Then what? You have 20 palettes of dog chew toys or asian pears....? Some of the goods have serial/tracking numbers.
The reason people don't rob 18 wheelers or trains is because it's not a good criminal enterprise
Also, not all valuable cargo are gps tracked smartphones and laptops, and not all situation mean having to stop and threaten a driver. For example: tree logs. They are often loaded onto trailers that are then left standing waiting to be picked up, or left standing part way to their destination because it’s driven by multiple drivers (usually happens when they have a long way to go.) It can take days before anyone even realizes the cargo is gone, because there’s a gap between drop off and pick up.
This kind of stuff is easy to steal, not especially hard to fence, and definitely not something your garden variety meth head does on a whim because of the logistics involved. This is enterprise level crime.
I’ve heard this is especially popular close to unmonitored border crossings (i.e. most EU borders) as it then makes the investigative work harder because jurisdiction.
Sure, gps tracking helps finding the stolen trailer – if it’s even being tracked – but by the time the police get there the goods are long gone and essentially untraceable. Nobody puts trackers in tree logs, and it can take days before anyone realizes it’s even gone because of the gap between drop off and pick up.
Just because it doesn’t make the news doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
Your comment made me laugh. Very true. Besides the fact that there is no black market for 20 palettes of dog chew and asian pears, the other problem is that unless you successfully steal a few highly valuable items, you would need one or multiple trucks to carry what you've stolen from that semi. You probably don't want to use the semi you just stopped, because it could have multiple GPS trackers onboard.
If you knew that you were stopping a truck full of laptops, then maybe it would be worth it somehow, but as you pointed out, laptops have serial numbers... And then what, you load a few hundred laptops into a van, but your van is now "burned". It's been photographed and you need to dump it somewhere, further complicating your operation.
Then, I don't know, it seems to me like people just love to come up with imaginary reasons why self-driving cars/trucks can't work. They seem to fail to realize that, well, we can come up with even better safety measures. You could make your automated truck very hard to open. It doesn't need to have a lock that can be opened by a human with a physical key. It can have an electronic lock inside the door, shielded behind a 5mm thick steel plate, that's completely invisible from the outside.
You could also install a remote-controlled drone on top of the truck (value < $1000). The truck has cameras all around that record continuously, and as soon as the truck gets stopped (or even slightly before), it phones home. A remote operator sees everything the cameras saw. The thieves waste precious time opening and unloading the truck, and just when they're about to take off, the remote controlled drone starts up and follows them around for as long as its batteries will allow (~10-20 minutes), informing the authorities as to their position.
If robberies of automated trucks became rampant, I'm pretty sure we could come up with many ways to mitigate the problem. I mean, heck, we could even install pepper sprayers around the truck. But the robbers can just wear full-face masks, you say. Sure they can, but those masks aren't foolproof, and it's an additional piece of logistics they need to deal with.
The way I like to put it (https://www.gwern.net/Complexity-vs-AI#technology-forecastin...) is: 'The critic asks “can I think of any reason this system might not work?” and stops as soon as they find one excuse, but the forecaster needs to ask, “can I think of any system like this which could ever work?” and keep going.'
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-deadly-camping-t...
And yet, not clever enough to be so successful as to stop automation, or economic development, or increasing global wealth, or...
You do have a point. The core reality that self-driving is equivalent to full artificial intelligence and passing the Turing test should be sufficient I'd think.
"The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts" https://www.outsideonline.com/2186526/nut-job
"$370,000 worth of iPhone X devices were stolen from a UPS truck" https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/3/16601970/iphone-x-devices...
"As Freight on Trucks Becomes More Valuable, Thieves Get Creative in Their Attempts to Steal It" https://www.ttnews.com/articles/freight-trucks-becomes-more-...
A heist where a human is involved has enhanced risk of injury or loss-of-life if the driver / guard decides to be a big hero or the criminal gets jumpy.
A world where vehicles are modestly easier to steal from (but audit the thefts) pushes risk from human lives towards insurance companies. Toss in a few honeypot shipments that are tailed by a handful of squad cars, and things are probably fine.
We don't have rampant highwayman theft because there are human drivers. We don't have it because most people don't want to do it.
But if your logic is solid, the next solution would be for these self-driving trucks to carry a human or two who'll sit there and not do anything. So, literal human shields.
Like the joke about how to solve the self-driving car trolley problem to your benefit: make sure you're in a car with a few newborn babies.
But the human shields are still solving for the wrong problem: placing the value of a load of (usually) consumer goods over the value of a human life.
If robberies start happening, insurance will adjust. Maybe a security driver will tail multiple vehicles headed to the same destination. Worrying about these cases seems helpful, but the industry will resolve these as the savings and improvements seem to make it a simple equation. This is all assuming the tech works ofcourse
I'm not sure taking away bribe-able workers with keys to the truck will make it easier to hijack.
Source: my father had to prevent this for film/cassette/DVD distribution, especially prerelease goods.
So I get it's a good thing?
Haven't you seen the documentary, The Fast and the Furious (2001)?
Besides that, it is (likely) easier to trick an unmanned truck into stopping as OP mentioned. A person would easily recognize what's happening and it would be easier for him to just drive around the obstacle. It's not as easy to create an AI that can "think" around things like that. Besides that, I hear truck drivers are often armed. I would guess that punishment for property crimes is less severe than armed robbery against a person, but I don't actually know.
In the grand scheme of things though, I think this is a negligible concern compared to all of the other problems self-driving trucks have to solve first.
It might initially be easier but I'm not sure if you would get very far with the stolen goods.
Everyone was laughing because "ha, that idiot stole a thousand GPS trackers, he's the most tracked criminal ever!" But of course every single one of those trackers was in sleep mode, and the only tracking bug was not part of the shipment. Sure, he was caught red-handed within half an hour while a police dispatcher watched a moving dot on a google map, but he was only being tracked by a single device, and we had no way to remote-active the other thousand.
Just an amusing related anecdote.
I'd much rather do all that than kill an armed truck driver.
Now that I actually am thinking about this more, I'd just get a sniper rifle and shoot the sensor units on the truck so it would be incapable of driving further (as opposed to throwing a mattress onto the road).
But again, I'm not in the business of robbing trucks. I'm just saying I'd rather rob a robot than a person. I doubt robberies are a big concern for driverless trucks.
Trucks are big. They're also not particularly flammable. Hard drives are small and easy to fireproof.
> only commit crimes in a wireless dead zone so no data is transmitted outside
This put you pretty far out of your way, and you're eventually going to have to bring a truckload of goods back from the middle of Idaho or wherever. Plus, trucks can carry pretty big antenna.
> (or better yet, use a police stingray so you can do it anywhere)
This doesn't really work that way, and also this is an additional major crime. Plus, people are looking for these.
> and put all cargo inside a faraday cage
That's a big faraday cage. Plus, what happens when you have to take the cargo out of your truck-sized theft apparatus and fence it?
> I'd just get a sniper rifle and shoot the sensor units on the truck so it would be incapable of driving further
I doubt there's anyone on earth who could make that shot once, much less 5+ times in a few seconds. A truck is moving 60+ MPH and the target is a few inches across.
More to the point, I think if we're trying to secure the use case of "truck the same as it has been for 30 years gets a black box put in it" we're doing it wrong. After not too long you just flat out won't be able to get in, even if you do stop the truck from moving. You won't be able to drive it anywhere - what need is there for a cab on an auto-truck?
Serial killers have it easy: they can bury the body. You can't bury goods you need to fence. At some point there will be a pattern.
Wouldn't be so certain. Jammers are illegal, but they aren't that hard to make.
If the truck is unmanned, it's burglary (or theft, since a truck isn't a building).
They typically carry different penalties, and the difference is even more stark if you happen to have anything that could be considered a weapon on you when you do it.
See https://globalnews.ca/news/6419141/cargo-crime-greater-toron... and https://www.todaystrucking.com/canadian-cargo-theft-surpasse...
20 palettes of asian pears, (or any food item), is surprisingly easy to unload.