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Uber Will Begin Picking Up Pittsburgh Users in Self-Driving Cars This Month
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Funny how I should read this, I was in one of these last month because of my work. They're fun and handle Pittsburgh's odd drivers well, can't wait to see how they handle icey/snowy roads with massive potholes. I've seen them around Shadyside and Oakland all summer. Uber has an office on Ellsworth in Shadyside. Apparently, Uber partnered with CMU at one point to help develop self driving cars, then Uber pulled out and poached most of the CMU people for its own project that resulted in this.
Very cool, I'll have to take a trip to Pittsburgh to check it out! 
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The one I like best is no more parking lots. We all share a swarm of Ubers that just drop us where we need to be and then move on to the next ride; optimizing their use all day. Front door service everywhere and a ton of new real estate opens up. To twist Joni Mitchell we unpaved a parking to put up paradise.
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The one I like best is no more parking lots. We all share a swarm of Ubers that just drop us where we need to be and then move on to the next ride; optimizing their use all day. Front door service everywhere and a ton of new real estate opens up. To twist Joni Mitchell we unpaved a parking to put up paradise.
Love the ideas. To build on that, I think you would have some businesses start to offer this as a service for free to grow business. You get a notification on an app or home automation system to tell you the delivery has arrived and to go out front to pick it up.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm mostly thinking about situations that today can only be resolved by communicating with other drivers (things like waving a hand, eye contact, or a construction worker holding up a hand). I don't see how an autonomous vehicle would fit into that picture today. As long as not all cars are automated and connected (and traffic rules adapted accordingly), I think there will always be situations where human intervention is needed.
Yes.
If I was not clear, let me be so now. My point was larger than UBER. I was not specifically calling UBER out, but automation in general. From that standpoint, as you automate and replace previous Human jobs with machines, those Humans need to find jobs. As you state, they can go into customer service or maintenance or something else. The biggest problem here is that Automation is currently taking the middle out and people end up having to move up or down. In you examples, those are typically part time, low wage, and low benefit jobs. Some of the displaced may be able to retrain and get better jobs, but that is not the majority.
And my comment about Social skills is a comment on being isolated more frequently because we spend more time on "social" media or in video games or some other activity that does not require actual human contact. If you go to brunch once a week and get drunk, that is great for you. But the rest of the week? Shopping on-line, posting on FB/Twitter/whatever? My point is that a million studies show that on-line interaction is very different than physical interaction. Therefore when I said that there is a social impact - well, there is. What I did not say is that there is no more social skills.
If you want to focus on UBER, then I will state this -- I use Lyft and hate UBER. Personal choice based on experience.
That would be stupid. Certain things require human interaction. The service industry is one area we should never cut out human interaction
At first glance people think it will make us lazy, and it will in specific chore related tasks. When this does come into fruition, I suspect we'll see a stark increase in travel and people will venture more into areas that seemed off limits previously.
My mom lives over an hour away from me with traffic. It would be ridiculously easy to work / watch Netflix / game on Playstation 5 for an hour to go visit her, rather than struggle through traffic with today's vehicles. Future generations will fret less on the travel ahead of them and do the things they would be doing at home, in a car instead.
I love that these 'driverless ' cars will have two people in rather than a usual taxi with just the one.
It takes two people to enable one person to not do the driving.....
It takes two people to enable one person to not do the driving.....
That's awesome! I haven't yet thought about all of the implications for people with disabilities. Automated driving will truly be life changing for so many people.
Not to mention how many lives will be saved everyday as driving algorithms improve. Less traffic and fewer collisions.
Much of this can be solved with the proposed "national minimum wage", partly paid for by the dismantling of the multitude of different government and local social programs. Just give everyone a flat $ benefit...with a few modifiers based on location, family size etc.
Motivated people will still work to have a higher salary and a better quality of life. But just give everyone enough to get by... would be lower crime, the peons will have their TV's and Cell Phones to occupy their time until they die.
I've worked for 3 Fortune 500 companies with different access to financial info. Our country is awash in monty, there is more than enough to "redistribute" without affecting the 1% to any measurable degree to their lifestyle.
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I see huge benefits to Rush Hour and the elimination of slow drivers and those that disrupt traffic flow to get "one car ahead".
Commuting will be so much smoother and faster.
This is still a testing phase. That's why it's only rolling out in one city right now too.
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People seem to forget how much technology is in our lives right now, and how many of our jobs are dependent upon it.
Back in the day, everybody worked their tails off all day in the fields just to put the same old food on the table. Advances in farming technology didn't put everybody out of work. How about automated factories? All those people who used to screw on toothpaste caps onto the tube are now out of work! People used to make copies by hand! Now a Xerox machine can do it in a fraction of a second. But all those poor transcribers are out of work! Automation in the laboratory allows one person to perform hundreds or even thousands of tests every hour where a single scientist could only perform a few back in the day. All those poor scientists!
Technology just allows us to open more doors. Computers have made so many tasks so much easier, and "put people out of work" but look at the thousands of people in IT, sales, and manufacturing that were created by the advent of the computer.
Times change. Some jobs will become outdated, but new ones will be created. We need to adapt to this, and ultimately, we gain from this.
Once driverless cars are real - why would anyone with their own car call Uber or any other taxi service? Why wouldn't you just get your own car to come pick you up. You could get it to drop you off wherever and let it go park itself nearby letting you know how many minutes it was away. Then, when you wanted to go somewhere else you'd just call it back.
Seems like Uber is putting its current drivers out of work and they could be putting themselves out of business too...
I love driving and I'm lucky that I don't live in or near a city, so I would never buy a driverless car unless I was forced into doing so by some future law or if I get too old or too daft to control the vehicle myself.
Many people may get rid of their cars if Uber self-driving cars are cheap, quick and ubiquitous. Being driverless could significantly reduce the cost of using Uber. It might make more sense to not own a car... Only time will tell.Once driverless cars are real - why would anyone with their own car call Uber or any other taxi service? Why wouldn't you just get your own car to come pick you up. You could get it to drop you off wherever and let it go park itself nearby letting you know how many minutes it was away. Then, when you wanted to go somewhere else you'd just call it back.
Seems like Uber is putting its current drivers out of work and they could be putting themselves out of business too...
I love driving and I'm lucky that I don't live in or near a city, so I would never buy a driverless car unless I was forced into doing so by some future law or if I get too old or too daft to control the vehicle myself.
Also, I only use Uber when I'm traveling. If I was going more than a thousand miles I would probably fly, and I certainly wouldn't waste money on gas to have my car meet me there.
It'll change our culture all right: most transportation will be owned by a tiny handfull of billionaires and the rest wont even be able to drive a taxi for a living.
Dystopian is the word.
Not all technological progress results in human progress.
I agree, but that's the way things are going. Some restaurants have already replaced having waiters take your orders with tablets, after experiencing one I try to avoid any others I see, but I'm sure given enough time I won't have options.
I read an article not long, that pointed out a major dilemma with self-driving cars:
They will sometimes have to morally (or legally) determine which person(s) they should kill, in order to save others.
Imagine you're in the back of a self-driving car going very fast, and suddenly a six year old kid chasing a ball darts out in front of the car. Okay, not too hard. The car must steer itself into another car or telephone pole, possibly sacrificing you, the adult rider, in favor of the child. That's the moral thing to do.
Now add a pregnant woman on one side of the road, and a grandmother holding a baby on the other side.
Whom should the car's computer kill, and whom should it save? The paying customer? The older kid who ran out in front? The unborn child and its mother? The baby in the hands of an adult who's already lived a long life? Or whomever is cheapest for the insurance to pay?
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Does the "need of the many outweigh the need of the few" apply if there are two adults in the car but only one adult outside about to be run over, when the car picks whom to sacrifice? If the two inside are the outside adult's parents, how would they feel if they car picked them to survive instead?
I think some states have already determined that the car is the legal driver. Therefore it will be responsible for any decisions it makes.
Quite possibly, laws will have to be passed, giving car programmers an ordered list of who has more right to live. And that's going to raise all sorts of moral questions, along with perhaps insurance company lobbying, etc.
This is like the subplot in "I Robot", where Will Smith was still mentally suffering from having a robot save him, instead of even trying to save the little girl, because his survival had a higher calculated likelihood.
They will sometimes have to morally (or legally) determine which person(s) they should kill, in order to save others.
Imagine you're in the back of a self-driving car going very fast, and suddenly a six year old kid chasing a ball darts out in front of the car. Okay, not too hard. The car must steer itself into another car or telephone pole, possibly sacrificing you, the adult rider, in favor of the child. That's the moral thing to do.
Now add a pregnant woman on one side of the road, and a grandmother holding a baby on the other side.
Whom should the car's computer kill, and whom should it save? The paying customer? The older kid who ran out in front? The unborn child and its mother? The baby in the hands of an adult who's already lived a long life? Or whomever is cheapest for the insurance to pay?
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Does the "need of the many outweigh the need of the few" apply if there are two adults in the car but only one adult outside about to be run over, when the car picks whom to sacrifice? If the two inside are the outside adult's parents, how would they feel if they car picked them to survive instead?
I think some states have already determined that the car is the legal driver. Therefore it will be responsible for any decisions it makes.
Quite possibly, laws will have to be passed, giving car programmers an ordered list of who has more right to live. And that's going to raise all sorts of moral questions, along with perhaps insurance company lobbying, etc.
This is like the subplot in "I Robot", where Will Smith was still mentally suffering from having a robot save him, instead of even trying to save the little girl, because his survival had a higher calculated likelihood.
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Car companies are already owned by billionaires.
Personal vehicles will never go out of style, there will always be a need for them. Especially without the need to pay for gas and the much reduced insurance rates.
You're not getting the picture. Much like folks who thought Amazon.com was "a little bookstore on the web".
The idea with Uber is that these folks aim take over transportation. "Taxi" as it exists today is peanuts and is not their target.
What they aim to lobby their way into is that: you wont have a municipal transportation run by your local govt plus private taxis and private cars. They, alongside the likes of Google - and Apple too - are angling basically for transportation systems in which not only will vehicles have no drivers, but personal cars will be priced or regulated out of the hands of the average person on the grounds of "optimizing system capacity". You must take a common public transport vehicle, driverless even if its a "single person vehicle that you rented". You'll have such services contracted out, such as bus and personal transport, to....them.
Private monopolies on your mobility. And there wont even be jobs for drivers either.
That is how you get to their equity valuations....
Wake up....
I think they are getting into the game too early. Let the car manufacturers bear the brunt of the cost of developing and testing the cars. Let them get it to the point where there is no safety driver and passenger. Those two are not going to take the ride for free, and are going to cost Uber money. A lot more money than they are currently paying drivers. I can only assume they are working some angle where they see a quick direct line to the same profit levels as they currently enjoy.
You probably don't get it because you don't have to waste 1-2hours of your day driving to work and back home everyday like many people (myself included) do.
What is needed for this to move forward is the hard/soft infrastructure for driverless vehicles. And it will need to be built-up quickly. [i.e., the freeways in Portlandia need more lanes to accommodate 500 people and their 3 dogs that move here every ***** day. It's like SEA or SFO without the charm. https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/autonomous-driverless-vehicles-corporations-list/