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#uber#data#driving#cars#self#companies#waymo#drivers#human#don
Discussion (109 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
You can’t be the CTO of Uber wanting to do AVs, and get the data collection requirement shockingly wrong.
Waymo’s bottleneck has never been data. When they want data about a school intersection in SF at a certain time of day, they just... synthetically generate it and simulate: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
Waymo is able to deploy with very little data collection by having world class simulation capabilities. They have most efficient operation in the AV industry.
The best example of why data collection isn’t the bottleneck is Tesla. They boast about billions of miles of data, yet they’re struggling to put out fully autonomous vehicles.
The original title says "self-driving" and that's much more clear.
I saw the title and thought it can't be AV, they must mean AI and made a typo.
Uber did invest early in self driving back in 2015, but in 2018 there was a fatality which pretty much deleted their whole program. And looks like it's taken them way too long to try picking it back up.
This isn't a pivot, this is them trying to sheepishly reenter the race they were dramatically ejected from.
There's nothing stopping the car makers from running their own taxi service and they already have networks of mechanics and cleaner as well as some level of storage. They'd need to scale up, but they don't need to start from zero.
Ubers success is in large part build on not having to own AND MANAGE their cars. With self-driving cars that advantage disappears, unless they're gaming that "drivers" will buy the cars and lease it to them.
Self-driving is possible but it requires a massive sustained investment in custom hardware on the car, in real and simulation testing, in painstaking software developlment covering tens of thousands of scenarios, realtime remote control failsafes, fleet management capabilities in every city. Waymo is the only company that comes close to the right approach. All these other Elons, GM, Uber CEOs are just jangling shiny objects in front of investors. A moonshot on the financial model for what are otherwise mature stagnant businesses.
Don’t they [1][2]?
[1] https://www.privacyinternational.org/examples/1929/tesla-lea...
[2] https://electrek.co/2020/10/24/tesla-collecting-insane-amoun...
I'm not sure about the privacy implications. You say "all its cars" but you actually mean "all its customers cars". The relationship between Uber and the cars/drivers is fairly different.
https://www.getnexar.com
Can the drivers charge a monthly late for hosting the sensors?
Seems par for the course. Nintendo turned legions of Pokemon Go players into unpaid sensor grids for delivery robots.
He said he “didn’t care and besides what was he going to do about it anyway, it’s going to happen no matter what”
I asked if he had ever heard of collective bargaining or knew about unions and he said no.
I think we’re only about another generation before the only purpose for human labor is to train and check the outputs of a machine.
[1] Here's how you know:
I think enough people haven’t been in a Waymo to realise that the technology is basically here, and that we’re like 10 to 20 years of doubling away from AVs doing tens of millions of trips a day in America. By the time anyone has invested in true mass production of AVs, we’ll already be so far down that path that the policy deck will be dealt.
So what are we walking into? Not 8-11 billion happy cows. A crisis. People deciding not to reproduce. The human population declining. The irony as we achieve a technical pinnacle while justifying our own extinction by choice. The great filter as it turns out is actually capitalism, a race to business efficiency against all else including the incentives of your very own species. This is the mind virus.
But that said, supposing we are looking at 60 years from now having a few billion fewer people on Earth, just by attrition (lack of replacement) that is not automatically bad. We could afford to shrink in population - if there’s a floor to that contraction. If indeed there are way too many people in a decade for the available human jobs, then it could be the equilibrium is just a lower population. Which could be temporary - who knows what the future could bring, such as possible space colonization, which may need more humans and also give people the hope that I think Gen Y and Z have lacked, which is one reason for their low repro rates.
The complete destruction of the human through exploitation and control, as seen in the article, is a major reason people are too unhappy to start families.
The worst part? Most people don't even know why, so there's never a general public reaction to fix it.
the only real argument for continued growth in to preserve the current structure of investment. that's your great filter, and it will result in economic collapse which isn't the same as extinction.
It’s here and it’s been here for decades - it’s just finally impossible to ignore or wave away
Gig workers are self-chattelizing because there is no floor to the depravity that society will accept, and an endless supply of people who will chattelize themselves for a moment of pleasure
Or perhaps they "chattelize" to survive?
There's not much pleasure to be had from gig work apart from the freedom to perhaps choose your own hours and perhaps be free of a human boss. Both of which are quite the opposite of chattelizing, in the short term.
The pleasure of being an Uber driver? Wouldn’t the better analogy be survival for most gig workers?
collective bargaining or unions do not prevent technological progress, but merely retard it in the hopes that their members can benefit at the cost of progress for everyone else. Look at dock workers and how they tried to prevent automation with unions.
Reminds me of when dockworkers resisted the shift to cargo containers. Those ports ultimately lost business in the end.
Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976415
I assume this is possible because the costs of adding the sensors to vehicles has dropped?
> [Uber] currently has partnerships with 25 AV companies... and is building what [Praveen Neppalli] Naga, [Uber’s chief technology officer] described as an “AV cloud”: a library of labeled sensor data that partner companies can query and use to train their models
So Uber's edge here is that expanse of their driver network allows them to build a comprehensive data set.