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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.
Why on earth are they running it out of Pittsburgh of all places? I could see a tech area like Silicon Valley, RTP, etc. or near where other automakers work like Detroit. But Pittsburgh?
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I think Uber is doing it right. Kudos to them for thinking ahead. Meanwhile, they should hire more lawyers too, to ensure they company will still be around to make use of the newly-hired engineers.
Google was initially interested in helping Uber develop a global robotic car service, but announced a short while back that they were dumping that partnership in favor of developing their own service. And so I say Goog Luck to Uber; they're gonna need it/
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
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 ]
and some one get's hurt they point to the fine print and say your own your own.
Just think of Sofia Liu.
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.
One of the nicest aspects of Uber in my opinion is that they provide very decent employment for people who would be out of a job otherwise
Maybe those people can spend their spare time reading about economic fallacies. The purpose of employment is the creation of goods and services, not "keeping people busy".
"ride-hailing", not 'ride-sharing'
Paid (taxi) drivers, vs some guy who can give you a ride to the airport.
But yes...no reason Uber would not be looking into this. Other than maybe a dubious cashflow situation...
Just think of Sofia Liu.
Look, I am sorry the kid was killed, but although the driver worked for Uber, he was not doing so at the time. People claiming that Uber is responsible are basically saying "Hey, they are a corporation, and they can afford it, so therefore they must be guilty."
and what the higher skill people who will pulling 60-80 hour weeks with no OT pay.
It is. Providing occupations is a side benefit, as is allowing people to earn enough to make a living. They've all gone together for so long that a lot of people take it for granted. There was a time, too, when economic activity was pretty much entirely comprised of human labor, plus a bit of work from the draft animals we had. That's not true anymore, and while you still need human involvement, it's a much smaller fraction than it used to be.
Moreover, we've gone from "making people more efficient in what they do", such as having a worker drive a horse-drawn cart, or later a truck, rather than hauling goods on their back to not even needing the worker at all, and instead having one or two people in an office directing all the various trucks their company runs remotely (the same people who provide instructions to the existing drivers, doing so for the robots instead). We're eliminating the jobs entirely, not just making them able to do more with less workers.
The question then becomes, what do we as a society do with those people? How are they going to earn a living, as society expects them to do? Some will be able to retrain into higher skilled occupations, but those people are the exception and not the rule. Minimum wage work isn't enough to survive on without significant government assistance, and even those jobs are going to become increasingly scarce.
My thinking is that we're eventually going to have to divorce economic survival from employment. Put in a guaranteed basic income, such that everyone gets enough to get by, and any wages earned go on top of that. It can take the place of pretty much all the current benefits (SS, WIC, Food Stamps, etc). You can get rid of the minimum wage, because no one needs to worry about earning enough to live on - all they're earning is for luxuries (however small), so markets can freely set the value of labor (because people would be free to quit without worrying about unemployment threatening their survival). Now, you'd probably also have to radically alter the tax base, and tax the output of capital (namely, robots and other highly automated or independent machinery) - partly since that's where more and more of the money will be. There's some precedent for this, as at the time the Constitution was signed, tariffs and excise taxes were the primary funding source for the government. Income tax didn't come until much later.
but the drivers own insurance said he was working for Uber at the time and we are not covering this and Uber tried to use fine print to get out it as well.
Just wait a for auto drive that has parts pushed out to many different contractors and sub-contractors that when something bad happens they all point to each other when you are sitting back with you bills racking up as the courts are fighting over who will pay up.
The number of jobs that take their place will be minimal.
There will still be people needed to load and unload the cargo from automated delivery vehicles. Humans are great at manipulating and sorting small and medium sized objects--still better than robots. Instead of the fish company employee unloading the truck, a restaurant employee will instead. If the soda truck is driverless, who stocks the vending machines?
It's going to be disruptive, and people will lose their jobs, but delivery encompasses more labor than just driving the truck. Self-driving trucks won't replace all of that.
That is extremely short term as robots will also be doing that work within 5-10 years. Personally, the self-driving car bits will be 10 years or less, probably closer to 5 before it starts making large inroads.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The "utopian" future is coming whether we like it or not. The question is whether it will be Star Trek or Blade Runner.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Don't forget about all of the bus drivers. There probably will still be a need for someone to supervise on school buses but on city and between cities I can see them becoming automated.
a society where increasing amounts of people are simply unable to earn a reasonable living no matter how hard they're willing to work.
used to send them off to war, but that is no fun either.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I suspect that we could stand to devout more resources to education. Even people who aren't exceptionally bright can likely teach at a primary school level, especially if they special in a topic area that they're good at. If the future is going to have even fewer low skill jobs, it's more important than ever to improve educating the next generation to fill the jobs that haven't been automated.
If we ever do reach a point where everything can be automated, or at least everything necessary to sustain human life, I suspect we'll have to move on to some other economic system that fits with the times.
I thought Uber's business strategy was to blame the driver for anything that went wrong, eg legal or insurance issues. But how will they blame the driver when the driver is their own AI?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Or Charles Dickens
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Or you simply buy a few hundred and later a few thousand self driving cars.
The problem is that currently you can go to the nearest dealer and buy them.
They don't exist yet. There are just prototypes being developed here and there.
They need to be developed (which requires having a huge database to learn from).
Also, the problem of buying car from another company (say Google if their robo car is the first to be mass produced), it that Uber would become dependant on Google's whim. If their future business model rely on a service powered by robo cars, it would a bit risky to entirely depend on an external company for said cars.
The point of Uber, apparently, is to beat others in the development of autonomous cars. Not to depend on anyone else. Make their own robo car business.
And they have a similar mass of useful data out of which to build the car's intelligence. Which was graciously provided by the hipsters using the service, who never consented to be part in an AI research in the first place.
The kind of data log that used to enable the controversial god-mode, can also be used to build a very precise model of "how are the driver managing to navigate inside city centers ?"
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you're loading from the same place you could do it with a static robot/smart crane. These have been in use in warehouses for decades.
For loading/unloading where the layout isn't standardised, perhaps a smaller version of this would work. http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."