But here’s the question: Do these ‘last mile’ drivers sit in the cab? Or operate the rigs from thousands of miles away, like drone pilots, with displays showing 360 degrees around the rig and access to all of its sensors?

Last mile driving may not look anything like truck driving.

Or, alternatively, do they wait at truck stops on the edge of town and meet the trucks as they come in (much like harbor pilots meet container ships at port entrances)?

If you were able to dispense with the cab and any human interfaces/amenities, that would cut out a big chunk of weight and drag. It would look radically different but just think of all of the components on a truck that are only there for the driver. No need for a cab, AC system, heater, pedals, steering wheel and linkages, airbags, seats, pretty much all of the glass and windows, doors, etc. The added sensors, telemetry, and computational requirements necessary for an autonomous vehicle suddenly don't look so pricy compared to the savings of removing a huge chunk of the vehicle, nonstop operation or maintenance, no salary for the driver, lower insurance costs, lower fuel costs, and other assorted savings. Really it's looking like more and more of an inevitability in my opinion. Once the control problem is solved, I doubt it'll be more economical to continue putting a trucker behind the wheel.

Of course if you need to provide all of that to allow for someone to drive it manually around town a lot of those benefits are gone. Who knows, there will probably be some transitional period where all automated trucks are still equipped for manual control but I doubt it'll stay that way for long.

Even if we remove all the facilities for a driver, i likely you would still need a human guard.

Although thinking about it, the guard could travel in a separate vehicle, and could be responsible for overseeing an entire convoy of trucks at one time.

I don't know what became of it, but at one point there was a DARPA initiative to do just that for military convoys. The reasoning was that automated trucks would allow soldiers to treat the convoy as a "dumb herd" that would follow and be overseen by a squad of heavily armed and armored "sheepdogs". This would improve protection for soldiers, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of battlefield logistics.

The automated part of the journey could be done by a driverless / cab-less / HID-less prime mover which drops the trailer(s) / cargo containers off at an interchanged where they are picked up by human driven vehicles for the last mile.

I don’t think so. Once you’ve already automates a truck, you have a lot more information to convey than what’s out the windshield, and you are liberated from needing to turn a steering wheel or push foot pedals.

There’s no reason to build a cab into the truck that is only used for the last mile. Telepresence will do just fine.

If that's the case, then why aren't cargo ships already automated to this extent? It seems like automating a container vessel would be even easier - there are far fewer things to run into on the water (even in a busy port) than there are on a busy highway.

I would bet because the wage paid is insignificant compared to maintenance of the vessel and that the maritime laws would be further complicating such a scenario.

Not so much maintenance as capital costs, I think. Giant cargo vessels can't be replaced as often as trucks either. But drone ships are certainly coming, it's a very trendy topic in the trade publications. I'd give it 10 years.

Pirates? You need a crew on cargo ships regardless of whether they are automated or not.

Crews generally aren't armed to begin with and with no humans to capture and ransom or threaten to change the ships course the amount of booty they could make off with is really limited. Most pirate attacks target hostages anyways. For engineering you could have small crews fly out to any one ship that's experienced engine trouble.

Definitely can't remotely operate a 40 ton truck. Wireless network latency is a bit high even under ideal conditions, and latency spikes could easily cause disastrous accidents.

You can continue to rely on the automated systems for avoiding collisions. The intelligence is more with dealing with the decisions that the AI can't make.

If you can pilot flying killing machines half the world away, you can definitely control a slow moving truck remotely.

There's not much to run into in the air...

I don’t think you’re going to be “driving” such trucks. I think you’ll be making decisions. For example, when you reach a yard and need to back it into a loading bay, you may draw a path on a map of the yard, taking into account obstacles that are there at that moment. The truck will handle the turning, backing up, and so on.

Likewise, you may be monitoring city traffic and choosing alternate routes. But you won’t be driving with one foot on the brake pedal and your hands on the steering wheel.

You could make massive gains just by not having to stop and rest drivers. I suspect the drivers will be on-board but able to relax or sleep until getting close to the destination. That lets all trucks drive 24hr straight through to their destinations.

>Or operate the rigs from thousands of miles away, like drone pilots, with displays showing 360 degrees around the rig and access to all of its sensors?

Any driverless technology that requires a constant wireless internet connection is a non-starter.

As I said elsewhere, I do not think a constant wireless connection will be an issue, because I don’t think you’ll be operating the truck remotely the way a hobbyist operates an RC car. The truck will brake when a car, pedestrian, or bicycle cuts it off, and do it better than you could.

You are there to route it around traffic jams, talk to the foreman on site, and choose the loading bay.

Even if you had a reliable high-bandwidth/low-latency connection, the truck will be better than you are at handling things that requires instant response. You are there to make decisions.

That's true, it requires a higher level of skill from the AI though.

The video stream bandwidth and requirement for near-zero latency will make remote control very challenging, if not impossible. I'd say the last-mile driver will be in the truck.