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Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#201

Post by CydeWeys »

riskable wrote: post #131
bartwr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing…

> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawy…

> This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this.

I don't think this is even close to correct. Lawyers were hit especially hard in the January layoffs, way more than 6%, and many teams lost their dedicated lawyers entirely (e.g. my team had one lawyer laid off and the other was reassigned to a basket of products instead of just our own).

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#202

Post by eptcyka »

xyst wrote: post #198

Yea let’s just kick people to the streets and let the “autonomous drivers” take over. Any “value” spent on humans is then gobbled up by a mega corporation. The ultra wealthy get wealthier. Will anybody please think of the shareholders!!!!1 The optics on this are totally not absolute dog shit.

Low-paying jobs don't exist to let poor people have jobs. Low paying jobs, among a wealth of other things, keep poor people poor.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#203

Post by mrshadowgoose »

sofixa wrote: post #187
mrshadowgoose wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. It's been shown through computer modeling that road congestion emerges as a function of both vehicles/road segment/time unit and human driving behavior. Remove the humans from the driver's seat, and your effective road capacity goes up significantly without doing anything else.

Do you have links to those computer models? Do they take into account induced demand? And still, even if autonomous cars are drastically more efficient, with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient (even the biggest highways will have a fraction of the capacity of a proper metro).

> Do you have links to those computer models?

You're more than capable of doing this research yourself.

> with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient

Sorry, this simply isn't the metric for success. It might be your metric, but it certainly isn't the population's metric. A lot of people want to travel comfortably in cars, "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.

Ubiquitous self-driving vehicles will allow us to eventually eliminate most congestion, and you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#204

Post by edude03 »

bartwr wrote: post #51
makestuff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.

Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing…

Realistically though they don’t have to figure out the legal problems immediately, they could and likely would start in their own backyards and expand from there

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#205

Post by snoochyboochies »

eptcyka wrote: post #202
xyst wrote: post #198

Yea let’s just kick people to the streets and let the “autonomous drivers” take over. Any “value” spent on humans is then gobbled up by a mega corporation. The ultra wealthy get wealthier. Will anybody please think of the shareholders!!!!1 The optics on this are totally not absolute dog shit.

Low-paying jobs don't exist to let poor people have jobs. Low paying jobs, among a wealth of other things, keep poor people poor.

Unemployed is the lowest paying job possible.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#206

Post by dicroce »

I bet Alphabet has calculated that of all of the rides a typical ridesharing service offers only a subset is currently serviceable by autonomous vehicles. A deal (or buying) Uber allows them to offer the service on only the rides they are confident they can fulfill.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#207

Post by panarky »

xyst wrote: post #198

Yea let’s just kick people to the streets and let the “autonomous drivers” take over. Any “value” spent on humans is then gobbled up by a mega corporation. The ultra wealthy get wealthier. Will anybody please think of the shareholders!!!!1 The optics on this are totally not absolute dog shit.

Yea let's just keep workers in such a precarious state that they not only must sell their labor for pennies, but incredibly they must now supply the capital to the corporation, all to do a job that isn't even necessary for a human to do, is hazardous for the worker and the public, and generates tremendous amounts of pollution. Why the "optics" aren't already absolute dog shit is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#208

Post by sofixa »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #203
sofixa wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have links to those computer models? Do they take into account induced demand? And still, even if autonomous cars are drastically more efficient, with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient (even the biggest highways will have a fraction of the capacity of a proper metro).

> Do you have links to those computer models? You're more than capable of doing this research yourself. > with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient Sorry, this simply isn't the metric for success. It might be your metric, but it certainly isn't the population's metric. A lot of people want to travel comfortably in cars, "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned. Ubiquitous self…

How would they eliminate congestion when they're so space inefficient? Even if they're more efficient at traffic flow, there's only so much physical capacity on the roads that people want to travel on.

> you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.

Cars aren't going anywhere, but they're the wrong solution for a variety of reasons (congestion leading to time loss, pollution (including noise pollution), land use efficiency or lack thereof, etc.) for a very big part of transportation needs.

> A lot of people want to travel comfortably in car

And a lot don't and aren't given that option.

> "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.

Mindless? There's only so much physical space available in the places where people live and work. American cities are often comprised of massive parking lots taking up valuable space that can be put to much better use, simply because most people are forced to commute by car. Give them another option and many (of course not all) would prefer it, which would also make driving much more pleasant for the remaining drivers.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#209

Post by jorvi »

eptcyka wrote: post #202
xyst wrote: post #198

Yea let’s just kick people to the streets and let the “autonomous drivers” take over. Any “value” spent on humans is then gobbled up by a mega corporation. The ultra wealthy get wealthier. Will anybody please think of the shareholders!!!!1 The optics on this are totally not absolute dog shit.

Low-paying jobs don't exist to let poor people have jobs. Low paying jobs, among a wealth of other things, keep poor people poor.

Shunting away low-paying (usually with low education requirement) jobs doesn’t magically move people up the job totem pole. Those people need to be retrained, and during that training they still need to make a living, preferably above subsistence level.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#210

Post by asynchronous »

snoochyboochies wrote: post #205
eptcyka wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low-paying jobs don't exist to let poor people have jobs. Low paying jobs, among a wealth of other things, keep poor people poor.

Unemployed is the lowest paying job possible.

Don’t tell HN that, it would make them upset.
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