucking is among the most common jobs for American's without a college education.... Sam Loesche represents 600,000 truckers for the teamsters. He's concerned that federal, state and local governments have only limited access to the driverless technology. Sam Loesche: A lot of this information, understandably, is proprietary. Tech companies wanna keep, you know, their algorithms and their safety data — secret until they can kinda get it right. The problem is that, in the meantime, they're testing this technology on public roads. They're testing it next to you as you drive down the road...

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