Exactly. I’d like to know that the driver of the truck has some skin in the game as well, instead of a computer that couldn’t care less if it causes a 50-car pileup and destroys itself in the process.
The same thing goes for airplanes. We could fully automate air travel right now; pilots only monitor the systems during most of the flight, and the advent of NextGen RNAV and RNP navigation procedures makes it possible for the flight management system in the cockpit to fly the aircraft more precisely than the pilots can. Air traffic control technology is heading in the same direction. However, very few people would be willing to turn their safety over to automated systems that suffer no consequences for making mistakes. At least the human crews, even though they themselves are sometimes the cause of accidents, have self preservation as a goal.
The best combination is to always have a human in charge, but let automation assist him where it makes sense.
>> The best combination is to always have a human in charge, but let automation assist him where it makes sense.
Didn’t we already have that with self-driving cars that the human was still supposed to be paying attention in?
To be honest, after seeing the videos of the cars and trucks crashing into each other in I81 yesterday or the day before, I am totally uninterested in automated tractor trailers.
Yes, I know they plan to only put them where the weather is foreseeable, but I recall at incident when a plane was forced to land on the Hudson River... 155 people were very grateful for the human “drivers”!
Automating some things certainly; electric starters instead of hand cranks, electronic ignition instead of manual spark advance, automatic chokes instead of manual, intermittent wipers, etc.
On the other hand, the great idea of an automatic transmission didn't make for better drivers but instead allowed worse drivers to get behind the wheel.
The more automobile functions are automated, the more ID-10-Ts get behind the wheel and behave like semi-passengers instead of drivers.