60 Minutes - 3/15/2020: On The Frontline, Children of Flint, King of the Road

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

There's new evidence of a long-term health impact on the children of Flint Michigan. Sharyn Alfonsi reports. Driverless trucks being tested right now on public roads. Jon Wertheim climbs aboard for a look at the very near future of transportation and technology that could eliminate as many as 300,000 jobs. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Westchester County, New York has one of the highest concentrations of coronavirus infections in the nation. That has left teams of courageous nurses visiting more than a thousand homes to track the virus and quarantine its victims. We're asking you not to go to work, not to go to school, not to go food shopping, really just to stay home. We have been following public health nurses in Westchester County. I wonder what you think of their effort. God bless them. God bless them. God bless them.

Dr. Mona is a bit of a superhero herself here because she was the first to link the water to high levels of lead in the children of Flint. The word lead, when you're a physician or a pediatrician, signals what in your brain? There is no safe level of lead. It impacts cognition, how children think, actually drops IQ levels. It impacts behavior, leading to things like developmental delays. And it has these life-altering consequences. You've heard a lot about the future of driverless cars. But what about this? That's right.

18 wheels on the road and nobody in the driver's seat. Don't be surprised to see this on American highways soon. How close are we to the day when these trucks have no driver? We'll be operating on the public highways with real cargo, with a real fleet in 2021. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Coronavirus is the greatest disruption to American life since 9-11. Efforts to contain the spread are triggering a cascade of cancellations, travel bans, and the threat of a recession. As of this afternoon, there were about 3,000 known cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. But responsible conservative estimates say many millions of Americans may become infected. The idea behind the restrictions is to let that happen over the course of a year, not in a matter of weeks. For a preview of what might be coming to your community,

we went to a hotspot, Westchester County, New York. The spread there began two weeks ago, when an infected 50-year-old man went to a religious service, a funeral, and a party. Since then, he's been in a hospital too ill to speak. That has propelled teams of courageous nurses to visit hundreds of homes on the front line. Westchester County is home to a million residents about half an hour's drive from America's largest city. Siobhan Jones, Caitlin Doyle Goldsmith, and Kathy Gomez are nurses in the county department of health. They're suiting up to enter the home of a couple who had contact with that first patient. A few minutes before they put on their equipment, they had introduced themselves on the doorstep.

I want people to see who I am first. It's very important. I want them to see my face before I put on all the equipment. So we go, knock on the door, introduce ourselves. We're from Westchester County Health Department. We're nurses. We're here to do the testing. When this first started, we would ask them also, do you want us to go around the back so that your neighbors don't see this and they don't get alarmed.

But then as it started becoming more public, they were more like, it's okay. How do people react to your visits? Grateful. That's all I can say. They're all kind, grateful. Not fearful? Not fearful. Not fearful at all of us. The nurses collect one swab from the nose and another from the throat. A few days ago, the swabs were being carried by state troopers three hours to the only lab in New York certified to do the tests. Since then, another 28 labs have been approved.

What are some of the questions, Siobhan, that you get from these families that you're visiting? The number one question is, when will I have my test results? When will I be off of quarantine? You know, a lot of them was like, is there a letter that you can give to me for my employer? The answers are up to three days for the results, 14 days in quarantine, and a patient can show his employer the official quarantine order left by the nurses. There must be people who say, oh, I can't be quarantined for 14 days. I have a business trip to Detroit next week.

Right. And you tell them... You must. You must. Yes. We're asking you to stay home for 14 days, also pending the results of your labs. We're asking you not to go to work, not to go to school, not to go food shopping, really just to stay home.

If you need to get a breath of fresh air, you're allowed to go in your backyard, but don't go within six feet of anyone. This past week, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, closed Broadway theaters and all venues with more than 500 seats. He ordered bars and restaurants to operate at half capacity. We have to get down the rate of infection. And the only two ways to do that is test, test, test, find the positive, isolate the positive, stop the contagion by reducing the density. Just reduce the ability of the virus to spread.

From the early data, it appears that the vast majority of patients have mild symptoms. So why is it important to take these severe measures? If we did nothing, yes, 80% would contract the virus. They would self-resolve. Some people would require hospitalization. And we could overwhelm the hospital system. And those vulnerable people who needed the intensive care wouldn't get it.

But part of the cost is an economic crisis. Markets rose Friday, but not before the Dow Industrial suffered its most rapid fall from a record high to a bear market since November 1931, the Great Depression. The airplanes are flying empty. I was at JFK Airport yesterday. It was almost abandoned, it looked to me. You have cut the capacity of every restaurant in New York City in half. These are real costs to the economy.

What value do you put on human life? What value do you put on human life? And we say here it's invaluable. And if you say well we're going to lose 5,000 more people. I say close the restaurants. I say close the stores. I don't want to lose 5,000 more people. If you do not slow the spread, the health care system can be overwhelmed and more people will die. New York State spent $30 million just this past week on its virus mobilization. In Westchester County, 60 nurses and EMTs are dispatched from a center hastily set up by the state in vacant office space. So you guys, just so you know, our team's 17. That man is a forest ranger.

They're pulling in staff from 20 state agencies. When we were there, 222 homes had been visited. 639 were waiting, with more added all the time. County Health Commissioner Dr. Sherlita Amler told us investigators are questioning everyone who may have had contact with that first patient. Where have they traveled to? What do they do for a living? Who do they work with?

Where do they work? What kind of work do they do? If there are children in the family, where do they go to school? Then what about their social life? Were they at any parties? Did they go to any business organizations meetings? Did they travel? This is what she's trying to avoid.

In Italy, there were too many patients too fast. The hospitals were overrun. Slowing the virus in America buys time. Why do we need time? Because we do not have a vaccine currently to prevent this disease. We do not have an antiviral to treat this disease. So if we can slow it down and there are fewer people infected, we'll have fewer deaths.

Most of Westchester County's quarantined are in the city of New Rochelle. Here, the state has imposed what it calls a containment zone. It is primarily residential. Mayor Noam Bramson told us the center of the zone is the synagogue visited by that first patient. So the containment zone has a one-mile radius. To be very clear, because there's a lot of confusion about this, it is not a quarantine zone. It's not an exclusion zone. It is an area in which large gatherings within large institutions are prohibited.

Which means no gatherings of more than 50 people. So it affects schools, both public and private. It affects houses of worship. It affects the local country club. But it doesn't have an effect on residents. It doesn't have an effect on businesses. No one is prohibited from entering or leaving. It's not as though this area is on lockdown. Maybe not the area, but this lock is on the gate of New Rochelle's high school.

The nearby middle school is being sanitized. And this is a bank in Westchester's containment zone. It's very difficult when you have very young children, but yeah. Tamar Weinberg had contact with the county's first patient. She's quarantined at home. How old are your children? Three, five, seven, ten. How long have you been behind the gate here? For a week. What is that like? A little stir crazy, but thankfully I love them, so we're good. We're good there. Well, I'm usually much friendlier than this, but this is about 10 feet or so,

and we're told that that's what we have to do in order to avoid any contact. Right. She shot these pictures for us of her online life, online school for the kids, online support from the community. The community at large has, they've been amazing at just offering to do any types of errands, shopping for us, and what they do is they come to our house, they drop off food at our doorsteps. What are you going to do the first day you can open the gate? I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to run, and running around in circles around my driveway, even though it's nice

and all, I almost die of boredom. Friday the state opened a drive-through test center in New Rochelle. Swabs are passed through the window, nose and throat samples are passed back out. The driver will get a call in a couple of days. The state hopes to process 6,000 tests a day. And you know what to do? By this morning, Westchester County reported tests on more than 1,300 people. Of those, 14 percent have come back positive. So far, 4,000 in Westchester County have been under quarantine.

George Latimer is the county's top elected official. When you have someone in a mandatory quarantine for 14 days, I mean, what if they don't have 14 days' worth of groceries? What if they don't have their prescription drugs? That's our job. Our job is to figure out how to get them the food that they need. If there are medicines or anything else under the sun, any of the necessities of life,

we have to figure out how to deliver that. Latimer is also thinking ahead to a worst case. The civil unrest is always a possibility depending on how large a group you have to quarantine. So the real question is how many more nourished shells will we see in the nation? How large will they get? And will government at every level, from the federal government on down, be prepared to deal with these things? Nothing seems normal. Even in preparing for our interview with Governor Cuomo at the state capitol,

So unusual. the New York Department of Health required we sit 10 feet apart because the state is monitoring the 60 Minutes office where several colleagues have the virus. After the interview, one of the governor's daughters went into self-isolation after being near someone who might have been exposed. It's bound to get worse. It will get worse. It will get much worse before it gets better.

Can you imagine a quarantine of New York City? No, I can't imagine a quarantine of New York City? No. I can't imagine a quarantine of New York City. I can imagine additional density reductions. We're at 50% occupancy. Italy went to closing stores entirely, besides grocery stores and pharmacies. I think actually the more successful you are early on, the less dramatic efforts you have to take later on.

When does this end? Months. Months. We have been following public health nurses in Westchester County who are putting on all the protective gear, going into the homes of people who are believed to be infected. I wonder what you think of their effort.

God bless them. God bless them. God bless them. I marvel at their courage and their dedication. You can't pay a person enough to do that. It's a character statement of who they are. You know, a lot of people watching what you do would think that it's heroic. This is what public health is. This is what we do. This is our job. For me, I think you feel like the whole community is your patient. You know, I'm curious, knowing what you know, what do you tell your own families? Wash your hands. Maybe no unnecessary travel. Don't go to big events if they could be avoided.

You know, there's panic out there, and it's really, like I tell them, until I become hysterical, don't really worry. You're talking about being in these people's homes, wearing those hazmat suits of yours and saying, don't be concerned. Be concerned, but don't panic and don't be hysterical. Sometimes historic events suck, but what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade.

Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app

or wherever you get your podcasts. You may remember the pictures from the water crisis five years ago in Flint, Michigan. Hundreds of angry residents holding up bottles of rust-colored water and demanding answers. Months of protests were waved off by officials who denied anything was wrong. The turning point came when a local pediatrician

found conclusive proof that the children of Flint were being exposed to high levels of lead in their water and prompted the state to declare an emergency. Now, that same doctor is working to solve a mystery that still worries parents in Flint. What lasting damage did the water do to their kids? Tonight, you will hear her initial findings, which she says are worse than she feared. But we begin with the legacy of Flint's water crisis. Once a week, hundreds of cars line up for bottled water at the Greater Holy Temple Church of God in Flint.

You know you're too old to be driving. Come on. Where's your sticker, baby? Sandra Jones is in command. She is a pastor's wife. God bless. With the voice of a four-star general. Let him go. Don't talk to him.

Come around me. He's 90. Take his number. We're going to find a way to deliver to him. Jones keeps the cars moving. I almost got my toes. And the water coming. Each family is allowed four cases of water. On this day, they gave away 36,000 bottles. It just strikes me.

It's been five years and we're still doing this. Five years. And the thing about it is, it's not lightening up. I could see it if it was lightening up, but it isn't. All right. It is not. The state stopped giving away bottled water two years ago because it said the water is safe. Sandra Jones relies on donations of water.

What's it been like? It's been kind of hard. Larry Marshall was second in line. The widowed father of four got here at 5 a.m. He's been waiting five hours for water. Water should be a basic necessity that we shouldn't have to wait or stand in line for. You know, this is not a third world country, but we're living like one. Marshall, like many in Flint, still refuses to drink tap water.

And if they come to you, the city or the state, and they say, you're drinking water safe, are you going to believe them? No. They lie so much, and we know they lie. When they say something, it's like talking to the wind, you know? I don't believe nothing they say. None of the politicians, none of them. Flint, once a prosperous hub of the American auto industry, was nearly bankrupt back in 2014.

Officials hoped to save money by switching the city water source from the Great Lakes to the Flint River. Clean water for Flint! Almost immediately, residents began noticing something wasn't right. The water was rust-colored, and many people had rashes. What do we want? We want water! But Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality and the city insisted the water in Flint is safe. Later, a state investigation found those officials hid the fact that the river water was not treated with chemicals that would prevent the pipes from corroding. So for months, the water

ate away at Flint's old pipes, releasing lead into residents' tap water. They were poisoned. I mean, they were poisoned by this water. They were all exposed to toxic water. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a pediatrician in Flint who her patients call Dr. Mona. Dr. Mona is a bit of a superhero herself here because she was the first to link the water to high levels of lead in the children of Flint. So within a few months of being on this water, General Motors, which was born in Flint and still has plants in Flint, noticed that this water, our drinking water, was corroding their engine parts. Just pause. Like the drinking water was corroding engine parts. So they were allowed to go back to Great Lakes water. Didn't anybody at that point say, if it's corroding an engine, maybe this shouldn't

be going into our bodies and to our kids? I mean, that should have been like fire alarm bells, like red flags. So what did it take before your eyes opened about this? Yeah, it was the word lead. Because the word lead, when you're a physician or a pediatrician, signals what in your brain? There is no safe level of lead. We're never supposed to expose a population or a child to lead because we can't do much about it. It is an irreversible neurotoxin. It attacks the core of what it means to be you. It impacts cognition,

how children think, actually drops IQ levels. It impacts behavior, leading to things like developmental delays, and it has these life-altering consequences. In 2015, Dr. Mona and a colleague started digging through blood test records of 1,700 Flint children, including the kids she sees at the Hurley Children's Clinic. Ready? Okay. The non-profit clinic serves most of Flint's kids. The city is 53% Black and has one of the highest poverty rates in the country. So we looked at the children's blood lead levels before the water switch, and we compared at the children's blood lead levels before the water

switch and we compared them to children's blood lead levels after the water switch. And in the areas where the water lead levels were the highest, in those parts of the city, we saw the greatest increase in children's lead levels. Armed with the first medical evidence that kids were being exposed to lead from the water, Dr. Mona did something controversial. She quickly held a press conference to share the blood test study before other doctors reviewed her work. So it was a bit of an academic no-no, kind of a form of academic disobedience. But you knew that? I knew that, but there was no choice. There was no way I was going to wait to have this research vetted. Two weeks later, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder ordered the water switched back to the Great

Lakes and declared a state of emergency. I say tonight, as I have before, I'm sorry and I will fix it. But the damage was done. Dr. Mona estimates 14,000 kids in Flint under the age of six may have been exposed to lead in their water. I never should have had to do the research that literally used the blood of third graders in Flint who passed Michigan's standardized literacy test dropped from 41 percent to 10 percent. I'm very concerned about my children. And not only my children, but I'm concerned about the children of Flint. Kenyatta Dotson is still fearful of the water, even though the state is spending more than $300 million to fix the water system. The city promised to replace all 12,000 supply lines that may have been contaminated with lead by last fall. Now they say the work won't be done until summer. Dotson says she and her daughters will continue to use bottled water for cooking and brushing their teeth.

I need time to come back to a place where I feel whole again. You don't feel whole right now? Oh, no. Would this have happened in a rich white suburb? Maybe it would have happened in a rich white suburb. Would it have continued for as long as it has? I don't believe so. We found many parents in Flint still bathe their young children with bottled water, first warmed on the stove, then brought to the tub.

When I'm in clinic, almost every day a mom asks me, is my kid going to be okay? So that's the number one kind of anxiety. How do you answer that? I sit down, I sometimes hold their hand, and I reassure my patients and their parents, just as I would before the crisis, to keep doing everything that you're supposed to be doing to promote your children's development. The Flint Registry is now live. In January of 2019, she launched the Flint registry, the first comprehensive look at the thousands of kids exposed to lead in Flint.

The goal of the federal and state-funded program is to track the health of those kids and get them the help they need. So today is the final day of his assessment. The registry refers hundreds of kids to specialists who conduct eight hours of neuropsychological assessments of their behavior and development. Dr. Mona shared her preliminary findings with 60 Minutes. Before the crisis, about 15 percent of the kids in Flint required

special education services. But of the 174 children who went through the extensive neuro exams, specialists determined that 80 percent will require help for a language, learning or intellectual disorder. What are you going to do? There's not much we can do. So there's no magic pill, there's no antidote, there's no cure. We can't take away this exposure. But incredible science has taught us that there's a lot that we can do to promote the health and development of children.

And that's exactly what we're doing. Through the registry, already 2,000 Flint children who are exposed to lead have been connected to services such as speech and occupational therapy, which some may need for the rest of their lives. But we also realized that our research, our science, this data and facts was also an underestimation of the exposure. Why underestimated? Because we were looking at blood lead data done as part of these surveillance programs, which are done at the ages of one and two. Lead in water impacts a younger age group.

It impacts the unborn. To determine that impact, Dr. Mona turned to a novel technique developed by Dr. Manish Arora at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital. He examines baby teeth. Baby teeth begin to grow in utero. Just like growth rings in trees, every day a tooth forms a ring and anything that we're exposed to in our diet, what we eat, what we breathe, what we drink, gets trapped in those growth rings. A laser cuts through the tooth to analyze whether lead is embedded in the growth rings of teeth. Dr. Mona has sent teeth from 49 Flint kids to be analyzed. This was a scan on the tooth of a child who was six months old when the water source switched in Flint.

As we hit that six-month mark where the water supply was changed, you can see how the lead levels go up, and they just keep going up as more and more lead's entering the body. It shoots straight up. Exactly. Wow. For the first time, researchers can pinpoint to the day, even before birth, when a child was exposed to lead from the water, and at what levels. Those early years are a critical time for brain development.

You're taking giant steps. As we were following Dr. Mona's work in Flint, another American city was forced to hand out cases of water. Testing on the drinking water in Newark, New Jersey, found lead levels four times higher than the federal limit. In some places, higher than Flint. Newark officials were warned about its water more than two years ago. Newark, New Jersey is like living Flint all over again. If we cannot guarantee that all kids have access to safe drinking water, not just privileged kids, but all kids have access to safe drinking water,

that's just one issue. Like, who are we? This is not isolated to Flint. This is an everywhere story. This is an America story. Last month, we made another visit to Flint to check in with Sandra Jones. Okay, let's move on out. Y'all moving too slow. Let's move him out. Y'all need to keep up with him. That's it. That's the way you do that. She was still in command despite temperatures in the single digits. Come on, hop out. Hundreds in Flint are still coming to her church parking lot for their weekly supply of water, more than five years after the crisis began. You know that universal sign we give truckers hoping they'll sound their air horns? Well, you're going to be hearing a lot less honking in the future, and with good reason.

The absence of an actual driver in the cab. We may focus on the self-driving car, but autonomous trucking is not an if, it's a when. And the when is coming sooner than you might expect. Already, companies have been quietly testing their prototypes on public roads. Right now, there's a high-stakes, high-speed race pitting the usual suspects, Google and Tesla and other global tech firms, against small startups smelling opportunity. The driverless semi will convulse the trucking sector and the two million American drivers who turn a key and maneuver their big rig every day.

And the winners of this derby, they may be poised to make untold billions. They'll change the U.S. transportation grid, and they will emerge as the new kings of the road. It's one of the great touchstones of Americana, the romance and possibility of the open road. All hail the 18-wheeler, hugging those asphalt ribbons, transporting all of our stuff across the fruited plains from sea to shining sea. Though we may not give it a second thought when we click that free shipping icon, truckers move 70% of the nation's goods. But trucking cut a considerably different figure on a humid Sunday last summer on the Florida Turnpike.

Starsky Robotics, a tech startup, may have been driving in the right lane, but they passed the competition and did this. Yeah, that's 35,000 pounds of steel thundering down a busy highway with nobody behind the wheel. The test was a milestone. Starsky was the first company to put a truck on an open highway without a human onboard. Everyone else in the game with the know-how keeps a warm body in the cab as backup, for now anyway. If you didn't hear about this, you're not alone. In Jacksonville, we talked to Jeff Widows, his son Tanner, Linda Allen, and Eric Richardson, all truckers, and all astonished to learn how far this technology has come. I wasn't aware until I ran across one on the Florida Turnpike.

And that just scares me. I can't imagine. But I didn't know anything about it. No one's talking about it. Nobody, never. I didn't know it had come so far. And I'm thinking, wow, it's here. He's right. The autonomous truck revolution is here. It just isn't much discussed.

Not on CB radios and not in state houses. And transportation agencies are not inclined to pump the brakes. From Florida, hang a left and drive 2,000 miles west on I-10 and you'll hit the proving grounds of a company with a fleet of 41 autonomous rigs. This is a shop floor or this is a laboratory? It's both. In the guts of the Sonoran Desert, outside Tucson, Chuck Price is chief product officer at Too Simple, a privately held global autonomous trucking outfit valued at more than a billion dollars, with operations in the U.S. and China. At this depot, $12 million worth of gleaming self-driving semis are on the move. Right now we've got safety operators in the cab. How far away are we from runs without drivers?

We believe we'll be able to do our first driver-out demonstration runs on public highways in 2021. That's the when. As for the how... driver out demonstration runs on public highways in 2021. That's the when. As for the how... Our primary sensor system is our array of cameras that you see along the top of the vehicle. Heard about souping up vehicles. This takes it to a new level.

It's a little bit different, yeah. The competition is fierce, so much so their technology is akin to a state secret. But Price points us to a network of sensors, cameras, and radar devices strapped to the outside of the rig, all of it hardwired to an internal AI supercomputer that drives the truck. It's self-contained, so a bad Wi-Fi signal won't wreak havoc on the road. Our system can see farther than any other autonomous system in the world.

We can see forward over a half mile. You can drive autonomously at night? We can, day, night, and in the rain, and in the rain at night. And they're working on driving in the snow. Chuck Price has unshakable confidence in the reliability of the technology, as do some of the biggest names in shipping. UPS, Amazon, and the U.S. Postal Service ship freight with two simple trucks. All in, each unit costs more than a quarter million dollars.

Not a great expense, considering it's designed to eliminate the annual salary of a driver, currently around $45,000. Another savings? The driverless truck can get coast-to-coast in two days, not four, stopping only to refuel. Though a human still has to do that. We wanted to hop in and experience automated trucking firsthand. I feel like it's our turn on Space Mountain. Chuck Price was happy to oblige.

We didn't know what to expect, so we fashioned more cameras to the rig than NASA glued to the Apollo rockets. Everybody buckled in? Buckled in. All right. Three, two, one. And we hit go. Autonomous driving started. We sat in the back alongside the computer. In the front seat, Maureen Fitzgerald, a trucker's trucker with 30 years experience.

She was our safety driver, babysitting with no intention of gripping the wheel, but there just in case. Riding shotgun, an engineer, John Pantilla, there to monitor the software. The driverless truck was attempting a 65 mile loop in weekday traffic through Tucson. The route was mapped and programmed in before the run, but that's about it. The rest was up to the computer,

which makes 20 decisions per second about what to do on the road. As we rolled past distracted drivers, disabled cars, slowpokes, and sheriffs, our safety driver kept vigil but never disengaged the driverless system. Watching the front targets close in, 100, yep, got a cut in right now. 55 mile an hour bad cutoff. This guy just flagrantly cut us off. He just really cut us off. We did not honk at him? Did we disengage?

We did not disengage. This vehicle will detect that kind of behavior faster than the humans. How far are we from being able to pick up the specific cars that are passing us? Oh, that's Joe from New Jersey with six points on his license. We can read license plates, so if there was an accessible database for something like that, we could. Chuck Price says that would be valuable to the company, though he admits it could create obvious privacy issues.

But TuSimple does collect a lot of data, as it maps more and more routes across the Southwest. Their enterprise also includes a fleet of autonomous trucks in Shanghai, as well as a research center in Beijing. The data collected by every truck along every mile, autonomous trucks in Shanghai, as well as a research center in Beijing. The data collected by every truck along every mile, it's uploaded and used by TuSimple, they say only to perfect performance on the road. Maureen Fitzgerald is convinced that TuSimple's technology is superior to human drivers.

You call these trucks your babies. Right. What do your babies do well and what could they do better? This truck is scanning mirrors, looking a thousand meters out. It's processing all the things that my brain could never do. And it can react 15 times faster than I could. Most of her 2 million fellow truckers are less enthusiastic. Automated trucking threatens to jackknife an entire $800 billion industry.

Trucking is among the most common jobs for Americans without a college education. So this disruption caused by the driverless truck, it cuts deep. As truckers like to say, if you bought it, a truck brought it. Steve Asselli is a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in freight transportation and automation. He also spent six months driving a big rig. What segment do you think is going to be hit first by driverless trucks? I've identified two segments that I think are most at risk, and that's refrigerated and dry van truckload.

And those constitute about 200,000 trucking jobs. And then what's called line haul. And they're somewhere in the neighborhood of 80,000 to 90,000 jobs there. thousand trucking jobs and then what's called line haul and there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 90 thousand jobs there you're talking 300,000 jobs off the top it's a big number it is a big number the Florida truckers we met represent 70 years experience in millions of safe driving miles hey you don't Gerald they say they love the, and when asked to describe their work, they kick around words like vital, honest, and patriotic.

It makes you feel like you could just poke your chest out with the responsibility that you're taking on. It kind of makes you feel like you're needed. Asked about driverless trucks, they feel like they are being run off the road. But another issue troubles them even more. I think that companies need to keep safety in mind. If you have a glitch in a computer at that speed, you can do some damage. There's too many things that can go wrong. One of them semis hit something that's small, like a car, passenger car, anything

like that. It's a done deal. I mean... I was on 75 last month through Ocala and there was a bad accident. So a state trooper came out and he was hand signaling people, you go here, you go there. How's an autonomous truck going to recognize what the officer is trying to say or do? How is that going to work? Sympathy, empathy, fear, code, eye contact. I don't know how you create an algorithm that accounts for all that.

You can't. Does the public have a right to know if they're testing driverless trucks on the interstate? Absolutely. Well, that's our concern is who's watching this? Who's making sure that they're not throwing something unsafe on the road? I think a lot of it is being done with almost no oversight from good governance groups, from the government itself. Sam Lesch represents 600,000 truckers for the Teamsters. He's concerned that federal, state, and local governments

have only limited access to the driverless technology. You know, a lot of this information, understandably, is proprietary. Tech companies want to keep, you know, their algorithms and their safety data secret until they can kind of get it right. The problem is that in the meantime, they're testing this technology on public roads. They're testing it next to you as you drive down the road. And that was consistent with our reporting. Do you have to tell anyone when you test?

No, not for individual tests. Do you have to tell them where you test? We do not currently have to tell them where we test in Arizona. How often you test? No. Do you have to share your data with any State Department of Transportation? Currently, we're not required to share data. We would be happy to share data.

What about inspections? Does anyone from the Arizona DOT come by and check this stuff out? The DOT comes by all the time. We talk with them regularly. It's not a formal inspection process yet. We wanted to ask Elaine Chao, Secretary of the Department of Transportation, about regulating this emerging sector. She declined an interview but provided us with a statement which reads in part, the department needs to prepare for the transportation systems of the

future by engaging with new technologies to address safety without hampering innovation. To that point, Chuck Price is emphatic that driverless trucks pose fewer dangers. We eliminate texting accidents. There's no texting while driving when there's a computer. There are no drunk computers, and the computer doesn't sleep. So those are large causes of accidents.

He adds that driverless trucks are more fuel efficient in part because they can stay perfectly aligned in their lane and unlike humans, are programmed never to speed. But he admits the profit motive is significant. You think there's a lot of money to be made here? There's certainly a lot of money to be made. There's an opportunity to solve a very big problem. Steve Vasselli says the industry may be imperfect,

but he thinks the solution should not depend on driverless technology alone. What's your response to the technology companies that say, look, I'm trying to do something more efficiently, and I'm going to improve safety. This is American enterprise. What are you going to get in the way of this for? I mean, I'd say that that's wonderful, but that's not your job, right? Your job is to make money, right? Policy is going to decide what our outcomes are going to be. Trucking is a very competitive industry. The low road approach often wins. We talk about the internal combustion engine replacing the horse and buggy and Eisenhower's interstate system.

When we talk about these transformational markers in transportation, where's driverless trucking going to rank? It's going to be one of the biggest. Next Sunday on 60 Minutes, Bill Whitaker on the race to develop a vaccine to prevent infection and an antiviral drug to treat the disease known as COVID-19. This clinical trial is up and running in the middle of this outbreak. This is the fastest clinical trial that I've ever seen come to fruition in this amount of time. And I have to really give credit to the folks at the NIH as well as others who were able to really jumpstart this thing.

I'm Scott Pelley. With thanks to the small, dedicated crew getting us on the air tonight, we'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.