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Uber Hires Hackers Who Remotely Killed a Jeep
An anonymous reader writes: The past several weeks have been rife with major vulnerabilities in modern cars, but none were so dramatic as when Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek tampered with the systems on a moving Jeep Cherokee. Now, Miller and Valasek have left their jobs to join a research laboratory for Uber. It's the same lab that became home for a number of autonomous vehicle experts poached from Carnegie Mellon University. From the article: "As Uber plunges more deeply into developing or adapting self-driving cars, Miller and Valasek could help the company make that technology more secure. Uber envisions autonomous cars that could someday replace its hundreds of thousands of contract drivers. The San Francisco company has gone to top-tier universities and research centers to build up this capability."
now, we have the name for our band.
Uber envisions being able to mysteriously stop Google self-driving cars that aren't on the Uber payroll :)
It now seems clear to me that Uber wants to be a provider of autonomous livery vehicles. No wonder they don't seem overly concerned with their employee -- I mean independent contractor -- satisfaction: they plan to get rid of them as soon as possible.
Now if you drive for the competition, and your car happens to break down...you've been Ubered!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Yes, the fever dream of capital: eliminate labor costs.
In the race to the bottom, some citizens will, of course, be made redundant. Don't stand in the way of progress, comrade, even if it destroys homes, families, and livelihoods!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Are you stoned, demented, or just a shill for Uber?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The self-driving car is very much going to project that sinks Uber. It's an enterprise so far outside their core business, with such a sheer volume of money required to bring to fruition, and they're just not going to get there. Moreover, it's not at all clear that their financials support being able to back a project like this if it doesn't bring quick and immediate success.
Google are probably the current leaders in this field. And to their credit, there's a logical value there - Google's business is, essentially, AI - which is what the problem boils down to (and integrates nicely with the rest of their search business - object identification, categorization etc.).
When investors start wanting to cash out, Uber is going to wind up sliced and diced and a lot less valuable then it looked on paper due to projects like this which they can't possibly fulfill.