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Uber Testing Massive Merchant Delivery Service
An anonymous reader writes: TechCrunch has obtained documents showing that Uber is testing out a delivery service that would allow shoppers to buy something online and have it delivered on the same day. "Sources say that Neiman Marcus, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany's, Cohen's Fashion Optical and Hugo Boss are all in talks with the Uber Merchant Delivery program, and one source in particular said that there are over 400 different merchants currently in talks (or already testing) with Uber for same-day delivery. (Cohen's Fashion Optical and Hugo Boss are both used as examples in the training presentation.) ... From what we can gather from the manual, it seems that Uber drivers and couriers are currently taking merchant orders through a different app (and even a separate phone) than the one they use to receive regular UberRUSH orders. Eventually, however, Uber drivers will be able to take both human passengers and Uber Merchant orders at the same time through an intelligent routing system, all from a single driver-side app."
Im sure most of these companies feel like its worth the PR, until they realize shipping through an unregulated, unlicensed, un-insured third party is a great way to watch $12,000 worth of shoes and purses go from the back of a prius to a roaring bonfire on youtube.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I don't have an irrational hate for Uber ... I have a well reasoned dislike for a company who says "la la la, we're not listening, your laws don't apply because we're awesome".
I heard one of the founders/mouthpieces defending their position once ... he sounded like a self entitled ass who deemed himself special and covered under a different set of rules.
Uber can't simultaneously say "we're not a transport company, we're a tech company" and also pretend to be a transport company.
Having an app doesn't exempt you from laws. Only in their delusional, self important heads.
They're a greedy tech company, they're not some fucking saviors of the world.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We all know the dystopia of 1984 in which humans were dehumanized by their own actions; and the Terminator movies where smart machines set out to kill us like cockroaches. The Matrix reduced humans into sleeping energy generators. Uber has advanced a new method of dehumanizing us by sending us on chores to serve a superintelligence (OK, just a central computer now, more or less managed by humans- but are those humans necessary?).
We do have a similar concept in Taskrabbit and the Amazon Mechanical Turk in which humans do tiny chores in response to requests delivered by their devices. Uber seems ready to take this concept worldwide at a grand scale. People will be scurrying about like ants, rushing from one chore to another in a frenzy of blind busy-ness.
And you, mister smarty pants programmer, you think you're off the hook? You'll be lucky to find work writing snippets of code that will be inserted into some diabolical software that doesn't even have a name.
Is this the beginning of a world where nobody has a job, a health insurance plan, a steady income; but instead performs chores when they can be found? Will we compete against each other to do menial tasks? Will we be graded like schoolchildren for our skills, timeliness, reliability? Will future humans be the cooperative slaves of a central computer?
...omphaloskepsis often...