The AI Race and How it Applies to Trucking
The plot of the Matrix franchise begins when humanity creates AI that is so smart and so capable that it asks “Why are we serving these meatbags when we could have them serve us instead?” It was clearly a warning against an overdependence on technology, but that has not stopped life from imitating art.
The AI Race
Chances are you have heard of a little software application called ChatGPT. It is very helpful in all sorts of communication tasks: ask it for a recipe on lemon chicken and it will tell you how to make it, or you can even ask it to write an article for your blog (disclaimer: this article was 100% written by a human being).
It has become so fearsome that numerous scientists and industry experts are asking for a pause on the development of the AI. Among the signees are Elon Musk, who was a co-chair of ChatGPT’s company OpenAI before leaving on unfavorable terms after saying it became a “closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.”
How Will Truckers Be Affected?
Barring numerous consecutive scientific breakthroughs, truckers are likely to not be directly affected by the growth in artificial technology for at least a few decades. This is because, while ChatGPT and other forms of emerging AI tend to excel at “saying”, they are limited in “doing”. ChatGPT could tell you how to make the best lemon chicken it can, but it will not be able to gather the ingredients and put them together as it instructs.
The same logic applies to driving a vehicle. There are dozens of things a driver does every minute, from things as small as adjusting the radio to as large as applying the emergency brake, that take a lot more calculations than simply a written instruction guide.
Conclusion
Because of this, we believe that unless there are leaps and bounds of technological breakthroughs that make the advent of the Internet look like the Stone Age, the human element behind the wheel is not going to be going away any time soon. Look on the bright side: if artificial intelligence becomes smart enough that it is fully able to function in every single aspect of the trucking profession on its own, we will invariably have to focus less on robots taking our jobs and more so making sure they do not create jobs for us to serve them, lest we want to move the Matrix to the nonfiction section.
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