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Uber Seeking To Buy Self-Driving Cars (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes from an article on Reuters: In order to save money from hiring drivers, ride-hailing service Uber has shown interest in placing a large order for self-driving cars, an auto industry source said on Friday. "They wanted autonomous cars," the source, who declined to be named, said. "It seemed like they were shopping around." Earlier on Friday, Germany's Manager Magazin reported that Uber had placed an order for at least 100,000 Mercedes S-Class cars, citing sources at both companies. [The top-flight limousine does not yet have fully autonomous driving functionality.] Another source familiar with the matter said no order had been placed with Mercedes-Benz. Diamler and Uber declined to comment. Auto industry executives are wary of doing deals with newcomers from the technology and software business who threaten to upend established business models based on manufacturing and selling cars. "We don't want to end up like Nokia's handset business, which was once hugely profitable... then disappeared," a second auto industry source said about doing a deal with Uber.
Well, you aren't far from the truth. The population on the planet is not sustainable if robots work. It is even not sustainable now, but we still have the subhumans on the subcontinent breed like no tomorrow. While there is still some small piece of work, there will be some money changing hands, and there will be breeding. But averaged over all, humans are poor, wretched, hungry mass, doomed to mere existence with short life span.
Humans are by nature (especially in the past) are r-selectors. The future, where robots case of everyone if a future of K-selectors. We have been moving gradually from r to K in accelerated pace in the last 400 years, and especially in the last 100. What the last 100 has given us is the r-selector numbers, with the quality of life of K-selectors. This is not sustainable. To complete our journey as species to K-selectors the majority will have to simply die off.
And naturally these days it will be the heads of corporations, (the owners of robots) who are significantly further into the K-selector status. As, only the execs and few employees at the top, and their immediate families will be granted by evolution, the K-selector status, because of their wealth. All the regular employees, will be left without work, and therefore if they do not revert back to r-selectors and start basic self-sustaining agriculture, will need to perish.
This has been so in ancient time - for early Eguipt to prosper they had to enslave Nubians, and other folk, though they had rich and fertile valley around Nile; for Rome (republic and early empire) to prosper, they had to kill and steal from most of Europe and Mediterranean leaving it in poverty; for the medieval feudal to prosper they had to reap (steal) all the products of the labour of their serfs; for the medieval Arab and Turkish empires to prosper to steal from the enslaved Christian territories turning the people to slaves; for the early US to steal from Africa and enslave human beings as well; for the Albion Empire to prosper they had to steal from most all people in the territories (like 1/3 of the planet); for contemporary US to prosper they have to steal from most rest of the world; and for the select few in US to prosper, they have to steal from most rest of their fellow country man.
In contrast take contemporary Russia, and before that USSR - they don't really prosper - people were/are still mostly equal (some more than others), but if almost no one has their labour fruits stolen from them, they are only limited to the wealth they create personally, which is not much - not dying out of hunger, but not having great life span or anything.
Believe it or not, it is actually the repuglican politics (their principals, not their particular execution) that keep us from getting one step deeper. The repuglicans are actually way closer to a socialist policy than their counterparts. The demoncrats of today are much more pro-corporate than those of the past and much less ordinary person social and merit awarding than the repugs.
Just live with it, it is evolution, it is normal for a species to decrease their needs and demands from nature, thus becoming K-selectors, and there is no more effective way of decreasing your species impact than to just reduce numbers significantly.
The Star Trek pipe dream universe needs little more than 2-3M humans. Actually all of them work as well, there is no one that doesn't. The crew of the ships, the colonist forces and the farmers, all those work, they are not on basic income.