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Driverless trucking has entered the man vs. machine debate.

And Aurora Innovation (AUR) co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson is one true believer.

“Fifty years from now, people are going to wonder: Did we really let people drive cars on the road?” he told Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi on a new episode of the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast. (see the video above or listen below.)

Urmson is a long-standing innovator in driverless vehicles. He worked with Google’s (GOOG) autonomous vehicle upstart Waymo and founded Aurora in 2017.

The self-driving freight startup is now pushing for driverless 18-wheelers. “Our technology is the combination of the software and hardware that allows that truck to get where it needs to go on the road every day safely,” he said.

Urmson also understands that some skepticism about the safety of driverless vehicles is warranted. “We’ve got something like four and a half million tests that we push the system through before we ever let it go driverless on the road,” he said.

Safety includes keeping systems away from vulnerability to hackers, as well as devising mechanisms that react quickly in the event of a possible fender bender.

The company’s updated LiDAR technology, called First Light LiDAR, “can see things 11 seconds before you could with conventional LiDAR,” he said. “That means we can react more quickly and earlier.”

Industry-wide, a rousing debate continues over a trucker shortage. On some sides, observers claim that it’s not as intense as it’s made to sound, while others proclaim the sector is in dire straits.

In October, a Newsweek article reported that 69% of freight businesses struggled to meet trucking demands. Challenges included high staffing turnover rates and tariffs, which rose by as much as 25% on heavy trucks. Over 30 trucking companies had filed for Chapter 11 in a short span of time, according to the article.

Aurora reported its third quarter results in October, which included a loss of $0.11 per share, compared to a loss of $0.13 per share a year prior.

Even so, the use of technology as a problem solver remains at the forefront of Urmson’s mission.

Aurora has vehicles making trips along the country’s “southern smile,” according to Urmson, and the company is working with major players including FedEx, Nvidia, Uber, and Uber Freight.

Rather than take jobs, Urmson foresees an industry where 450,000 new jobs in the US could be created over the coming 15 years. Driverless trucks could assist with “big, long-haul things where people have to spend time away from their family,” giving human drivers the shorter trip option.