The difficulty of developing autonomous trucks that can compete with manually driven vehicles raises questions about the labor market impacts. Starsky, a self-driving trucking company, was considering using teleoperation as a solution to a local driving problem.
The Starsky company is working on a teleoperation system to remotely control trucks for improved aerodynamics while maintaining engine performance in the trucking industry.
The challenges in developing autonomous vehicles include latency, the ability to work in real time and NDAs that prevent researchers from publicly discussing their findings. Despite these issues, some companies like Waymo and Anki are making progress in the field.
The tech industry often prioritizes marketing over transparency and education, making it difficult to fully understand the complex engineering and human problems associated with technologies such as human-robot interaction. This focus on hype and profit can limit productive discussions about the pros and cons of these technologies and their effects on society.
Researchers are debating how difficult it is to estimate labor impacts of autonomous truck driving as companies try to build a reliable product while reducing costs. The question of competitiveness with manually driven vehicles arises, and teleoperation may be a solution for handling vehicle failures.