Kodiak AI autonomous trucks have driven over 3 million miles on real roads. Daniel Goff says the company achieved the highest safety score from Nauto.

Being available now, will HAD play a role as a steppingstone to adoption of full L4 systems? And, if HAD has strong uptake, will it motivate the truck OEMs to accelerate their own rollout of such systems? In the near term, it will be fascinating to see what transpires with Traton and their U.S. subsidiary Navistar, now that their technology partnership with TuSimple is kaput. I'm quite certain they aren't sitting on their hands; they seek to have a strong play in the AV truck market as a strategic necessity. For highway operations, current efforts aim to automate the "ramp to ramp" long haul, augmented by transferring the load to human driven trucks for the last mile.

It's no secret that the trucking industry is responsible for bringing most of our everyday products to our doorstep in America. From clothes to food to televisions and smartphones, over-the-road trucking is likely part of the delivery process along the way. In fact, the trucking industry brings in over $700 billion per year while transporting 72.5% of American freight. As technology and regulations change around trucking, the companies and drivers can also utilize tech in new and exciting ways. Specifically, knowing what weather and potential delays to look out for while they're on the road.

Political and tech pundits love the idea that artificial intelligence will put hundreds of thousands of truck drivers out of a job, and it's even been a centerpiece of presidential campaigns, but recent developments on the cutting edge of tech look set to deliver some exquisite poetic justice on that matter. You see, artificial intelligence is more likely to take my job, writing articles online, than yours driving trucks. That's thanks to Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), which is "an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text." Recently, GPT-3's makers have allowed people to play around with the tech, giving it writing prompts and getting back in return some pretty serviceable, though often-enough hilarious, text. After some time with GPT-3, Joe Weisenthal, host of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast and a popular markets commentators, jokingly concluded that the tech news elites speculating about the demise of manned trucking are probably in for a rude awakening.

When the robots rise up, they won't take your life. They'll take your job, particularly those in fields primed for automation, like manufacturing, trucking, and customer service. Technologists, economists, and policymakers believe this future is all but inevitable, and say it's time to begin thinking seriously about how to ensure artificial intelligence advances humanity--and improves the economy, without leaving the middle class behind. Two economists who recently left Washington say the answer lies in ensuring the government provides enough of a safety net to help middle class Americans navigate the coming transition. Jason Furman and Gene Sperling--former chief economic advisors to President Obama--prefer to think of it as a bridge, not a net, that will help people reach the future.

As a tech analyst, one of the particularly exciting topics I get to cover is the march towards fully autonomous vehicles. I've long projected that these next generation vehicles, ranging from semi-to-fully autonomous, will be one of the most impactful developments we see in our lifetimes. As with many nascent technologies, it's looking like some of the earliest applications will be in the commercial sector. Trucking, specifically, stands to benefit from new levels of autonomy, promising gains in efficiency, safety, comfort and sustainability. For several years now, I've been closely watching Plus (formerly known as Plus.ai), a pioneer in self-driving truck technology.

Kodiak Robotics is one of the last private autonomous vehicles companies focused on trucking that is still standing. Nearly all the rest have been wooed by the public marketplace and the capital it can provide. But co-founder and CEO Don Burnette says the three-year-old company's strategy of staying focused and small(er) is paying off. It will be able to deploy a commercial-scale operation for about $500 million in funding, he says in the interview below. To put those go-to-market costs in perspective, that's 10% of what Waymo has raised in external fundraising and less than 25% of newly publicly traded company TuSimple's total fundraise.

Einride, a Swedish technology company that develops and provides freight transport solutions based on electric and autonomous vehicles, released today the results of a survey conducted with OnePoll on the state of the trucking industry. The survey examines the sentiments of American respondents around the intersection of artificial intelligence and industry-wide employment. According to Deloitte Insights, over 37 percent of organizations have reported deploying AI solutions – up 270 percent from four years ago. Analysts forecast global AI spending will more than double over the next three years, topping $79 billion by 2022. In conjunction with this growth, is the impact AI is having on employees.

Autonomous driving startup Aurora announced on Tuesday that it has scored a partnership with Toyota to build self-driving taxis based on the Toyota Sienna minivan. Aurora says it's aiming to have a fleet of Sienna prototypes ready for testing on public roads by the end of the year. Denso, a major Japanese auto parts manufacturer, will also contribute to the project. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast.

Progress on self-driving technology has been slower than many people expected just a few years ago. Google's Waymo was aiming to launch a fully driverless taxi service by the end of 2018 but missed its deadline. GM's Cruise abandoned plans to launch a commercial service in 2019. Tesla has repeatedly fallen short of Elon Musk's optimistic timelines for delivering fully self-driving technology. They have plenty of cash and can keep working on the problem as long as they need to. But it is a big challenge for some of their competitors: independent self-driving startups that rely on venture capital to stay afloat.