According to the news self driving trucks are about to hit the road with no driver on board.
But according to this book that is not going to happen. The author says that the real purpose is to get rid of the skilled drivers and replace them with underpaid button pushers.
Will they really do that? What’s going to be the situation few years from now?
I see at least four big problems with having drivers that sit around to supervise the AI.
- It’s a mind-numbing boring task. How does one stay alert when most of the stimulus is gone? It’s like a real-life version of Desert Bus, the worst video game ever.
- Human skills will deteriorate with lack of practice. Drivers won’t have an intuitive sense for how the truck behaves, and when called upon to intervene, they will probably respond late or overreact. Even worse, the AI will call on the human to intervene only for the most complex and dangerous situations. That was a major contributing factor to the crash of Air France 447: the junior pilots were so used to pushing buttons, they had no stick-handling skills for when the automation shut off, and no intuition to help them diagnose why they were losing altitude. We would like to have Captain Sullys everywhere, but AI will lead to the opposite.
- The AI will shut off before an impending accident just to transfer the blame onto the human. The human is there to serve as the “moral crumple zone” to absolve the AI of liability. That sounds like a terrible thing for society.
- With a fleet of inexperienced drivers, if an event such as a snowstorm deactivates AI on a lot of trucks, the chaos would be worse than it is today.
- The AI will shut off before an impending accident just to transfer the blame onto the human.
I may be mistaken but I thought a law was passed (or maybe it was just a NHTSA regulation?) that stipulated any self driving system was at least partially to blame if it was in use within 30 seconds of an accident. I believe this was done after word got out that Tesla’s FSD was supposedly doing exactly this.
IMO:
Bare bones skeleton crews, similar to Railroad workers. They will try to strike but then gov’t will make it illegal to do so ASAP.
Staying hopeful though, keep learning and teaching, while being involved at your local community!
The future of our jobs is not a mystery. It is the result of a transformation that started a long time ago. It is obvious, clearly understandable, but well hidden behind of curtain of confusion. This book starts from the most asked question: “will AI take over our jobs?” In order to show how misleading it is. Misleading are also all the alarms raised over the power AI, but the real dangers could have even more deleterious consequences, leading to an era where the masses could be trapped in jobs that are alienating, mind numbing and underpaid. Exposing the arguments in a manner understandable by the layman, The Age of the Button Pushers goes trough the fields of computer science, economics and media communication. The whole picture will be reconstructed taking into account the lessons from the past with the changes brought by the industrial revolution, the present with the consequences of automation, the near future with the risk of an economy dominated by monopolistic giants. Part of the book will be dedicated to all the fabricated stories that dominate the current narrative on the media, highlighting the flaws and the inconsistencies, showing how altogether these stories paint a picture that makes absolutely no sense.
