211–220 of 376 posts
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I read somewhere that there are different levels of "tech" company. A truly tech company would work without any human intervention for multiple days without breakdown. A non-tech company involves human in every tasks required for work. Most of the companies fall somewhere in between. Ride services/Food delivery company cannot function without humans.
Are there any companies that work for days without human intervention?
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It's the loss of agency to machines, not the raw numbers that scares people. Why do you think so many people are unduly spooked after airline accidents due to mechanical or computer error?
I would say that, when I think about it occasionally, I am kind of scared by the possibility that someone will hack into all the self-driving machines (from a particular vendor) and make them all do something terrible at once—before anyone has time to deploy countermeasures.
Maybe a single 'driver' agent in a free-moving ground vehicle in close proximity to vulnerable actors and objects is not the right model for scalable, efficient, safe personal transport?
This self-driving system promise keeps getting delayed! It looks to me this is a case of a donkey led by a carrot on a stick (investors are the donkey here). What I never understand is what happens when a new situation that the system did not previously train for happen? what if this situation is deadly? Will all the Uber cars decide to jump off a cliff because of a wrong signalization or bad weather? What will the T…
> What I never understand is what happens when a new situation that the system did not previously train for happen? I think most people ask this kind of question because they assume the entire system is some kind of big if-else-if-else statement. The question about swerving and hitting the kid or the grandma follows the same logic. What we have to realize is that a neural net can and will react to things it hasn't sp…
While I agree with your overall point, this is not true. AIs often fail in very inhuman ways. Their "thought process" and learning capabilities resemble ours only superficially.
That said, humans also make a ton of lethal mistakes on the road and I do think we're getting close to a point where it might even out on balance. But people are more forgiving of relatable human failure modes than bizarre machine ones.
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So whats the big plan to lower overhead on rides? I looked up their last quarter and it was billions lost yet again. This doesn't seem sustainable, just shoveling money into the furnace quarter after quarter like that.
The big plan is a war of attrition to capture a monopoly/duopoly status for taxi services within a given country. Acquire all competing taxi companies or price them out of business.Once that is done, raise prices. If competition arises, lower prices again until they go away. In some senses, its just like Amazon.
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The big problem is that the populace do not understand statistics. As soon as a self driving car kills someone the witch hunt begins and the whole fleet needs to be retracted until investigation is over. Can your image network solve this problem?
It's like nuclear power. It just has to continue regardless of how many deaths since the number of deaths will be lower than other methods, in this case coal and fossil fuel deaths, and in the case of self driving, manual driving accidents.
* - Yes, Nuclear is not dead, but is not being used anywhere close to the potential it has i.e. effectively dead.
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One of their execs literally pitched me this very vision when I turned Uber down for an eng mgr position several years ago. I thought it was comical that his pitch was "The reason we're going to be successful at Problem 1 (taxis) is because we're going to be successful at ridiculously-difficult Problem 2 (self-driving) which we're not close to solving". Pass.
I love it when job interview pitches fall flat like that. Many years ago, I had a job offer from IBM for a class of server I wasn't familiar with. The guy explained it to me like this: "You see, desktops these days are running Linux, and mainframes are running (IBM OS something?). We represent a class of server bigger than desktops but smaller than mainframes. It's an exciting space. The desktop class of PCs are hand…
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>the younger generations are less likely to own cars There's nothing inherent about this. If the promised alternatives to owning cars turn out to be BS, the younger generations will have to own cars whether they want to or not.
A much more durable change is the shift in social norms towards intoxicated driving being unacceptable under any circumstances. Just 40 years ago the DUI threshold was .15 and even then the penalty was light. Today it's .08 with talk of lowering it, penalties have been ramped up multiple times, and nobody sees DUI enforcement as a technicality. That's a pretty big opportunity for any firm that gets you home from the…
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I'm not sure how strong a network effect other than in a local area. I'd be pretty sure that (in normal times) their primary market isn't business travelers flitting from SF to NYC to London but residents of $CITY using Uber Pool for commuting or Uber to go out with friends on a night out to a bar.
Contrary to that, local profitable markets like Manhattan have had significant entrants eat away at Uber’s market share with companies like Juno scooping up the best customers and drivers. The same thing happened in many cities in the early 20th century before streetcar operators managed to get jitney cabs (the unlicensed pool taxis of their day) banned because too many teens would borrow the family car after school…
But if there's a local alternative known to be better for going out with their friends, you can be sure that a person used to going out regularly with their friends will know what it is.
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No, that was never the strategy, no matter how many times people on HN claimed it was. Both Uber and Lyft are aiming for profitability next year with human drivers. (Disclaimer, I work for Lyft but this has been said in public many, many times by both companies.)
That's just not true. Way before Uber IPO'ed and started aiming at profitability next year, self-driving cars was the big thing for Uber's future. (Disclaimer, I worked at Uber 2014-18).
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One pedestrian death due to cars occurs on average every ~200 million car-driven miles. Is that really bad? (the math is based on # of US miles driven in 2017 divided by the number of car-caused pedestrian fatalities in the same year)
It's the loss of agency to machines, not the raw numbers that scares people. Why do you think so many people are unduly spooked after airline accidents due to mechanical or computer error?
I can understand a person being distracted, reacting slowly, not seeing me, etc. I can also mitigate this risk. Crossing the street I can make eye contact with a person and be really confident that they aren’t going to run me over.
Walking in front of a robot? I have no internal model for the kind of mistakes they make. It seems equally likely in any circumstance that they’ll make the mistake of running me down, and there is nothing i can do to avoid it.