It might begin very soon

pnichols wrote:


Well ... there is one big and very important difference between a human truck driver and a technology truck driver: A human truck driver has an ultimately selfish reason to not want to get into, or cause, an accident involving what he's riding in. It's called self preservation.

If that were the only motivation that humans have, that might be comforting. But that same driver is also under pressure to get the job done, even if he's tired or feeling ill, maybe he just drank half a bottle of cough medicine to help him finish the run. And when he's approaching his mandatory break, he may feel compelled to drive a little faster so he can get to the depot while he's still legally allowed to drive... or maybe he just wants to get home to his family faster. Driving 10% over the speed limit gets him home an hour earlier on a 10 hour drive.

He's also prone to distraction, perhaps paying more attention to his MP3 player than to the road, or getting into an argument with his wife on the phone. Or maybe he's one of those drivers that thinks he can watch a movie while driving.

And even humans are subject to malfunction, drivers have had accidents during medical incidents. It's much more expensive to have a redundant driver than to build redundancy into control systems.


A self-driving car doesn't need to have a sense of self-preservation, it just needs to know how to stay on the road and avoid obstacles.