(Your Job) Is a Video Game 36
arctother writes: UberDRIVE—Uber's simulation/video game/recruiting tool—is, at best, just a poor copy of a much more interesting video game – driving for Uber. The main innovation of Uber, and other smartphone-enabled "e-hailing" car services, is the insertion of a new interface into the human-to-human, on-the-street interactions between drivers and passengers. Uber attempts to transform the cab-driving and -riding experience through the deployment of an allegorithm: the productive joining of a framing narrative (or "allegory") and software-mediated control (or "algorithm"). Understanding how allegorithms shape experience will become more and more important as they are increasingly deployed with mobile interfaces to reshape and "augment" social interactions. "Ingress," you are already thinking; but you should really think of "Uber."
Ubers game (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Ubers game (Score:4, Interesting)
More likely tuning algorithms. [And Uber just stole my business idea.]
"Test Cell" time is very expensive. I think some of ours run $20k an hour and that's not even close to as expensive as they get. Additionally each prototype in a test cell can only ever accumulate 168 of test data per week. (It's a hard limit.)
The 'hardware' part of driverless cars has been pretty much nailed down. We've come a long way in the 11 years since the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge [wikipedia.org] (The original event didn't go so well) [youtube.com] Google and Uber have been poaching the grad students and professors from a lot of the first teams. [businessinsider.com]
Now what those engineers need is more data. They have dSPACE [dspace.com] machines hooked up to all of their Matlab models and are running a few thousands 'vehicles' in parallel. The problem is they need a very smart and adaptive better controller to test scenarios with. Uber is tuning it's algorithms against human drivers. The payout is two fold. In the short term they get to vet drivers. In the long term they don't have to deal with drivers again. [dspace.com]
If this pans out Uber will be releasing driving game for the XBox One, PS4 & Desktop. "Earn up to $1/hour driving a car!". It'll be a gamified Mechanical Turk. For $20k Google could have 20,000 hours of data in an hour. "Promote" the best driving drivers to $2/hour, $4... $10. You'd still be generating 2,000 hours of data per hour and you'd have the "best" drivers you can find.
The entire "personal vehicles" and "are they licensed" is moot when it's fleets of driverless cars all dispatched from a few locations around the city (as driverless cars become legal). They're already collecting all the data as to where the vehicles are needed. I wouldn't be shocked if Uber isn't already buying up property in places that their data shows a lot of vehicles are needed.
Uber is playing long game. "Drivers" right now are just a cheap way to collect all that data since Taxi companies probably won't release it (or even keep it).
I expect Google is doing all of the same things in parallel.
they also both use frames (Score:1)
an allegory "frames" a situation by saying what will happen to each of the characters; how they will interact with each other and how the situation will resolve.
that's what a stack frame does, too. the function starts with a stack frame (a situation) and says how the characters (registers) will interact with each other, and how the situation will resolve.
just something to think about. i have a whole lot more thoughts along this vein [neyer.me] if you are interested.
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Your mom is a video game
Don't just rush in and downmod AC here. Given the subject matter, this is actually Insightful.
3rd submission from the same blog (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the third submission of "arctother [slashdot.org]" pointing to "taxicabsubjects.blogspot.com". Taking the the frequency of posts on that blog into account, about every third post there is seemingly slashdot material. One wonders whose blog that is.
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Quotation marks (Score:2)
Please, learn how to use quotation marks correctly. They are not for emphasis.
What the fuck am I reading? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is this article supposed to tell me?
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Uber is diversifying... Gotta get that "valuation" up to 10 bil...
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What is this article supposed to tell me?
My takeaway was that if there are people in the world who can coin words like "allegorithm" we are misdirecting the War on Terror. It's not ISIL who are going to cause the Downfall of Western Civilization.
Allegorithm (Score:2)
Yeah, no, we're not going to start using that word. Sorry.
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Let's be clear on why not: "allegory" makes some sense, yes, it's really a computer program but in our minds it's a game or even a simulation.
But it's NOT A FUCKING ALGORITHM. Quicksort is an algorithm. Grand Theft Auto minus the story is still not a fucking algorithm.
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Dude, look at your hands! (Score:2, Funny)
They're, like, fucking amazing, aren't they?
Terribly written synopsis (Score:5, Insightful)
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The synopsis reads like a poorly written press release from an illiterate goat herder trying to promote his personal blog. Slashdot should be ashamed of putting this in its front page.
Slashdot would post a glowing review of Mein Kampf as long as it mentioned the word Uber enough.
Incomprehensible (Score:5, Insightful)
Ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
1a) No, it doesn't have to be actual news or make any sense.
2) Users will flock to the thread to wage holy war over government regulation and the legality of Uber's tactics.
2a) Yes, even when TFS says absurd stuff like "allegorithm" and "driving in real life is actually a video game myeh."
2b) Yes I'm serious, post whatever the hell you want. It can be the text from a Nigerian email scam, just be sure to insert the word "Uber" at least once.
3) ???
4) Profit!
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Inconceivable!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
No it isn't (Score:3)
(Your Job) Is a Video Game
No, (my job) is not.
(Your headline) is stupid.
Crazy Taxi (Score:2)