…experts were asked for their probabilities that we would get AI that was “able to accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average there was a 50% chance of this happening by 2062 – and a 10% chance of it happening by 2026.
They were also asked by what year “for any occupation, machines could be built to carry out the task better and more cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average that there was a 50% chance of this happening by 2139, and a 20% chance of it happening by 2037.
…What do these AI researchers think is the hardest and most quintessentially human of the tasks listed, the one robots will have the most trouble doing because of its Olympian intellectual requirements? Who will be the last ones into the Borg?
Artificial Intelligence experts, 80 years. Of course
Will truck drivers be ‘dinosaur’d’?
Truck driver don’t just drive trucks. They secure loads, act as agents for the trucking company. They verify that what they are picking up is what is on the manifest. They are the early warning system for vehicle maintenance. They deal with the government and others at weighing stations. When sleeping in the cab, they act as security for the load. If the vehicle breaks down, they set up road flares and contact authorities.
These people have knowledge that is not easily transferable. They know the quirks of the routes, have relationships with customers, they learn how best to navigate through certain areas, they understand how to optimize by splitting loads or arranging for return loads at their destination, etc. They also learn which customers pay promptly, which ones provide their loads in a way that’s easy to get on the truck, which ones generally have their paperwork in order, etc. Loading docks are not all equal. Some are ad-hoc and require serious judgment to maneuver large trucks around them.
Those are huge, generational obstacles to architect all the redundancies to make a system actually ‘work’, unfettered by humans.
The alternative futurist argues that AI fully autonomous self driving trucks will be far better than humans.
Better at confirming that the load is secure, verifying the manifest, monitoring vehicle maintenance, and interfacing with the weigh station, splitting loads, optimizing returns and that the whole need for that sleep-time security disappears when the vehicle is self-driving and doesn’t have to sleep. Loading docks that are ad hoc will find themselves either standardizing or paying extra for failing to do so, like every other aspect of an industrial, computerized world.Perhaps.
Bureaucracy is also a very human problem; a driver leaves the terminal and gets to their first delivery only to find that customer has decided, for whatever reason, that they can’t accept delivery that day, “Please come back tomorrow” So for the rest of that day the driver must unload the first shipment, set it aside, unload the next shipment at the next stop, and reload the first shipment, close the trailer and move on to the next stop. The waste of time and effort is phenomenal and never appears on a report.Contract terms will change to accommodate the new technology and customers will give up the flexibility to refuse shipments and many other small compromises.
This create opportunities for a premium service, Human Truck Drivers
07Feb