Naturally I was thrilled to learn that Uber's First Self-Driving Fleet Is Arriving In Pittsburgh This Month (story in Bloomberg, August 18, 2016). I live in Pittsburgh.
Near the end of 2014, Uber co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick flew to Pittsburgh on a mission: to hire dozens of the world’s experts in autonomous vehicles. The city is home to Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department, which has produced many of the biggest names in the newly hot field...
“Travis had an idea that he wanted to do self-driving,” says John Bares, who had run CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center for 13 years before founding Carnegie Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes components for self-driving industrial robots used in mining, farming, and the military. “I turned him down three times. But the case was pretty compelling.” Bares joined Uber in January 2015 and by early 2016 had recruited hundreds of engineers, robotics experts, and even a few car mechanics to join the venture.
The goal: to replace Uber’s more than 1 million human drivers with robot drivers—as quickly as possible.
The plan seemed audacious, even reckless. And according to most analysts, true self-driving cars are years or decades away. Kalanick begs to differ. “We are going commercial,” he says in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This can’t just be about science.”
Earlier in the week Matt Taibbi asked whether there a word for "lower than scum?" (here).
We face a similar problem today — is there a term stronger than "batshit crazy?"
The greater Flatland problem is that replacing a million Uber drivers with souped-up driverless Volvos is seen as a positive development. Our "best minds" are working on it.
For his part, Kalanick sees it as a way to further corner the market for autonomous driving engineers. “If Uber wants to catch up to Google and be the leader in autonomy, we have to have the best minds,” he says, and then clarifies:
“We have to have all the great minds.”
Have a nice weekend.
Well, I suppose it's good to have goals...
Progress only moves one way, right? It is ALWAYS a Positive Development. The current (or, really, ongoing) project of Progress seems to be the elimination of all jobs below the pay grade of hedge fund manager. I'm not entirely sure what the upside of such an arrangement might be, but these folks certainly seem seriously committed to finding out.
In other news, these folks should probably be committed, seriously.
Ahhh, well, Progress marches on....
Posted by: Brian | 08/19/2016 at 11:47 AM