Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

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.

i rather have a driver

Finally. This is amazing! THE FUTURE IS HERE.

truck driver is the most common job in 38/50 states. If we replace taxis, uber drivers, truck drivers, and delivery people, that's a lot of jobs rendered obsolete. Some people can retrain but we have the face the fact that some of them cannot. Some people are incapable or unwilling to learn marketable skills.

Well this should certainly be an interesting little experiment. On a couple of different levels too, both in how people respond to the service but also how the vehicles end up doing.  I can see a lot of things going wrong here, but I would be wring and maybe they have ironed out all the kinks already.  I guess we shall see how it goes, and I am really interested now.  Thanks for sharing.

This just shows how much human kind is starting to rely on technology for everything in our lives. I watched this one movie, it was animated, and I can't remember the name of it. It had to do with people in the future being fat, and every human had a bed that fit their body and they moved around in it, like a small airplane.


They didn't need to do anything but eat which made their bones smaller because the became of no use to us anymore since we stopped walking. Their bodies were all fat, and it was stupid, but that's what's happening now.