From the Article

>Self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics said that it has begun a pilot program with IKEA in Texas.
>
>A semitruck equipped with Kodiak’s autonomous driving system is making daily delivery runs from an IKEA warehouse near Houston to a store close to Dallas, roughly 300 miles away.
>
>The trucks have human safety drivers on board, but they’re being driven by Kodiak’s autonomous-driving system.

Since we're about to enter a new economic downturn are we going to see more of these self driving systems and robots come into the labor market?

So if I'm putting 2 and 2 together correctly, this means I can have their cafeteria meatballs robotically delivered to me? If so, excellent. If not, destroy all the robots and don't waste my time.

As long as they will still let me set up a delivery for a month out, and then cancel it the night before without telling me until they don't show up on the day that I requested off work specifically for, I'm all for it. Bonus points if they can program the robot to "misplace" one essential box, or break a key part.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:

From the Article

>Self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics said that it has begun a pilot program with IKEA in Texas.
>
>A semitruck equipped with Kodiak’s autonomous driving system is making daily delivery runs from an IKEA warehouse near Houston to a store close to Dallas, roughly 300 miles away.
>
>The trucks have human safety drivers on board, but they’re being driven by Kodiak’s autonomous-driving system.

Since we're about to enter a new economic downturn are we going to see more of these self driving systems and robots come into the labor market?

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y774o4/ikea_teams_with_selfdriving_truck_startup_kodiak/issuejg/

Curious but skeptical here. Would love to see transparency, their accident record and the complexity of their test area.

One one hand yes robotics make sense for offloading the strain of long hauls from humans. One other, a loaded 53+ foot rig that makes a calculation mistake? Yes, there are people on board. People makes mistakes just like robots do. The machine is only as smart as we make it. Read up on Tesla's automated driving record. The debate is are these systems mature are really safe enough?

My understanding is that the early runs are done on looong stretches of boring highway. The human safety driver likely takes over leaving and entering cities.

I've read about the potential for a human in a room somwhere being able to remotly take-over the entering and exiting cities part.

Careful running electric vehicles in Texas. The power grid is known to fail.

this has nothing to do with economic down turns. if they still require a driver, then they still require a driver. lol. more sensationalist journalism as usual.

Remote driving trucks would be hard AF, you have a huge ass heavy vehicle that you need to drive in places where you have a 5 inches clearance on either side. Not to mention that when you drive a truck you need to feel it.

Self driving trucks won't be a thing, for a long long time.

well, if they require a driver, there isn't really much difference from current truck drivers. I got my CDL recently, and modern trucks have cruise control. So, you get on the highway and you put on cruise control, and then the biggest struggle is not falling asleep. which, that's what training is for, after the training period, you get used to the long highway drive and you don't fall asleep.

But with modern cruise control, trucks will slow down to match the speed of traffic. the driver has to engage when there is a major speed change, like if it goes from 65mph down to 40, because of a traffic backup or something. But honestly for most of the day you're just sitting there listening to music, holding the steering wheel straight.

So with robotic trucks, I guess they just upped cruise control to the next level, so that it will switch gears and stuff on its own too. I think it is just sensationalism. They are trying to freak people out, or wow them, as usual. Sensationalism sells articles better than grounded stoicism.

Good thing there’s no electric vehicles involved?

This is an automated system slapped to a standard semi…

I've done quite a bit of traveling in my day, and Texas easily has the worst roads in the country. It honestly feels like a third world country in some places

>Since we're about to enter a new economic downturn are we going to see more of these self driving systems and robots come into the labor market?

Probably not. The article did not even make the bold calm that the pilot program will feature a fully driverless truck with no safety driver.

Driving is so hard that this will take many decades to roll out. We are not even close to solving the problem of driving a car.

[removed]

[deleted]