Depends what you're talking about. The current technology will not allow a box truck for instance to operate in urban environments. It's why they're focusing on long distance hauls. Now if you're talking about a minivan going from home to home that's another story. But a large box truck or tractor pulling a 50 ft trailer in confined areas where you have to deal with jay walkers, pets, detours, unplanned road closures etc etc - we're not there yet.
we're not there yet even with cars.
here's the issue:
you have two types of automation we can go with for a best result. best result being some super duper small percentage of accidents that cost money, accidents that injure, and accidents that kill. then for trucking throw in better gas mileage and no need to sleep so rarely any reason to stop other than refueling. so its a less expensive trip in that regard.
so the equation looks like this: AI cars/trucks best case - peds, bikers, drivers currently still on the roads= slightly better case scenario than all human drivers and zero Ai drivers.
or keep working at it so it will ook like this : AI cars/trucks best case scenario - peds,bikers, drivers currently still on the roads = very good case scenario even though you still have regular people on the roads.
PEOPLE are the problem. not the ai, not the software, nor the hardware.
example: if right now at midnight there was a law that said, if you jay walked, if you road your bike outside of the bike lane, and if you get caught driving a car. you will get life in prison. exaggerating of course. lol. So now we have streets with zero drivers and all pedestrians obeying the laws, as well as all bike riders obeying the laws. you could roll out Ai driven cars and trucks tomorrow morning and they would have a great to excellent result vs what we have today.
So you have companies trying to build tech around our bad decisions and unlawful driving, walking, and bike riding. when we need to just get out of our cars and obey the rules on the road for biking and walking.
