Teaching The Robots through Worker Surveillance - On Hirschbach and Aurora and their Guinea Pig Drivers

The Voice Of GO(r)D podcast is very excited to bring you a deep dive discussion about the implementation of autonomous trucks on our highways, and the use of human truckers as teaching ‘Guinea Pigs’ in this enterprise.

Paulette Nobles is a trucker who just recently left Hirschbach Transportation and she joins the show with Mitchel Riesgraf, a driver with Long Haul Trucking and the Truckxedo TikTok channel. I met both through CDL - Drivers Unlimited, a driver advocacy organization that is … hibernating?

Paulette and Mitchel share their experiences and research with us, and some of it is quite alarming, especially the use of driver facing cameras to scrape driver performance and behavior in an effort to collect data to teach the robots assumed to be our replacements. Paulette also has some insights to share regards Hirschbach, a carrier partner with Aurora Innovation in their project to make truckers extinct. We explain in the discussion why all of their rhetoric otherwise is pure and unadulterated BS and that you ought be skeptical of anything these people say.

It should be noted, and I forgot to mention in the intro I recorded, that today we have reports that the Ukrainian military used drone swarms numbering in the hundreds which took out numerous on the ground aircraft of the Russian Air Force, launched from over a thousand miles away. Automated warfare to automated truckers, and it is really people who end up in the crosshairs.

Lean into NeoLuddism!

Links -

Aurora’s letter to the Congressional Transportation and Infrastructure Committee attempting to sell them on the safety of their systems -

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:44226229-4a9f-4199-b953-8a12801ddecc

A cringe video made by Hirschbach in which their own employees celebrate their replacement -

https://vimeo.com/1052465404

Aurora’s announcement of driver back in (for now)

https://aurora.tech/newsroom/updating-our-driverless-operations

A market research firm pours some water on Aurora -

https://www.bleeckerstreetresearch.com/research/aurora-innovation-aur

https://www.stealingfire.tech/
https://www.jamesyear.com/

James has been on my show about 8 times now, but here is the first of our roundtable discussions looking into Autonomous Trucks -

And finally, AI and automated tech are also in the news in the world of politics, as a part of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ has a sneaky insert which lets AI and related tech development off of numerous hooks for a decade, and Vice President Vance gave a recent interview where he spoke out of both sides of his mouth where it concerns workers affected by all of this.

Read about all of that here -

https://autonomoustruckers.substack.com/p/the-propaganda-pushing-autonomous

For more links, files, and videos mentioned in the introduction and throughout the show, head on over to my Substack post about this podcast - there is always much more info and often photos or videos that Spotify and others won't let me link to.

https://autonomoustruckers.substack.com/p/teaching-the-robots-through-worker

While you are there, smash that subscribe button and never miss a podcast or any of my written work, as it will show up instantly in your inbox.

As mentioned on the show - I’m writing a book about the fate of the North American trucker in 2025, and you can read about that here -

https://autonomoustruckers.substack.com/p/book-project-announcement-and-a-majo

If you've got a couple of bucks to spare to help me see the book through - https://www.givesendgo.com/EndOfTheRoad

Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are wel