Slashdot Mirror
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.
Welcome to jonny cab. Please state your destination?
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 ]
Yeah, because that's the only place doing research on robots and autonomous cars...
It isn't the only place, but it is easily one of the top three. Pittsburgh is not a tech backwater.
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.
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."
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.