Uber's Hiring Plans Show Outlines of Self-Driving Car Project 45
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.
Great jobs except... (Score:1)
Why on earth are they running it out of Pittsburgh of all places? I could see a tech area like Silicon Valley, RTP, etc. or near where other automakers work like Detroit. But Pittsburgh?
Re:Great jobs except... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, why would a robotics company want to be near Carnegie Mellon University?
Re:Great jobs except... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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1) Good wages. I mean really good wages.
2) Low housing costs
3) Some really good unis in the area
4) Brew pubs
5) Go Steelers!
6) For all you straight single young male professionals out there, a MUCH better male to female ratio.
and best of all......
No Californians! (or Texans)
But seriously I interviewed for a job there and the more I investigated it, the more I liked it.
Hello! (Score:3)
Welcome to jonny cab. Please state your destination?
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Once you get rid of the drivers, then you're not providing a taxi service, but a car rental service.
If you are splitting hairs, both terms have baggage that does not convey the intended nuance. "Johnny Cab" is perfectly clear to anyone familiar with the cultural reference. "Robotaxi/robocab" would also work.
You missed my point - car rentals are not regulated like taxi rentals, so a huge legal problem for Uber disappears.
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Once you get rid of the drivers, then you're not providing a taxi service, but a car rental service.
There's a difference between being a driver and being a passenger.
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robots are people too you know. If a corporation can be a person so can a robot.
Re:Too bad (?) (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
and what the higher skill people who will pulling (Score:2)
and what the higher skill people who will pulling 60-80 hour weeks with no OT pay.
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The number of jobs that take their place will be minimal.
There will still be people needed to load and unload the cargo from automated delivery vehicles. Humans are great at manipulating and sorting small and medium sized objects--still better than robots. Instead of the fish company employee unloading the truck, a restaurant employee will instead. If the soda truck is driverless, who stocks the vending machines?
It's going to be disruptive, and people will lose their jobs, but delivery encompasses more labor than just driving the truck. Self-driving trucks won't replace all of that.
That is extremely short term as robots will also be doing that work within 5-10 years. Personally, the self-driving car bits will be 10 years or less, probably closer to 5 before it starts making large inroads.
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If you're loading from the same place you could do it with a static robot/smart crane. These have been in use in warehouses for decades.
For loading/unloading where the layout isn't standardised, perhaps a smaller version of this would work. http://www.bbc.com/news/techno... [bbc.com]
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Don't forget about all of the bus drivers. There probably will still be a need for someone to supervise on school buses but on city and between cities I can see them becoming automated.
welfare paid in Soylent green? (Score:2)
a society where increasing amounts of people are simply unable to earn a reasonable living no matter how hard they're willing to work.
used to send them off to war, but that is no fun either.
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If we ever do reach a point where everything can be automated, or at least everything necessary to sustain human
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One of the nicest aspects of Uber in my opinion is that they provide very decent employment for people who would be out of a job otherwise
Maybe those people can spend their spare time reading about economic fallacies [wikipedia.org]. The purpose of employment is the creation of goods and services, not "keeping people busy".
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Moreover, we've gone from "making people more efficient in what t
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Or Charles Dickens
great example of forward-thinking (Score:1)
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I think Uber is doing it right.
Are they? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to just buy self-driving cars, or team up with someone like Google, or an automaker, rather than doing their own R&D?
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Goog luck to Uber (Score:2)
Big data mining alternative to Google (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Or you simply buy a few hundred and later a few thousand self driving cars. No god mode needed.
The point is to build them (Score:2)
Or you simply buy a few hundred and later a few thousand self driving cars.
The problem is that currently you can go to the nearest dealer and buy them.
They don't exist yet. There are just prototypes being developed here and there.
They need to be developed (which requires having a huge database to learn from).
Also, the problem of buying car from another company (say Google if their robo car is the first to be mass produced), it that Uber would become dependant on Google's whim. If their future business model rely on a service powered by robo cars, it would a bit risky to entirely d
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We have self driving cars since a decade.
Not on the market but as working cars.
There is no AI or databases to learn from involved.
Well, limited AI in the picture analysis algorithms ofc.
The point of Uber, apparently, is to beat others in the development of autonomous cars. Not to depend on anyone else. Make their own robo car business.
Unless they can steal some know how somewhere that is impossible. I mean the beating. Even by hiring all the experts that have worked the previous decade for other car manufa
and some one get's hurt they point to the fine pri (Score:2)
and some one get's hurt they point to the fine print and say your own your own.
Just think of Sofia Liu.
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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."
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but the drivers own insurance said he was working for Uber at the time and we are not covering this and Uber tried to use fine print to get out it as well.
Just wait a for auto drive that has parts pushed out to many different contractors and sub-contractors that when something bad happens they all point to each other when you are sitting back with you bills racking up as the courts are fighting over who will pay up.
Finally, mostly correct terminology (Score:2)
Paid (taxi) drivers, vs some guy who can give you a ride to the airport.
But yes...no reason Uber would not be looking into this. Other than maybe a dubious cashflow situation...
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It was the driver's fault! (Score:1)
I thought Uber's business strategy was to blame the driver for anything that went wrong, eg legal or insurance issues. But how will they blame the driver when the driver is their own AI?
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Software Engineers.