>railroads, which having been eating the lunch of trucking for awhile now

Right. Which means that a lot of trucking isn't especially long haul already which in turn means that taking people out of only the highway portion isn't necessarily the big win that a lot of people assume it could be. If you still need truckers around the endpoints, it doesn't necessarily make sense to take them out of the middle (given other advantages to having a human operator). Of course, good assistive systems can still be used to improve safety.

That's why I worry about this area of technology, especially in the context of the history of AI in the past. The hype factor is extreme, but there's very little domain expertise at play.

I have a relative who is a trucking regulation consultant. It's not some trivial business... there are a lot of moving parts.