Self Driving Trucks

Mine went off just today for a " stationary object" I was like it's called a bridge.

Our Internationals hit the brakes for no reason which scares the crap out of everyone whos driven one. They mistake road name signs for speed limits. So it will see a sign for Indiana 35, beep and disable the cruise because it thinks you are doing 65 in a 35.

Earlier in the conversation I said this:

I use AI daily. I build AI-driven apps. I can tell you from quite a bit of experience that AI will give you graduate-level science in one paragraph, but then screw up 3rd-grade level facts in the next. It is WILDLY unpredictable, even in many of the simplest tasks. You must not take your eyes off it, even for a moment.

Just now, I was trying to determine how many days it is from sept 11, 2001 to may 15, 2025.

Grok (x.com) said it's 5,013 days. The correct answer is 8,647 days.

I asked Grok how he derived it and he gave me a long explanation of the math, which was obviously wrong. I told him the answer was wrong and asked him why that happened. He said he miscalculated and the correct answer is 5,002 days. He gave an explanation longer than a typical blog article as to why the new number is correct.

To be fair, Gemini (Google) and ChatGPT (OpenAI) both got it correct.

But Elon Musk (owner of Grok) touts his robots, self-driving taxis, and Grok as world-changing technologies ready for prime time. None of them are anywhere near the claims he makes.

I love Elon and I think he's critically important to our future, but like all fabulously wealthy business owners, he's a marketing dynamo who will say anything to build a following and promote his products. Take nothing he says at face value if he stands to profit from it somehow.

Do not trust AI. Use it, but never blindly trust it. Also, be aware of who creates the one you're using because every AI has its own built-in prejudices. I trust Elon more than I do Google or OpenAI, but right now his AI is trailing the others.

(long explanation of the math, which was obviously wrong. )

That's scary because all date functions rely on epoch.

While we sit patting ourselves on the back, we're overlooking a glaring issue or two.

The mindset that has led to the engineering narrative is caustic. As we age, Gen X is being replaced by millennials, undisputed brainwashed indoctrinated subjects by the woke academia. They're not even aware of their programing.

A couple of years ago, I was fueling the truck and a group of young students were at the pump with a driver, working on an autonomous truck. I asked the young gal who was the leader of their tech group what the benefit was. She told me with complete conviction as a cult member would, how great it will be that people will no longer have to drive cross country anymore and that no one likes it. How older people who are disadvantaged and obviously exploited will now be able to go to college and actually contribute to society.

I asked her if the thought had occurred that many of us choose the lifestyle of over the road , and prefer the freedom of it, that we reject societies norms and love what we do. We're certainly not exploited and of all career paths we produce, for without us, there wouldn't be society as we know it.

Predictably, this was met with a blank slack jawed fish mouth and a retort that I'm a racist maga person.

The issue is that when religious zealots, cult members and such are on a cause, it's extremely difficult to rid them of it, no matter how illogical and insane it is.

Another significant issue is that our federal government has demonstrated over and over that it will roll out harmful and fatal ideas and policies in exchange for power and money. They will facilitate and roll out autonomous trucks long before they are ready at the behest of the corporate Goliath shippers, manufacturers and carriers. All of which have a bested interest in reducing labor costs and reducing skill based labor.

I'm not sure individually what we can do, aside from never underestimate your enemy. It's folly to sit around smugly thinking this won't be a problem. Keep in mind axioms of technology. If you can buy it, it's already obsolete. And development happens exponentially.