Beginning today, a select group of Pittsburgh Uber users will get a surprise the next time they request a pickup: the option to ride in a self driving car.
The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics center to develop the technology.
Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing equipment pulled up to Uber’s Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC) northeast of downtown Pittsburgh.
During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers — and how passengers react to them.
“How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?” said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.
If they are anything like me, they will respond with fascination followed by boredom.Driver error kills thousands of people every year in the U.S. alone, so self-driving cars don't have to be perfect in order to make our roads much, much safer -- they just have to be better than us. And here's the thing: they're already better than us. The hurdles to getting self-driving autos on the road aren't technological -- the technology already exists, and it already works well enough to be an enormous improvement over the status quo.
No, the real hurdles to adoption of this technology are cultural -- matters of public perception, and the influence that perception can have on the politicians who will be called on to modify existing laws in order to allow fully autonomous vehicles to be rolled out in large numbers.
Autonomous vehicles, or Autos, don't get sleepy, or sick, or distracted; they don't need days off, or overtime pay, or pensions; and they don't require much more maintenance than the highly-computerized cars and trucks of today do already. Costs can only go down, along with human casualties, while while efficiency, reliability, and productivity all increase.
Autos are not the vehicular equivalent of VR; they are not a tech demo, with possible applications to be worked out later. Autos are not the future; they are the present. They can be put to use immediately, doing things better and cheaper that people need done, and also open up an unknown number of other possible applications that we haven't even thought of yet, simply because human limitations have made those applications unworkable or outright impossible. Autos are revolutionizing society, just like smartphones did, and it's already starting.
This is not science fiction; the technology is here now. This is not hype; autonomous vehicles can be any shape and size at all, once you remove the need to allot space for human operators, and can replace humans in every application which involves moving stuff from A to B. Uber is just the start; GM invested in Lyft last year, with exactly this same end in mind, and if you don't think that long-haul trucking will be going fully automated just as soon as regulations allow, then you're not paying attention.
And transportation isn't the only endeavour in which in humans are facing replacement by automation. CGP Grey did a great video on the subject, which I highly recommend watching.
You'll often hear futurists like Ray Kurzweil talking about the coming singularity, when increasing computational power starts to completely reshape society in ways that we can scarcely imagine, scenarios which normally rely on the invention of an AI technology that can replace human brains completely. I think those AI evangelists have missed the mark, though, because our relatively stupid current computers are already good enough to replace us at all kinds of repetitive tasks, and it's already happening. And that fact, while initially fascinating, is already banal enough to become boring, fast.
Welcome to the singularity, already in progress. No hype.