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Investors have lost the plot. Uber is nothing more than a taxi company using VC capital to undercut competitors. There are no self driving cars. That’s just a

Investors have lost the plot. Uber is nothing more than a taxi company using VC capital to undercut competitors. There are no self driving cars. That’s just a story to get money and make the brand bigger than its product. Come back to reality. There is no futuristic mars colony with Uber robots driving everyone around. It’s just a bunch of taxi drivers with dispatch replaced by an app.

leggomylibro 9y ago
Fools and their money are soon parted. But then again, the market can stay irrational longer than any individual can stay solvent. Ah, screw it; things just happen, what the hell.
abvdasker 9y ago
Please take your uninformed cynicism somewhere else. Uber's self-driving division is one of the 3-5 groups leading the pack right now (with Waymo obviously in front). It is anything but a scam, and even a basic attempt to Google Uber's self-driving program will show you videos of their very real results. Your premise that self-driving cars are just a publicity stunt for Uber doesn't even make sense given that the company has spent close to a billion dollars on the project. If Uber's self-driving program was really "just a story to get money and make the brand bigger than its product" they could have faked it for far less than that.
- fergie 9y ago
  Its fair to question just how far AI driving can possibly go at the moment. Most of the AI we have today is being used for classification and recommendation in fairly low-stakes environments (advertising, (search, social)). It _is_ a big jump from that to powering large metal boxes that move at high speed around built up areas. Yes, of course AI driving is coming, but in the next 3 years? Almost certainly not. And then there's the question of where the next advances in AI are likely to emerge from- Google and Amazon? MIT, Oxford or Stanford? A well capitalised startup?
Lordarminius 9y ago
There are no self driving cars - yet. The time scale to realization is measured in decades - longer than is currently promised but the tech companies involved wont tell you that.... I agree with all you on all the other points.

leggomylibro 9y ago

Fools and their money are soon parted. But then again, the market can stay irrational longer than any individual can stay solvent. Ah, screw it; things just happen, what the hell.

abvdasker 9y ago

Please take your uninformed cynicism somewhere else. Uber's self-driving division is one of the 3-5 groups leading the pack right now (with Waymo obviously in front). It is anything but a scam, and even a basic attempt to Google Uber's self-driving program will show you videos of their very real results. Your premise that self-driving cars are just a publicity stunt for Uber doesn't even make sense given that the company has spent close to a billion dollars on the project. If Uber's self-driving program was really "just a story to get money and make the brand bigger than its product" they could have faked it for far less than that.

fergie 9y ago
Its fair to question just how far AI driving can possibly go at the moment. Most of the AI we have today is being used for classification and recommendation in fairly low-stakes environments (advertising, (search, social)). It _is_ a big jump from that to powering large metal boxes that move at high speed around built up areas. Yes, of course AI driving is coming, but in the next 3 years? Almost certainly not. And then there's the question of where the next advances in AI are likely to emerge from- Google and Amazon? MIT, Oxford or Stanford? A well capitalised startup?

Lordarminius 9y ago

There are no self driving cars - yet. The time scale to realization is measured in decades - longer than is currently promised but the tech companies involved wont tell you that.... I agree with all you on all the other points.