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Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

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Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#151

Post by aianus »

794CD01 wrote: post #118
technofiend wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example of San Francisco is an outlier - there's too much upward pressure on wages there to let driving compensation fall too low. Let's have the same conversation about Minneapolis, Dallas, St. Paul, Austin, Kansas City, etc. Austin is a great example of a city with a lot of unemployement and underemployment due to the massive student population. Can't you imagine a college student riding around listening to le…

Unfortunately the current favored presidential candidate wants to make that situation illegal by raising the federal minimum wage to 12 or more.

I don't think the federal minimum wage applies to contractors sitting around waiting for the next job. The revenue while the clock is running is way above minimum wage.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#152

Post by Hydraulix989 »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #144

Definitely not better road markings. I'm a Pittsburgh native, having spent most of my life there, and if anything the immaculate roads here in NorCal are a part of the ongoing skewed optimism regarding self-driving vehicles. In Pittsburgh, you have potholes, ubiquitous construction (especially on PA-28), bridges (and I'm not talking Bay Bridge esque suspension bridges here), windy single lane dirt roads without marki…

http://pghroads.tumblr.com/post/50986812907/you-knew-this-wo...

Infamous Pgh driving scenario: "Left lanes need to exit right, right lanes need to exit left, here's 300 ft, make it happen"

Also, there are a number of short merge on-ramps that have Stop signs instead of Yield signs where you are required to come to a complete stop before merging onto high speed traffic.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#153

Post by aetherson »

technofiend wrote: post #90
aetherson wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine why. If you were going to devote hours to being behind the wheel of an Uber, would you will willing to do it for "far less" than the already far-from-princely sums that an Uber driver makes?

I literally had an Uber driver this morning who didn't speak enough English to take the route I requested. She knew "Hello", and "Have a nice day." No harm done if she's a competent driver. Would I devote hours being behind the wheel? No. I would try to find a job UNIXing for food because that's what I know. But we're not talking about me. We're talking about folks who have a driver's license, a clean driving record…

First, I note that you've got from "far less" to "downward pressure." Are you modifying your claim? I think that there is a considerably more colorable argument that it might shave 5 to 10% off the wages of a driver than that it might shave 50% off the wages of the driver.

While shifting the costs of vehicle purchase and maintenance from the driver to Uber is a factor, it's not enough to make driver wages "far less," and Uber has already been offering various assistances to drivers towards vehicle ownership, so nothing very dramatic is happening there -- and in any case, none of that savings will make it to the passenger, who ultimately is paying for the vehicle.

Making "far less" money than a typical Uber driver means around minimum-wage job or below. Let me suggest that there is no large pool of people who are interested in a roughly minimum-wage job with no security or prospect for advancement, who can plausibly save you from dying in a car crash.

(PS: There is no way that Uber would allow its drivers to dictate a novel while a passenger is in the car).

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#154

Post by stale2002 »

n72 wrote: post #110

I wonder how this will affect crime. With a driverless car, if someone wanted to hold you up, all they have to do is walk in front of the car, which will then obediently stop.

Or they could just pull out a gun and shoot the driver? It is already easy to do terrible things if you want.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#155

Post by Nutomic »

794CD01 wrote: post #118
technofiend wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example of San Francisco is an outlier - there's too much upward pressure on wages there to let driving compensation fall too low. Let's have the same conversation about Minneapolis, Dallas, St. Paul, Austin, Kansas City, etc. Austin is a great example of a city with a lot of unemployement and underemployment due to the massive student population. Can't you imagine a college student riding around listening to le…

Unfortunately the current favored presidential candidate wants to make that situation illegal by raising the federal minimum wage to 12 or more.

Unfortunately?

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#156

Post by aianus »

soundwave106 wrote: post #128
OpenDrapery wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most all of us work for companies that would like to make us obsolete. Payroll is a necessary evil in the enterprise, as far as "the business" is concerned.

The irony here is that I would say most companies are, in one way or another, driven by consumption. Our present economic system, generally speaking, relies income earned in jobs to fuel this consumption. If everyone is obsoleted, who will have the income to consume what the robots and fancy technology produce? I personally don't see the current business / economic system being very well prepared for the possibility…

If the robots double the profit margins then you can sell half as many widgets and make the same profit.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#157

Post by bogomipz »

If the adoption of driverless cars succeeds this translates into less automobiles sold by manufacturers to the general public. Won't the auto manufacturers then need to increase the price of each unit sold? Eventually wouldn't Uber's savings from no longer having pay labor costs be lost due to auto makers increase in price per unit of each(now driverless) car sold?

This seems to be a lot exposure for Uber unless they get into the manufacturing business which seems like a rabbit hole. This type of exposure is the same as say a music streaming business that has to pay for content - i.e your business model is predicated on favorable enough terms from a third party in order to make a profit. And we've seen that the way around this is by being vertically integrated such as what Netflix has done with creating its own content.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#158

Post by aetherson »

794CD01 wrote: post #115
efuquen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the car would drive to the pickup location empty. It would seem full driverless with nobody in the car is the big deal here. It doesn't really matter is someone will be behind the wheel later, you already had the thing driving around with no human to intervene in case it does something crazy. Don't see how that's an intermediary step.

A car driving around with no human inside poses less risk to human life than a car driving around with a human inside who is unable to control the car.

That's a carefully parsed statement -- less risk. True.

But I don't think that we're cool with the idea that because the number of humans threatened by an accident is reduced by somewhere between 50 and 20%, it's okay for flagrantly unsafe cars to be on the road.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#159

Post by awesomerobot »

speleding wrote: post #84
nkoren wrote: post #15

Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there's a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms. This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more chal…

We don't need to jump to completely driverless right away, there is a convenient intermediate step: The passenger can be the passive driver, and the car would drive to the pickup location empty. As soon as regulation allows, that step already gets you the major benefit of not having to "pay for the other dude in the car".

This would require passengers to be licensed drivers

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#160

Post by cgearhart »

794CD01 wrote: post #129
cgearhart wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely use the maps. In order to accurately localize the car, a detailed map can be used as part of the likelihood function for location to answer "how likely is it that the vehicle is at position (x,y) given the most recent measurements?" If you don't have an accurate map, it's very difficult to come up with a likelihood function that is accurate enough to keep the car in its own lane.

Keeping the car in its lane is overrated. Any human who drives in snow knows the rules. If there are other cars around, center yourself with respect to them. If there are not, lanes are irrelevant. Even many narrow side streets in snowless areas force you to improvise in a similar way to handle oncoming cars.

Keeping the car in its lane amounts to keeping it from hitting anything. In any case - lane markers or not - controlling the car on shared roadways requires localizing it in terms of its environment. A high-fidelity map of the environment improves the localization accuracy that can be achieved from noisy sensors. If the map is more accurate, you can tolerate more noise from the sensors.
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