It’s not your imagination; we just posted about artificial intelligence developments as recently as this past April. However, AI applications are moving ahead at an astounding rate, especially when it comes to vehicles. Trucking is likely to be the first industry to use self-driving vehicles on a massive scale, which will put 3.5 million truckers out of a job.
Just this past weekend, I had a conversation with my New Orleans taxi driver about this very topic. He is a former trucker, and we were discussing what a difficult job trucking is and how the pay scale is very low. He switched to being a cab driver. We talked about how it’s a good thing he left that industry, because of the changes AI will bring. However, I quietly wondered how much longer humans will be driving taxis. Perhaps humans will hang on for a while, since AIs can’t load luggage or have interesting conversations about past experiences…yet.
- This self-driving truck has no room for a human driver — literally [The Verge] “What better use case for driverless technology than long-haul trucking where most of the driving is confined to the highway? The Swedish startup Einride certainly buys into this vision. It recently unveiled a prototype of a self-driving truck that completely lacks a steering wheel, pedals, a windshield, and, well, the whole cab really.”
- The human army using phones to teach AI to drive [WIRED] “Forrest isn’t an engineer or programmer. She writes textbooks for a living. But when the 54-year-old from suburban St. Louis needs a break or has a free moment, she logs on to Mighty AI, and whiles away her time identifying pedestrians and trash cans and other things you don’t want driverless cars running into.”
- Watch an AI teach itself to drive in ‘GTA V’ on Twitch [Engadget] “While automakers are still negotiating with local and state governments to let autonomous cars test drive on open streets, one programmer has found a more accessible proving ground to teach AI how to be a motorist: Grand Theft Auto V. It’s not the first time folks have used the game to train their self-driving vehicles — but you can watch this one learn in real-time on Twitch.”
- Val.ai lets self-driving cars bid for parking spots [TechCrunch] “When a self-driving car needs to park itself, it can submit real-time bids for local spots occupied by others. If a currently parked car knows it needs to pick someone up soon, and it will earn more from selling the parking spot now than the gas it might burn driving around until its pick-up time, it can accept a bid. The winning bidder vehicle gets directions to the spot, and the one parked there vacates when it arrives.”
From the Ohio Web Library:
- From parking lot to paradise (Scientific American, 317(1), 54-59.)
- Computer on wheels (Popular Science. Jan/Feb2017, Vol. 289 Issue 1, p17-16 )
- Autonomous and Connected Technologies to Decrease Transportation Costs to Under 1$ per Mile (PR Newswire US June 22, 2017)
