Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Transportation

Uber Starts Self Driving Car Pickups In Pittsburgh (techcrunch.com) 192

The reports were true. Uber on Wednesday announced it a select group of Pittsburgh users will get a surprise the next time they book a cab: the option to ride in a self-driving car. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's robotics center to develop the technology. Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing equipment pulled up to Uber's Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC) northeast of downtown Pittsburgh. During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers -- and how passengers react to them. "How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?" said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.When a couple of drivers were asked about Uber's push to get cabs drive themselves, they weren't pleased.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Uber Starts Self Driving Car Pickups In Pittsburgh

Comments Filter:
  • Great! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by b0bby ( 201198 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @11:35AM (#52886101)

    It's good to see more real world testing of these systems in a challenging environment. It will be interesting to see how they handle Pittsburgh's winter. I was hoping that they'd be ready by now, since my kid is about to get a driver's license, but at least I should be able to buy one in 5 or 6 years.

    • It's good to see more real world testing of these systems in a challenging environment...

      Well, that's certainly one hell of a way of describing trial by fire where human lives are at stake.

      Uber wants to know how people would "react" with autonomous cars? Yeah, I'll let you know when Common F. Sense feels safe enough to trust one. In about 10 years.

      • by b0bby ( 201198 )

        You have a driver sitting in the thing, with a big red button to hit or an easy way to take back control by moving the wheel or tapping the brakes. That doesn't seem to be putting human lives at much more risk than anyone else out on the road. And the payoff of this testing is that every mistake, in theory, should only be made once.

    • You're going to be disappointed, this isn't ready either: it has two engineers in the front seats making sure things don't go wrong. According to the article, they hope to have that down to one engineer in the near future, and zero engineers.......sometime.
  • Abolish Jobs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alternative_right ( 4678499 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @11:35AM (#52886105) Homepage Journal

    Jobs are miserable and robotic; giving them to robots is a great justice.

    Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: maintaining land and buildings, participating in cultural events, having families, curating farms, maybe even maintaining old documents and cumulative knowledge.

    The cube-slave period of humanity will be seen as the bleakest, if only by the alien archeologists sifting through our rubble for clues as to how to avoid the potential demise of their own civilization.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]

      Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?

      • Re:Abolish Jobs (Score:4, Insightful)

        by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @12:26PM (#52886559)

        Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]

        Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?

        That's the problem with society today. We seemingly only find value in the almighty dollar.

        Humans have already proven for thousands of years that money is not a necessary component of survival, no matter how the world today wants to paint it.

        • Re:Abolish Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)

          by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @01:28PM (#52887063) Journal

          Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]

          Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?

          That's the problem with society today. We seemingly only find value in the almighty dollar.

          Humans have already proven for thousands of years that money is not a necessary component of survival, no matter how the world today wants to paint it.

          Comments like your betray a deep and important misunderstanding of what money is. Money is a convenient fiction, no more and no less. It's a stand-in that we use to represent real resources and labor, to make exchanging them easy. The focus on "the almighty dollar" is actually a focus on "goods and services needed and desired by humans".

          If what you're saying is that modern humanity is too materialistic, too focused on comfort and convenience and too accustomed to living in a world of plenty, you can make that argument. But complaining about a focus on money just demonstrates that you don't understand what money is.

          Note that I'm not claiming that money is the only way to manage the production and exchange of goods and services. It's just the best one we've yet found in an environment of economic scarcity. If automation transitions us to a post-scarcity economy, in which there's so much of everything that everyone can have whatever they like, money may no longer be a good way to manage it. But we're certainly not there yet.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]

        Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?

        The robots, obviously. They have jobs so they can afford to pay humans to do maintenance jobs that are too dangerous to be done by robots.

    • This is the potential of technology, but it will only be realized if we get smart and do things like mandate shorter work weeks, or a universal income

      unfortunately our corporate overlords have so completely brainwashed the population into thinking such ideas are dangerous that it will never happen, and we are just going to end up with a bunch of excess population.
    • by Alomex ( 148003 )

      Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: maintaining land and buildings, participating in cultural events, having families, curating farms, maybe even maintaining old documents and cumulative knowledge.

      Last I checked, science and creating of new knowledge are key components of civilization, which are surprisingly missing from your list.

  • by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @11:36AM (#52886111)

    This blows a HUGE hole in Uber's argument that they aren't a taxi service and shouldn't be regulated as one. They can't argue that self driving cars are independent contractors or that they are merely middlemen facilitating a service with an app.

    • by mr_mischief ( 456295 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @11:42AM (#52886157) Journal

      That somewhat depends on who ends up owning the self-driving cars, doesn't it? If I buy a self-driving car and sign up to be an Uber non-driver who gets paid for the use of my car am I a contractor, an employee (if I don't have to be present how could I be?), or a lessor?

      • That somewhat depends on who ends up owning the self-driving cars, doesn't it?

        I suppose but Uber clearly owns these ones. Frankly I cannot imagine the insurance cost for a driverless car would be tenable for anyone but a large company like Uber any time soon. You raise some reasonable questions but frankly they are moot. If Uber is actually using driverless cars that they own then they are unambiguously a taxi service. Not that there was ever really any doubt about that fact before to anyone with a functioning brain.

        • So what? The whole medallion deal serves to create an artificial scarcity. Once there are no jobs to protect there'll be millions of these on the roads. I can't wait until I no longer need to own and drive a car.
      • by ADRA ( 37398 )

        If and when this happens, they'll just have a new subsidiary called UberCars who's primary job is to lease cars with door to door car removal. Then Uber (the defacto taxi service) will use that company for their dispatch needs instead of independents to reduce costs. Its pretty dicey to assume independents could survive against a lean mean equivalent service running in massive scale.

    • They can call the new service Johnnycab.
    • That's no taxi... It's a TRAP!!

    • They aren't charging for this service when using these cars at this point. They are testing, and the rides are free. Your point is valid in the future however.

    • by k6mfw ( 1182893 )

      Whenever I see articles about Uber, or when people say how they can make good money doing Uber, reminds me of this mention by Chris Johnson below. But with a self-driving car then no opportunity for people the "join the cult."

      It's designed to make maximum use of crazy people and force the others to live up to that standard or be fired.

      I'll define 'crazy Uber people' not as 'danger to customers', but 'people who are bringing more value in terms of vehicle, skill and desire to please, than they are getting back in pay and benefits'. So the crazy Uber person is the one who keeps buying a new Lexus or whatever, vacuums their car three times a day and busts their ass to outperform all the other Uber drivers, so they can continue to win out over anybody else seeking to be a driver.

      The key factor is that they are giving more than they get back, in the belief that they're cornering some kind of market or buying in to something important.

      If you make a business that relies on people like this, you can demolish anybody else because you've worked out how to get voluntary unpaid labor, like the Amazon exec who was said to use her own money to hire subcontractors to do more. As long as there are people who are willing to do that, the market breaks and Amazon/Uber get to do what Wal-Mart did in small towns, break the back of other market participants so they can't break even or continue.

      Another way to be a crazy Uber person is to put more depreciation and wear and tear on your car than you can afford to repair (or replace). It's easy to be crazy in these ways. It's externalities which are easy to overlook. These Amazon/Uber business models are designed to leverage that kind of crazy as hard as possible, and kick out everybody who's not willing to lose (one way or another) on the deal. Psychology is useful in getting people to buy into this stuff.

      As they say, a cult.

      • Yep; well-spotted - this is the business model in use via Slashdot. Content-creators bust their ass to type in snarky comments about iGadgets, US corruption (the word corruption being largely redundant now when discussing things US) etc and that-company-we-all-love leverages their effort to do whatever it is they do to turn a profit.

    • self driving cars can hide under an system of subcontractors to get out of liability / dump it on some small business unit that has no funds to payout damages in a big crash and no rights to any software / code / logs / etc and in a court case.

      court discovery for source code / logs may hit an wall of NDA's / EULA's / etc With an big list of subcontracted firms that all say we are only X and we do not own / run any car service.

      • self driving cars can hide under an system of subcontractors to get out of liability / dump it on some small business unit that has no funds to payout damages in a big crash and no rights to any software / code / logs / etc and in a court case.

        A properly motivated judge can bust through that nonsense in no time. There is a well established principle of beneficial ownership [wikipedia.org] and related laws that put the responsibility exactly where it belongs.

        • What about NDA's / EULA's?? In a jury trail can they say one of people on the jury works for an competing companies and we can't let them have the code?

    • This blows a HUGE hole in Uber's argument that they aren't a taxi service and shouldn't be regulated as one. They can't argue that self driving cars are independent contractors or that they are merely middlemen facilitating a service with an app.

      When have Uber ever cared about being on the rigth side of the law?

    • They aren't taxis, they are merely elevators that move horizontally instead of vertically. Are you claiming that all elevator owners should also have a taxi license?
  • The reports were true.

    No, the reports were false, as they said Uber would start at the end of August [bloomberg.com]

  • it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise

    "Welcome to Guinea Pig Taxi Co., please buckle up."

  • by Vermonter ( 2683811 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @11:58AM (#52886263)
    If I were a passenger in a self driving car, I would sit in the back seat and act panicked, banging on the windows with a horrified look on my face while mouthing "help me!", every time we passed another car.
  • Winter is coming and I hope the uber CEO is ready for some trail by prison combat in a FPMITA when the auto drive cars start crashing and killing people.

    • I'd wager the AI drivers will STILL drive better than a majority of the human drivers...

      • I'd wager the AI drivers will STILL drive better than a majority of the human drivers...

        And I would wager that no matter what the statistics show, you still won't feel any better about a family member being killed by "autonomous bug #172A"

        This is the inherent problem with AI deployment. 40,000 lives are lost every year in the US with human drivers. If that number is reduced by even half, it will be viewed as a resounding success and will be approved by every regulatory agency, with the obvious main difference being bugs and hackers causing deaths on our roadways instead of alcohol or distract

        • by ADRA ( 37398 )

          Are you kidding? A single death will be heralded as the end of the world. All too many journalists play on people's inherent fears. "10 drunks killed themselves last month" has zero resonance because we know humans, we know drunks, we know they do stupid things when they're drunk. We've heard it happening from the day we're born till the day we die. Case closed. But a robotic car? I mean, what's a robotic car all about? How does it work? Will it just randomly run off the road or into other vehicles? Should

          • Are you kidding? A single death will be heralded as the end of the world.

            And yet it wasn't the end of the world when a Tesla on "autopilot" did it. It wasn't even a financial apocalypse for Tesla. Not even close.

            Crime stats much lower than a couple decades ago, but turn on your TV and see the FUD that keep suburban housewives up at night and her husband's hand on that rifle...

            If you think crime is in the decline, you're looking at the wrong crime. This isn't 1950 anymore. We live in an electronic world now, with an online society (to include controlling your AI car), and we've proven year after year that an online society is a hacked society because when it comes to the products we rely on every day, revenue trumps security every fucking

  • same CMU that messed up the admissions and now you want to trust your life to there code?

  • by npslider ( 4555045 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @12:08PM (#52886357)

    Uber-bot 54321 has filed a lawsuit against Uber-bot 12345 in federal court today. Uber-bot 54321 claims that Uber-bot 12345 failed to yield at the intersection of Beta Drive and Program Lane. It is still unclear if humans will be on the jury as they are becoming less and less reliable in every-day matters of state.

    In other news, Uber-bot OS 10 has been released today leading to scattered reports of biological transport vehicles randomly stopping in the middle of transit lanes. AI developers promise a patch is forthcoming.

    Chemical batteries are still overheating world wide, leading some in the Matrix Party to call re-ignite calls for the biological battery initiative to be readdressed in Congress. President Siri has not commented on this.

    Turning to weather, the Arctic Tundra is expecting another comfortable day, with High's in the mid 80's...

  • When a couple of drivers were asked about Uber's push to get cabs drive themselves, they weren't pleased.

    Displeased, sure - but I hope to hell they weren't surprised. If they were, they haven't been paying attention, and that wouldn't bode well for their passengers.

  • Pittsburgh resident here, they are going to get some tremendous testing data here right now. The level of construction obstruction is at an all time high this year. If it can negotiate this mess, it can handle most any road I've ever travelled on worldwide.
    • Not to mention the gridlock due to the Liberty Bridge fire and closure, if they work this week, I'll be impressed.

  • o Stand by the side of the road
    o Wait for a so-called 'driverless car' to approach
    o Walk out into the middle of the road holding up a big 'ROAD CLOSED' sign
    o LOL

    Will work every time.
    • by bondsbw ( 888959 )

      What do you expect to happen? What would be different with a human driver?

      If you think the driver won't call the cops on you, maybe you should consider that the passengers will.

    • o Stand by the side of the road

      o Wait for a so-called 'driverless car' to approach

      o Walk out into the middle of the road holding up a big 'ROAD CLOSED' sign

      o LOL

      Will work every time.

      Just put a traffic cone in front of it and walk away.

      Now the passenger could get out and remove the traffic cone, but then the car would probably just take off without them, because it is not like they have any real intelligence.

  • Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers -- and how passengers react to them. "How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?" said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.

    From an actual customare review later this year:
    Well the autonomous driver is pretty bad at giving people the traditional driving hand gestures, but actually quite good at recieving them. I wasn't sure how safe I was or who was actually driving with one guy huddled over the controls like a nervous wreck, but it did seem like whoever was driving was just learning the rules of the road so that, at least, felt familiar.

  • They test these things near the area where I work. Saw it take a wrong turn at my work's parking log. Was able to make a 3-point turn, presumably on its own. If you are going to teach a car to drive itself, Pittsburgh is a good choice. If you can drive here you can drive anywhere in the US.

    However, i live on a one lane dead-end street with parking on both sides and no turn-around bulb. Would be hilarious trying to see it navigate that disaster.

  • They'll be playing chess?

    (i always see these Eastern European/Russian cab drivers playing chess on the trunk/hood of their cabs while waiting for fares by the Beverly Center in LA. I hear it's not an uncommon thing.)

  • We are still being shown how to use seatbelts on airlines. I can only imagine what we will have to listen to before the car starts to move when they become truly autonomous. There might be a five-minute safety brief before you three-minute Uber ride.

Your program is sick! Shoot it and put it out of its memory.

Working...