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I genuinely do not get Uber's strategy here. Even once self-driving cars are mature, they'll occasionally screw up and sometimes kill someone. And Uber's cars a
by scarmig 10y ago
I genuinely do not get Uber's strategy here. Even once self-driving cars are mature, they'll occasionally screw up and sometimes kill someone. And Uber's cars are so incredibly far from mature that operating without legal cover is... just insane. If they kill and hit someone, Kalanick is easily portrayed as a ready-made movie villain. Wantonly ignoring state and local laws in the hopes of getting ahead of the pack, sacrificing the life of cute little toddler Adam to the altar of Mammon?
And it's really not just portrayed: Uber'll deserve any and all punishment thrown at them for this, up to and possibly including the shut down of the company and criminal charges for the people who did this. And Uber'll be setting the cause of self-driving cars back years, maybe even a decade.
This is all incredibly obvious too, and I don't think Uber folks are idiots. Maybe they're getting desperate, and they're willing to eat the risk of the company being destroyed because their business strategy for survival is sensitive to getting to production-ready self-driving cars a year earlier than they would have otherwise?
- wheelerwj 10y agoThis has nothing to do with self driving cars. What is likely gking go happen in the future though is fines will be substantially higher.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- justicezyx 10y agoTotally agree. I also think Uber's move is advancing its own lead at the risk of slowing down the overall self-driving car transition. Their move, as you described, when go wrong, not only damage the company, but also general public's acceptance of self-driving technology. That damage could be more profound and harmful in the long run.
- Fricken 10y agoUber's is laying the groundwork to make the legal case that Tesla owners using autopilot are in fact 'testers', presumably in hopes of tangling Tesla up. 'Levandowski compared Uber’s technology to Tesla’s autopilot feature, saying: “It’s hard to understand why the DMV would seek to require self-driving Ubers to get permits when it accepts that Tesla’s autopilot technology does not need them." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/uber-defies-california-self-driving-cars-san-francisco https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/uber-defi...
- scarmig 10y agoThat's interesting, if it's actually the case. It seems a bit of a stretch to me--Uber is still opening itself up to existential risk--but if by doing so it can plausibly kneecap Tesla and if it views Tesla similarly as an existential risk, this move might make sense. ETA: That is, from a business perspective. The fact that you might kill a couple people in the meantime is kind of a deal breaker from a moral point of view.
- Fricken 10y agoI could be wrong, but I haven't heard a better theory. I doubt they're just being cowboys, Uber's lawyers and stratgists are demonstrably skilled in the dark arts, I suspect they've calculated their outs.
- robrenaud 10y agoHow many people does delaying the progress of self driving cars kill?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- scarmig 10y agoInteresting point. Let's guesstimate it. I'll focus on the USA. Let's assume that after the full transition, 0 people will die from automotive accidents. This isn't the case, but it's close enough. Naively, that would save roughly around 30k lives a year: in other words, every single day self-driving cars are delayed kills a bit under 100 people. The dynamics of the transition don't matter too much, assuming everything is simply shifted forward a year: you just move one year from the totally untransitioned state to the totally transitioned state. That's huge. Anyone who does something that delays the transition one day is basically pretty much committing the Pulse night club shooting and the Sandy Hook shooting. Now, another question: if a self-driving Uber slams into a group of children crossing the street, how much do you anticipate that to delay the transition to self-driving cars? There's also a hidden assumption that getting inferior products on the road as quickly as possible is a necessary step in order to start iterating as quickly as possible. A day of clean room testing is worth some small fraction of a day of real world testing. I don't quite dispute that point, but just stating it explicitly.
- LordHumungous 10y ago>I genuinely do not get Uber's strategy here Simple: distract investors long enough to somehow make ride sharing profitable.
- derwiki 10y agoIs this even possible with human drivers? I thought every ride was subsidized by Uber because at "market rate" the service is too expensive.
- LordHumungous 10y agoShort answer, no