Uber Co-founder Travis Kalanick's Newest Venture? 'Gainfully Employed Robots' (yahoo.com) 59
Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick launched a new venture that "will focus on creating 'gainfully employed robots' for the food, mining and transport industries," Bloomberg reports.
"I left Uber in 2017 heartbroken," writes Kalanick on the new company's web site. Kalanick resigned under pressure in 2017, and complains he was "torn away from an idea and a movement that I had poured my life into... I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building. Digitizing the Physical World is my life's work... " Kalanick is remaking his real estate company, City Storage Systems, which owns ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens, and renaming it Atoms, according to a manifesto posted on the new company's website. [Bloomberg notes that the company's food robotics division "makes a food assembly machine called Bowl Builder, according to its website."] In addition to its work on food, Los Angeles-based Atoms is expanding into robotics technology for mining and automotive transport. Kalanick said on the livestreamed tech talk show TBPN Friday that Atoms has effectively been in stealth for eight years and has "thousands" of employees....
Kalanick wrote on the Atoms website that the company will make "specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large." That will include "infrastructure for better food," he wrote, as well as "more productive mines to power Earth's industries" in addition to "wheelbase for robots" in transportation. "The industrial thing is probably our main jam," he said on TBPN. "Once you crack movement in the physical world, there are lots of people who want access to that..." Kalanick also said he was the biggest investor in Pronto, a self-driving trucking startup that currently focuses on closed sites like mines.
"I left Uber in 2017 heartbroken," writes Kalanick on the new company's web site. Kalanick resigned under pressure in 2017, and complains he was "torn away from an idea and a movement that I had poured my life into... I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building. Digitizing the Physical World is my life's work... " Kalanick is remaking his real estate company, City Storage Systems, which owns ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens, and renaming it Atoms, according to a manifesto posted on the new company's website. [Bloomberg notes that the company's food robotics division "makes a food assembly machine called Bowl Builder, according to its website."] In addition to its work on food, Los Angeles-based Atoms is expanding into robotics technology for mining and automotive transport. Kalanick said on the livestreamed tech talk show TBPN Friday that Atoms has effectively been in stealth for eight years and has "thousands" of employees....
Kalanick wrote on the Atoms website that the company will make "specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large." That will include "infrastructure for better food," he wrote, as well as "more productive mines to power Earth's industries" in addition to "wheelbase for robots" in transportation. "The industrial thing is probably our main jam," he said on TBPN. "Once you crack movement in the physical world, there are lots of people who want access to that..." Kalanick also said he was the biggest investor in Pronto, a self-driving trucking startup that currently focuses on closed sites like mines.
So brave (Score:5, Insightful)
I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building. Digitizing the Physical World is my life's work... "
And all he had to start with was $2B of stock sales of Uber after his ouster. Truly an every-man we can all relate to, overcoming such huge odds.
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That, and "gainful employment" usually means a person has a job with pay that meets their living expenses plus a bit. What living expenses do these robots have, except for the livings they take from humans?
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Robots don't take away livings, they grant livings. It's called production, they produce stuff we can use. Do YOU take away someone's living when you do your job?
No, because I filled the open job the company had. If a robot takes my job and I no longer have a job, who are the robots producing stuff for if I can't buy it because they took my job?
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Nobody else applied for that open job?
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No, the job was replaced by a robot. A human lost income and the government lost tax revenue.
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A product was produced for cheaper, unlocking other opportunities related to that product. For example if the product was a light bulb, cheaper lightbulbs mean more office lighting which means a company can offer 24/7 services.
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Sure, on paper, that works. Thing is, humans take longer to retrain but that's not really the problem. AI wouldn't even be a problem if we didn't have to work to survive. Given how our society runs, it's no wonder so many of us don't want to see AI succeed the way the techbros want it to.
There won't be any liberation from work and even if there is, all of us on UBI is not going to provide us with a nice enjoyable life. Instead, we will all be living an overall lower quality of life without any way to improv
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Given that robots are equivalent to slaves, living expenses are something they do not have. Did "gainful employment" ever apply to slave labor?
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Robot is literally from mechanical slave; you can find English saying so before the robotinic came over to English to replace the politically incorrect phrase.
These people are like Mr. Burns when they try to be good they end up doing *more* evil! (see "The Old Man and the Lisa.")
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Re: So brave (Score:1)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AP... [youtube.com]
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"Alright everybody back in the pile"
Re:So brave (Score:4, Interesting)
The government should make him pay taxes on his "employed" robots, since he was dumb enough to call them employed. Apparently he's been employing robots for the past 8 years and has 1000s, that's a lot of dodged taxes.
Of course, robots aren't employed. They are capital that are deployed. Government should still tax this guy for thinking that was clever.
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The gains go to the owner.
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I translate that as there only being an option to rent, not buy, these robots.
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Yeah, and why would robotic unemployment be an issue? When I don't need to operate any of my machines or tools, I don't: it doesn't mean that I then get rid of it! Those robots can be in storage for the duration they're not needed, and when the time comes, they can be brought out, serviced if necessary, and then used for whatever it is they do
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And what a great new idea this every-man has. What's the one problem Uber had? A limit to the amount of exploitation of human beings. Solved!
Let's get Super Pumped! (Score:2)
So it sounds like... Travis Kalanick [wikipedia.org] is offering 24/7 robots for business owners that are tired of dealing with humans. That's the dream of every techbro of the moment within the techno optimist grift.
And both he and Elon appear to be way behind the Chinese.
And don't forget his partner "brother born of another mother" Anthony Levandowski. [wikipedia.org]
"Google later sued Uber for allegedly stealing proprietary information. Levandowski was convicted of stealing Google/Waymo trade secrets, but avoided a prison sentence than
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Way, way behind the Chinese, they have coal mines that are fully robotic (and 100% electric) already. As in almost every other segment of our economy today, the US is playing catch-up. This is especially true in application of AI. Here in the US the tech sector is busily recreating the Dot Bomb with its absurd valuations for ChatGPT and the like, while in China AI is being applied to actual industrial processes with great success and immense returns on investment.
https://kdwalmsley.substack.co... [substack.com]
Shaanxi
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China is great claims propagandist cusco?
cusco's only job is to destabilize the West and promote evil.
cusco's propaganda claims about Iran...
By the way, most if not all of the "massacres" are inventions of the US propaganda industry. [slashdot.org] Everyone knows about the massacres of the Supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killing upwards of 15,000 unarmed protesters and random civilians. Credible estimates put the number far higher 30-40k. But the entire Internet was turned off by their governm
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From the moment the first tool was crafted it was inevitable that technology would appropriate all human labour.
The question is what do we want the world to look like when that time comes and how do we minimize harm to people during the transition. This is the true fight with the tech oligarchy - not trying to prevent the inevitable but fighting to ensure the future is equitable.
Unfortunately it's a fight against selfishness, the core human flaw. Not having to work to survive could be the next human evoluti
Abundance... to whom? (Score:3)
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"why sell these things if you can rent them out and keep extracting fees from the users" .. that's only a good business model if you're sure there's no competitors. Robots will have tons of competitors, the Chinese are on it. So is figure.ai and Tesla. It's not like some Adobe Photoshop monopoly thing.
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I don't know if I'd want to invest in the Adobe Photoshop "monopoly" right now. Most people just have AI edit their photos now.
Sure, a talented human can do a better job, but for a dumb social media meme or a lame marketing portal picture.... who really cares? Just take a stock photo and change the background color to match your corporate approved color palette.
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The free market will solve it.
"...that's only a good business model if you're sure there's no competitors..."
That's why these same people buy the government, to ensure there are no competitors.
"Robots will have tons of competitors, the Chinese are on it. So is figure.ai and Tesla."
Like how you think this is an argument in your favor. Hysterical.
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Kind of like how Africans with productive jobs brought abundance to their owners. Worth fighting a war over, especially when it's the poor doing the dying.
Can you have one send me its resume? (Score:2)
So they know they're getting ready to fuck us over (Score:4, Insightful)
Google the phrase 70% middle class jobs taken by automation and you will find a study about it. They have been devouring middle class jobs through automation since the 1980s. And they are about to accelerate it.
People forget the luddites were real people with real problems. They didn't just walk across the street and get a job working for Henry Ford they lost their jobs with nothing to replace them. It took decades for technology to catch up and for two world wars to blow up enough infrastructure to get us back to full employment following the industrial revolutions.
The reason we were able to get back to full employment is we had a fuck ton of land that we could still expand into. That land is now either owned by billionaires or full of people or both. That was a one-time Bonanza.
We have made jobs a resource necessary to live and we are going to constrain that resource. Traditionally when a resource necessary to live is heavily constrained we murder each other until there are few enough people that the resource isn't constrained anymore.
Only this time we have nuclear weapons.
But hey how about those trans girls in sports right?
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UBI.
By itself Ubi is worse than useless (Score:2)
Also you're going to have a damn hard time getting enough money out the door to cover Big ticket stuff like medical Care and higher education.
And of course you're going to have friction between the people who are still working and the people who aren't. That will be exploited to cut Ubi payments down just
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UBI is just a label, by itself it is meaningless, not "worse than useless". In fact, it's quite useful just not to you.
"So your Ubi money just gets hoovered up."
That is true but it has nothing to do with UBI. That is a system that has already failed, UBI cannot fix it but neither can anything else.
"Ubi seems to be an attempt to have socialism without all the socialism. And I just don't see that working."
No, UBI was a single idea that got converted to identity politics. UBI is actually a placeholder for t
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UBI is not a hard problem, it's just not spoken of in a coherent way.
You've obviously given a lot more time to thinking about/researching this than I or most other people have and it shows. I'm just inclined to look at it from the techno-social aspect, and see that something like it has to happen or we're soon going to have people starving in the streets worse than during the Great Depression. Formerly the farmhand displaced by the tractor could go work in a factory, when the factory moved overseas they could work in retail or fast food. I don't see any new low skill/low
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When Spot can walk a security patrol, ABB can build bots to sort recycling, Seimens robots are picking strawberries, and McDonalds finally builds its burger-flipper robot, what are the stupid or unambitious people going to do? There are only so many jobs cleaning Port-A-Pottys and tearing off roofs, and those jobs are already full anyway. Hungry people pick up torches and pitchforks, the rich are going to have to embrace UBI out of self defense. (Or we'll see a deliberately manufactured version of Ebola
just what we need an amazon dps for robots where t (Score:2)
just what we need an amazon dps for robots where the local owner takes all the risk + upfront costs and has little real control.
It seems appropriate to quote Maya Angelou (Score:2)
Made to order (Score:2)
As I predicted (Score:3)
Looks like things are playing out as I expected.
"You will live to see manmade horrors beyond your comprehension."
will (Score:1)
Oh look, yet another company bragging about how awesome their robots are going to be some day. How is this even news? I'm intensely interested in what a robot can accomplish today, right now. Not the following: can lift, can move, can carry, can (in one specific circumstance with no confounding factors and when new and with a full battery) do.
I want to see the robot that can walk into a laundry room it has never seen
Return of the villain (with monologue) (Score:2)
This guy is a real-life cyberpunk villain, I'm not surprised in the slightest to hear that he owns a bunch of ghost kitchens.
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What is Elon Musk's pay package at Tesla?
Minimum wage isn't the issue, the underlying structure of the economy is. We no longer have an economy that supports a middle class. Band-aids don't solve it.
so... (Score:2)