The Voice Of GO(r)D podcast is very excited to bring you a deep dive discussion about the implementation of autonomous trucks on our highways, and the use of human truckers as teaching ‘Guinea Pigs’ in this enterprise.
Paulette Nobles is a trucker who just recently left Hirschbach Transportation and she joins the show with Mitchel Riesgraf, a driver with Long Haul Trucking and the Truckxedo TikTok channel. I met both through CDL - Drivers Unlimited, a driver advocacy organization that is … hibernating?
Paulette and Mitchel share their experiences and research with us, and some of it is quite alarming, especially the use of driver facing cameras and other surveillance equipment used to scrape driver performance and behavior data in an effort to teach the robots assumed to be our replacements. Paulette also has some insights to share regards Hirschbach, a carrier partner with Aurora Innovation in their project to make truckers extinct. We explain in the discussion why all of their rhetoric otherwise is pure and unadulterated BS and that you ought be skeptical of anything these people say.
It should be noted, and I forgot to mention in the intro I recorded, that today we have reports that the Ukrainian military used drone swarms numbering in the hundreds which took out numerous on the ground aircraft of the Russian Air Force, launched from over a thousand miles away. Automated warfare to automated truckers, and it is really people who end up in the crosshairs.
Lean into NeoLuddism!
Links -
Aurora’s letter to the Congressional Transportation and Infrastructure Committee attempting to sell them on the safety of their systems -
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:44226229-4a9f-4199-b953-8a12801ddecc
A cringe video made by Hirschbach in which their own employees celebrate their replacement -
https://vimeo.com/1052465404
Bonehead Truckers commentary on said video over on YouTube -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glpe18BN1C4
Aurora Driverless Safety Report
You have heard previous guests discuss the risk of Autonomous Truck systems being hacked, especially by hostile foreign actors such as the CCP. Here is a report outlining the investment going into security systems attempting to protect from such attacks.
https://www.telematicswire.net/autonomous-vehicle-security-market-to-reach-usd-4-8-billion-by-2032/
***** update
A reader sent this to me not a few minutes after I published this podcast - a big piece in the Wall Street Journal which shows TuSimple, a competitor to Aurora and other autonomous systems developers, has been selling US developed trade secrets to China. This is a big deal for security, especially after what we just saw in the Ukraine.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/china-self-driving-trucks-tusimple-c20255e1?st=B3FbkH&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Here is the video of Aurora presenting a driver out autonomously operated rig -
And Aurora’s announcement of driver back in (for now)
https://aurora.tech/newsroom/updating-our-driverless-operations
A market research firm pours some water on Aurora -
https://www.bleeckerstreetresearch.com/research/aurora-innovation-aur
Frequent guest of the show and collaborator James Year has released a ‘short doc’ about the launch of Aurora’s trucks for More Perfect Union -
James will be back on the show very soon, in the meantime check out his work -
https://www.stealingfire.tech/
https://www.jamesyear.com/
James has been on my show about 8 times now, but here is the first of our roundtable discussions looking into Autonomous Trucks -
The Digital Highway - Questions about Autonomous Vehicles
Voice Of GO(r)D brings you the first in a series of Roundtable discussions on Autonomous Truck and Car technology, from the perspective of those whom will be most impacted by it - truckers, taxi drivers, and other on the road professionals.
On ‘Platooning’
https://spectrum.ieee.org/truck-platooning-ohio-indiana
And finally, AI and automated tech are also in the news in the world of politics, as a part of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ has a sneaky insert which lets AI and related tech development off of numerous hooks for a decade, and Vice President Vance gave a recent interview where he spoke out of both sides of his mouth where it concerns workers affected by all of this.
Read about all of that here -
The Propaganda Pushing Autonomous Trucks Is Steadily Increasing - As is The Resistance
Since my last update dispatch on Autonomous Truck system developer Aurora Innovation, who are behind the very first driverless 18 wheeler to operate ‘driver out’ on a US interstate, they have announced resuming operations with a safety driver behind the wheel, which ought to raise some questions about the nature of liability and how it relates to these …
Thanks for listening, and if you are a trucker, you really, really, really, need to pass this around to your comrades of the road. We are past the point of “it’s not happening in my lifetime” - it is happening, right now, and soon enough you will feel the economic effects of driver displacement, as if you aren’t already feeling it from the bastards trying to replace us with insourced labor before the robots are fully approved.
As mentioned on the show - I’m writing a book about the fate of the North American trucker in 2025, and you can read about that here -
Book Project Announcement and a Major Ask of my Readers.
Greetings and salutations to readers of Autonomous Truck(er)s and listeners of the Voice Of GO(r)D podcast, and if I haven’t said it already, Happy New Year.
If you’ve got a couple of bucks to spare to help me see it through -
https://www.givesendgo.com/EndOfTheRoad
Or you could become a paid subscriber to this Substack -
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and Strongly Encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com
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