[quote=flu]In today’s world take Uber for example. Do you still need to bend over and pay an arm and a leg for regular yellow cab? What do you think Uber has done to the traditional cab business model? And now let’s suppose Lyft or Uber is interested creating a autonomous ride sharing service that requires no driver. Then what? What do you think naturally happens to the the folks that were cab drivers. Lyft and Uber might need to hire more R&D engineers to build this.
Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month
The autonomous cars, launching this summer, are custom Volvo XC90s, supervised by humans in the driver’s seat.
Near the end of 2014, Uber co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick flew to Pittsburgh on a mission: to hire dozens of the world’s experts in autonomous vehicles. The city is home to Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department, which has produced many of the biggest names in the newly hot field. Sebastian Thrun, the creator of Google’s self-driving car project, spent seven years researching autonomous robots at CMU, and the project’s former director, Chris Urmson, was a CMU grad student.
“Travis had an idea that he wanted to do self-driving,” says John Bares, who had run CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center for 13 years before founding Carnegie Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes components for self-driving industrial robots used in mining, farming, and the military. “I turned him down three times. But the case was pretty compelling.” Bares joined Uber in January 2015 and by early 2016 had recruited hundreds of engineers, robotics experts, and even a few car mechanics to join the venture. The goal: to replace Uber’s more than 1 million human drivers with robot drivers—as quickly as possible.
The plan seemed audacious, even reckless. And according to most analysts, true self-driving cars are years or decades away. Kalanick begs to differ. “We are going commercial,” he says in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This can’t just be about science.”
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Thank you for posting these articles, flu. Most people would agree that technology is displacing human workers, that’s not debatable. The problem is that the people who were already displaced by technology (over decades) have traditionally been the low-to-middle class working Americans. They’ve already been displaced and are fighting for whatever scraps are left behind. In their world, there has long been a huge oversupply of labor, and the introduction of greater numbers of cheap, exploitable foreign labor has made things even worse for these people.
Your article also defines part of the problem: they are hiring “dozens” or “hundreds” of these higher-end tech workers “…to replace Uber’s more than 1 million human drivers with robot drivers…”
It’s clear that the number of new jobs created by the shift to higher-level tech jobs is minuscule compared to the jobs being lost.
What do we do with all of the people who are being displaced by technology? And why should we add to this burden by adding even more workers to an already over-saturated labor market?
This is the primary reason for the discontent among current and former working-class Americans (of multiple races and ethnicities). What some see as “racism” is really a fight for survival. These people have been steadily and dramatically losing their economic, political, and social power, and it’s been happening for decades (the suicide rate for this group is near a 30 year high). It’s perfectly understandable that they would support the first politician who claims to be standing up for the American working class (Trump on the right, and Bernie on the left). Nobody’s done that in decades. To the contrary, it seems as though our political leaders have long thrown these workers under the bus in order to court foreign workers and a more globalist agenda.
[Note: this is an excellent article which helps to explain what’s been happening. Please read it. -CAR]
And while we keep hearing the drumbeat about needing more education, especially in STEM subjects, there is no shortage of college graduates, and no shortage of people with STEM degrees. The job openings where there is a high demand for workers tend to be in very concentrated areas, and there is no way that these few openings can even begin to make a dent in our under/unemployment rate, even if every person out there were to get a specialized degree in the required subject(s).
