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Uber's Hiring Plans Show Outlines of Self-Driving Car Project
itwbennett writes The most interesting people that Uber is now hiring aren't drivers: they're engineers. The mobile ride-hailing app has listed a slew of jobs at its new Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh. In particular, Uber is looking for engineers in the areas of robotics, machine learning, communications, traffic simulation, vehicle testing, and software and hardware development.
Yeah, why would a robotics company want to be near Carnegie Mellon University?
Question: How do you jump start research into car robotics when you're not Google and thus don't have a huge mass of knowledge about all the roads gathered by your google cars and google maps program ?
Answer: You get a ton of hipster to drive for you, record their trajectories/behaviours (remember "god mode" ?) and use their knowledge as a starting point to populate your initial database.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Unfortunately it's the way things are going to go, sooner or later. It's going to put a lot of people out of work, because driving is a key occupation for a lot of people, not just Taxis. It's also not just college students that deliver pizza, but all the delivery drivers, long-haul truck drivers, and it's these we should be worried about, because there's a lot more of them.
Even just going by the 2012 numbers from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (data.bls.gov), there's something around 1.25 local/regional delivery drivers, and 1.7 million heavy and tractor trailer drivers, plus about 250k taxi drivers/chauffeurs. Roughly speaking, we're talking about something like 1% of the population here that will likely be replaced almost entirely by robots in the next 20 to 30 years, if not sooner. The number of jobs that take their place will be minimal.
Now, this will make the economy vastly more efficient in any number of ways. Robots don't doze off at the wheel because they tried to drive too long in a day, they try to attack their taxi customers, and they can work far, far longer than any human can. At the same time, these are not high skill jobs that are being eliminated, and many of these people will not be able to easily transition to other work, if at all. What are we going to do with that? Sure, eventually people will stop having the expectation that they can simply go into truck/taxi driving as a career... but I also don't think many were directly planning on that when in school, to begin with.
Instead, we're facing a situation where the amount of viable work for no or low skill workers is becoming smaller and smaller, and we're going to have to figure out what to do about that as a society where increasing amounts of people are simply unable to earn a reasonable living no matter how hard they're willing to work.