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Google To Compete With Uber, Uber To Explore Autonomous Transportation
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg breaks news that Uber has a major new competitor in ridesharing: Google. According to the report, Google has informed Uber's board of directors of this development, and shown them screenshots of a ride-sharing app currently being tested by employees. Why did Google share this information with Uber? Because they've heavily invested in Uber, and Google's David Drummond, chief legal officer and senior VP of corporate development, is on Uber's board. Of course, a Google ride-sharing service would fit perfectly with their project to build and develop autonomous vehicles. This could be very bad news for Uber (not to mention other ride-sharing services) because they rely heavily on Google's mapping data. That is, unless Uber beats them to it. Uber today announced a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to develop, among other things, "autonomy technology." A source told TechCrunch that Uber went on a hiring spree and "cleaned out" the National Robotics Engineering Center, a research organization affiliated with CMU.
Blatant conflict of interest with Uber's minority shareholders. Watching Google tapdance around this one will be loads of fun.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I've been following with interest the debate about government-regulated taxis versus free-market Uber.
So far as I can tell, the argument for Uber is that it's cheaper, and the rides are nicer and more convenient, but otherwise it's the same service. In particular, the service has not been a statistically significant source of crime.
The arguments against are that 1) it's illegal, and 2) Uber drivers don't have enough (or the right kind of) insurance.
The first argument seems contrived. Up here in NH the Portsmouth taxi commission decided that Uber is a better solution, then voted to disband. (As the Free State project points out, "where else would this happen?")
And as to the insurance argument, the Boston Globe reports that "Passengers hurt in accidents often run into denial and evasion by poorly insured firms".
Uber is a good service, people seem to like and want it.
Are there any objections I've missed? Besides "predictions", of course(*). Anyone can predict anything and sound just like an economist.
(*) Predictions are invalid because both solutions are in play right now. There's no need to predict what will happen because we can just look to see if it's happening.
I imagine that enough cameras to provide a thorough view of the interior, before and after, would be a fairly minimal part of the overall cost of an autonomous vehicle. Once you have that, it's your choice of attempting to assess damage/lost items/vomit/etc. with machine vision or just farming that out as piecework to cube slaves in a call center type environment.
At that point, unless they've been very clever about spoofing their details when the hailed the ride(or just stole somebody's phone), you could more or less automatically deliver the lost article(if they left something in the car and you want to score some customer service points), the bill, or the court summons(if you are less than pleased with how they treated the vehicle) to their place of residence.
Not immune to properly motivated destruction; but neither are human-controlled vehicles.
Please correct the headline, thanks:
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
Car2Go already had to deal with that problem. Is it really a problem for them though?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Given the more-or-less-total legality of video surveillance in stores and other commercial settings(so long as there's no audio, that can be a major issue in some jurisdictions), and the willingness to accept clickwrap EULAs as being equivalent to real, contract-grade, 'consent', I suspect that 'privacy rights' won't know what hit them.
That said, it will be interesting to see if Google(or others) voluntarily agree to a less intrusive mechanism(eg. snapshot of car state before you board and snapshot of car state after you leave, in order to provide enough data for a damage 'diff'; but not filming you the entire time) some or all of the time out of commercial pragmatism. It isn't exactly news that (among numerous other, more boring, functions) cabs are sometimes called by people who would be much more comfortable with some privacy(business travellers...enjoying the opportunities...that being away from their families opens up, people who've been drinking a bit too hard to drive home and sometimes with similarly intoxicated company picked up during that process, that sort of thing). It would be tactless to be so overt as to build a service specifically for them and sell it in so many words (Google PrivateCab: your red light district transport solution! just doesn't look good on the credit card statement); but it would be leaving money on the table to scare such customers away by filming them at all times when all you want to do is test for interior damage.
The other possible variable would be the adoption of substantially damage-resistant interiors: it would be hard to build these and also preserve any charm; but if that isn't a problem I suspect that Team Engineering could put together a passenger cabin that could be swiftly and automatically washed out and dried(presumably by a mechanism similar to a standard car wash; but with the doors open at the time and waterproof interior materials) in the case of contamination. That still wouldn't resist deliberate vandalism, paints and markers would require more robust solvents and keeping glass from being scratched or etched is difficult; but it would make recovering from your basic inebriated vomiting incident substantially faster and cheaper. That would only be viable if the demand were great enough to justify the specialized and ugly design; but there might well be enough people who would otherwise be vomiting on upholstered seats to be worth it.
I've been waiting for something like that for a long time and wondered where it would come from.
Personally, I'm a big fan of short-time rental companies (where you pick up a car wherever you find it, and drop it when you're at your destination, and someone else will take it from there). And the only problem is that at certain times, cars pool up in certain areas. So at times, the nearest car is quite far away. Or if you go to the center - no parking space.
How cool would it be to have a car that you just exit at your destination, and it'll go and find a parking space on its own? And when you need it, you open an app on your smartphone, and the nearest car comes to pick you up.
For me, that is exactly what the future of transportation in cities is going to look like. Robot cars for short distance travel.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If Google cabs come pick you up and you pay them to drive you somewhere, Google is running a straight up taxi service. It's not ridesharing in any sense. Maybe Google would allow private car owners to put their driverless cars into the system, and keep a portion of the fares, but I don't see this as being very motivated. Google will have the driverless cars first, private competitors in their system would only drive down prices, and then there's the legwork of making sure that all the privateer taxis are safe and insured.
I love the idea of driverless taxis, and I'd love to live in a city where they were the only passenger cars allowed on roads. Unfortunately, I think that idiots will ruin the idea - for example, by using these things as convenient "date rape cabins".
I really wish the ACLU would go find some sign-language-using people and get a court case to overturn that bullshit "video surveillance somehow isn't wiretapping" rationale.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz