Technology
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Companies will put the staff back in the trucks when it becomes apparent how easy it is to stop them and steal everything from the back.
Nobody is stopping trucks on the interstate. You could easily have one human minder escort 12-15 trucks outbound truck and a minder escort inbound trucks and spend most of the time on the interstate. Instead of a dozen drivers x 3 days you could use 1-4 hours of human labor total.
Imagine a system were one driver could transport hundreds of trucks worth of cargo at once on preset routes. What an invention that would be...
Would be easier if set on its own dedicated track.
Something like... a slightly slower Hyperloop! At those speeds, the "pods" wouldn't need to run in a pressurized tube. I'll name it "OKLoop".
You could even have the whole thing start and stop with one set of controls.
Get this idea to Elon immediately. He'll have XRails running all over the country by 2050, from San Diego, all the way to, ooh, Los Angeles I suppose. Can't imagine it would get much further than that before he gets bored of the idea.
In the context of this discussion, switching to trains isn't really going to address the idea of people raiding the cargo haulers, in whatever shape they're in.
You're right, but it's because stealing cargo isn't an issue. Trains are just a much safer and efficient method of transportation that also requires very few people.
Yes we know trains exist trucks are used in addition for obvious reasons that won't stop being true when we dont need drivers
There's nothing really stopping people from doing that to human driven trucks either. Besides, if it's 'capacity to make the choice of running someone over' you're after, just have a dude at a control center watching ten different trucks with remote control overrides. Something arguably they would do regardless for many reasons.
I'm more thinking it's a lesser crime to rob a driverless truck. No chance of being shot by a yee-haw Trump trucker while doing so. No need to be armed.
Just slow to a stop in front, open the back, take what you want. It's practically a victimless crime.
I don't think this is likely to happen regardless. Occasionally trucks are raided, though it's rare in the us. More often in some places where there's a lot more instability. But I don't think the reason it's rare in general is 'because there's a human at the wheel', especially not the concern that they may be armed.