Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department | Hacker News Reader

Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department

nytimes.com

141 pointscalcsam90 comments

I found some of the almost mournful passages in this piece off-putting. As the author ultimately recognizes, the drift of robotics talent from publicly funded universities to private enterprises is an indication that the technology has advanced to the point of commercial viability.

In other words: Companies finally think they can build robots that are good enough that people will pay for them! To me, that is exciting news, not an occasion to lament the sudden emptiness of university laboratories.

Perhaps in other fields, there is a strong tension between the basic research that government funds and the commercial applications that private companies pursue. But in robotics there are usually foreseeable uses for the technologies that researchers are pursuing. I don't foresee the direction of the field being dramatically changed, particularly given the amount of government money that will still pour in through the DoD.

This is great, as it frees up public research funds to be invested in other perhaps more forward-in-time projects.

Uber and other companies (including Google) have been hiring a lot of robotics faculty as well as newly-minted PhDs. This is a good thing for robotics research.

There's generally a shortage of tenure-track jobs relative to the number of qualified PhDs, so when companies poach faculty, it improves everyone's career options. This is one of the reasons why CS PhDs have a much higher chance of getting good tenure-track faculty jobs than, say, physics PhDs.

Of course, when there's a faculty exodus it causes a temporary leadership vacuum--e.g. this has been the situation at Stanford for the last couple years, where most of the AI faculty has left to start companies. But most of the students at Stanford seem to do fine, and universities can usually fill the void in a few years and hire some new enthusiastic faculty.

Yes, the editorialist here seems to be bemoaning the 'professionalization' of the research topic, as if the companies and researchers owe some sort of loyalty to a university which profits off the cheap labour. It is roughly equivalent to chastizing NFL and NBA teams for taking all of the NCAA's best players, and paying them more.

More, in this case, meaning "at all."

Nah, the CMU Robotics Institute folks they're talking about were almost certainly paid.

Not by Silicon Valley standards, but they did receive actual money. These were faculty and employees, not students.

I was referring to the NCAA athletes :)

> Not by Silicon Valley standards

Ph.D. students don't get "poached", they "graduate or drop out" and then "get jobs". The people being poahced are professors and scientists in permanent positions.

I think people tend to under-estimate a full professor's salary at a top CS deapartment.

The average salary of an associate professor at CMU is $138,000, full professor $194,000. Before consulting, money from research spinoff startups, etc.

Even not adjusting for cost of living, I'm not sure how that's "not by Silicon Valley standards".

And adjusted for cost of living, Pittsburgh is in one of the cheapest cities in the US (e.g., it's not uncommon for CMU grad students to buy houses in reasonable areas of the city on their $30-40k/yr PhD stipends).

I'm not sure about non-faculty research scientists and so on, but I would imagine the $50-$100 range is about right. Which, again, adjusted for cost of living, is right there with SV.

Edit: E.g., according to the obviously-take-with-a-grain-of-salt CNN COL calculator, the average CMU professor would have to make $324,000 to have a comparable salary in SF. So I guess "not by SV standards" is probably actually accurate, just probably not in the way you meant

Hm. I know the guy who ran the Master of Software Engineering department at CMU West (in Mountain View.) And he didn't make the "average full professor" amount you're claiming. And one would assume he'd be making at least average for a professor.

That would be crazy money in Pittsburgh. Are you sure that figure is accurate?

> Are you sure that figure is accurate?

1. I don't have first-hand information about CMU, I got the data from here:

http://www.american-school-search.com/faculty/carnegie-mello...

Other data indicate that the six figure range is definitely accurate for CS associate and full professorships at research universities:

https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?Survey...

And it's not insane to assume that the top schools pay 30-50k more.

2. It is an average. Lots of compounding factors: Was the person running the program a Full Professor? (Most professors are not full professors, and a lot of faculty aren't professors. Note the 50k+ discrepancy between assistant and full professors.) Did he have a research lab and how does CMU factor grants into compensation? Etc. I don't know the specific details about that particular person (or even CMU), but I also don't have any reason to doubt the numbers given above.

I'm pretty sure the guy running the department was a full professor, yeah.

They don't say anything about how they get their data, which is a little odd.

Yeah, the numbers on the second page seem more realistic to me. They give more like $95k for a full professor -- which, after Silicon Valley adjustment and the extra $30-$50k you mention is more like $130k-$175k for a full professor. That's much closer to what I've seen than $195k.

So I think the first site is just wrong in how they're estimating, at least for CMU.

> So I think the first site is just wrong in how they're estimating, at least for CMU.

Those numbers are FOR CMU, and they are the only numbers we have for CMU. So I'm not really sure how this gets resolved.

> They give more like $95k for a full professor

No, they don't. They say $111,262 (see CS, not overall). Average. (And that's just salary -- a CS professor at a top school has plenty of built-in options for making money on the side.) So you're are assuming that one of the top CS schools in the country pays 15k below national avage.

Your numbers for PhD stipends are a bit high. I wouldn't be surprised if SCS students were paid that much, but the typical stipend for the rest of us is more like 24k/year.

Even so, there's a PhD student in my program who bought a house last year, and I thought seriously about it myself in my second year. Housing truly is cheap in Pittsburgh.

> I wouldn't be surprised if SCS students were paid that much

24 sounds like you're excluding the summer months?

I know in Math and other fields it's pretty common for "no guaranteed summer funding" to be actually meaningful words. But Most CS PhD students at top schools have no problem pulling a summer stipend, making 30 common. I never knew anyone in grad school who had trouble getting summer funding if they wanted it.

And usually CS grad students opt for at least a couple internships; even low-paying CS grad student internships can have 2x+ compensation compared with the phd stipend.

In any case, if a CS grad student at CMU/Stanford/MIT/Berkely is making less than 30k, it's purely by choice or really bad planning/luck.

24 includes summer, and that's pretty much standard for engineering programs outside of CS, even at Stanford, CMU, MIT and the like. I'm in the materials science program.

> It is roughly equivalent to chastizing NFL and NBA teams for taking all of the NCAA's best players, and paying them more.

That's characterizing industry as the more advanced form of academia (NFL/NBA are more advanced than NCAA). But that's not really true. Even at the companies with the most well-funded research teams, the actual kinds of research being done in industry are often different from the sorts of research those same individuals would be doing in academia.

And while it doesn't make the headlines as often (for obvious reasons), it's hardly unusual for people in industry to return to research in academic institutions.

We don't need to think of academia and industry as zero-sum, no, but we also don't need to think of academia as merely a stepping stone to industry, even if that's how it is used by some people.

> That's characterizing industry as the more advanced form of academia

It's not a perfect analogy, but I think he was mostly trying to hit on the amateur/professional split.

> It's not a perfect analogy, but I think he was mostly trying to hit on the amateur/professional split.

Right, and I'm saying that it's inaccurate to claim that either academia or industry research is 'amateur'. They're both professional, just with different funding sources and different goals.

That analogy breaks down a little - one of the reasons to lament this is because public universities publish their research for others to consume and build upon. Research within private companies stays inside those companies.

But in that sense you might as well lament when private companies hire recent grads too, since it's competing with the talent pool for academia.

I could also make similar arguments for the NCAA, as it builds the skills of many new and young players (far more than will ever play in the professional leagues), providing an indispensable resource for the development of talent and new techniques. In addition the NCAA teams are a valuable part of the colleges they are in.

In truth, I am completely ambivalent as to the value of NCAA; but I do not believe that professors and students have any obligation to be 'loyal' to university research labs, as the universities pay the researchers as little as possible, and would be more than happy to sell the researchers down the river for a small increase in their endowment or government grants.

Companies publish plenty of research. And unlike universities, they actually make products people can use, which is even better.

Yes, they do publish plenty of research, and thanks to the Bayh-Doyle act they make a lot of money off publicically funded entities too. Those great discoveries are patented, and those licensing fees are making products expensive.

I'm not bashing the act; government wasn't getting the job done.

I would rather see something like a prize system in tech, and medical discoveries. For instance, we need a cure for a certain disease. The government could offer, say a 1 billion dollar prize, to the first company that solves the problem.

The discovery would then be required to open sourced to U.S. companies? Hell, it might prevent some companies from relocating overseas to avoid taxes? So instead of outrageous drug prices, generic drug companies would bring the price down due to competition?

(a little off topic, but relevant? Maybe not relevant towards gadgets, but relative to expensive medical cures?)

http://www.ucop.edu/ott/faculty/bayh.html

The government could offer, say a 1 billion dollar prize, to the first company that solves the problem.

There are a number of challenges with the "prize" system. Who judges whether or not an invention qualifies for the prize? Things aren't black and white in biotech. If you're drug cures a disease but has bad side effects, does that deserve a prize? What if you don't cure the disease, but you massively reduce the burden of the disease. Do you deserve a prize?

Second, the prizes would have to be much larger than $1B. Gilead (who sells the hepatitis C cure Sovaldi and Harvoni) sold $5B worth of the drugs in Q2 of this year. Their margins are likely >50%. Even relatively small drug have NPVs of several billion.

The other issue with the prize system is it makes the 2nd to market impossible. It's a disincentive to competition. Under the old system you could have two, similar drugs sold and they battle it out for market share. Even if you split the market it can be profitable. Under the prize system, if you're 2nd to market, well, tough, you get absolutely nothing. A lot of drug development is incremental. Lipitor was the 5th statin to market (and the best out of all of them). With the prize system you'd get one drug and that's it.

> unlike universities, they actually make products people can use

Universities also produce lots of things that people actually use directly in the form of Free or Open Source Software. BSD, GNU, Mach, etc. Many of the architects of the Internet were working at universities too. It's not fair to dismiss them as you did.

And some companies publish plenty of research. Microsoft is very impressive. Google good but less. Apple not so much.

No, that's wrong. The same amount of research can still be done in public universities if the talent pool is increased. You now simply have a lot more people working on the problem. Have a dozen companies with a staff of a few hundred researchers creating more knowledge, even if it's temporarily private, is a huge win. Patents expire and other companies are still capable of figuring out the competition's solution.

Basically, the entire premise is stupid. We are adding a few thousand highly skilled people into the workforce. There's no way that's a problem.

Actually, the universities will get more funding from now-wealthy alumni who made their money in industry.

You can't honestly think that the department will continue doing the same caliber of research immediately after losing 50 of its members. It will take years to regain the amount of know-how that just vacated the premises.

In the meantime that team just got a huge budget increase to continue their research.

CMU is a great university. I image there are 2-3 PhD students at the top 50 school who will be looking to work there. CMU might even be able to lure away a couple other professors from the top 25 who'd love the chance to rebuild the program.

Public companies are not a closed loop. The iPhone pushed cellphone UI rather far compared what academics did over the last 20 years.

On the other hand, it also meant that we're still stuck with capacitive touch screens.

If you think that's bad you should have seen the resistive ones.

I'd take the resistive screen of my old N900 over my current N4's capacitive any day.

Which were invented by government and university labs.

>There's generally a shortage of tenure-track jobs relative to the number of qualified PhDs, so when companies poach faculty, it improves everyone's career options.

Good for the PhDs; bad for the schools, who must now find more funding to retain the same level of talent, thus making future academic research (e.g. the next gen of robots) more challenging to accomplish

Maybe they can divert money from their athletic departments to pay their PhDs $20k more per year?

This is not an argument that applies much to, say, the mighty Carnegie Mellon Tartans.

Even at schools with actual athletics programs and budgets, most PhD students are paid with grant money won by their advisors, or through government fellowships. Not by the university. (I'm a PhD student at CMU paid with NSF grant money.)

Also of note, CMU just introduced a new presidential fellowship to fund undergraduate and graduate students in all fields [1].

1: http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/september/pres...

You are assuming that there is a talent shortage and that universities know how to rank the talent. Not really true, considering how many PhD seats there are and how few faculty seats there are.

People have been building robts for years, they're just becoming more consumer-facing. What's not good is that a few companies buy up all the talent and control the market in a monopoly or oligopoly-style situation. Whatever goes on in comercial labs will be heavily patented; all large tech companies play that game (out of necessity until such time as there is meaningful patent reform) and Uber has applied for patents on things like their surge pricing mechanism, even though the concept of equilibrium pricing is a matter of basic economics.

Your main problem seems to be with the use of patents to protect market dominance. I agree with you that this is a problem, but disagree on the cause. The patent system has been causing this kind of issue ever since its creation; look at when the Wright brothers patented aircraft roll control, and a lawyer patented cars.[1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._Selden#The_Selden_pa...

That is not the case, and I apologize for the lack of clarity. I am not totally opposed to patents, and I think your examples undermine your argument since they describe innovations that are clearly patentable (whereas my mention of Uber applying for a patent on surge pricing is highly questionable under the Prior Art standard).

My main problem is the use of capital to establish market dominance by indirectly buying out the public commons. Taxpayers arguably subsidized the development of Cornell's robotics department, with the benefits of their research being available across the whole economy (possibly through patent licensing), but by hiring away all the staff at once Uber has indirectly appropriated a chunk of that public subsidy.

Now all the individual scientists who worked there are independent agents who presumably liked the terms of the offers they received and also wanted to continue working with each other. One could say that the human capital in the lab was undervalued by the public funding option, but one could equally argue that Uber has helped itself to a large consumer surplus (qua hoarding the supply of available robotics scientists) with the joint effect of denying their availability to competitors, and increasing the price the public will have to pay to re-establish a comepetitive department, if it can do so at all.

There is no guarantee that this will result in an increase in robotics innovation from the private sector. It might suit Uber equally well to pay the robotics scientists to sit around and do nothing or otherwise fritter away the investment, as long as the scientists' absence from the marketplace of ideas disadvantages Uber's competitors. In other words, you don't need your own robot car, you just need to make it harder for anyone else to build robot cars that could compete with you.

I do not want to suggest that Uber has evil motives here, by the way - I have no idea what the firm's plans or goals are. I'm just pointing out that acquisition of a resource does not automatically lead to greater economic efficiency. We've all seen examples of ;arge firms buying up potentially disruptive competitors in order to bury them.

I have to agree with the more 'mournful' passages from a general perspective. I agree, it's promising to see the hard work of researchers finally enter the market, but the comments the author is making addresses a deeper issue.

Funding for basic research has dropped considerably over the decades across North America, yet the long-term value has shown itself to be unimaginably vast. It's incredibly short-sighted for a government to primarily invest in research that has direct industrial applications. The returns on basic research on both a financial and intellectual level, as a whole, are massive. We need to keep investing heavily in researchers that are addressing fundamental topics that some might otherwise see purely as 'academic'.

Uber didn't buy CMU's robotics department. They hired the employees. CMU didn't get any money out of it.

It's good to see robotics finally happening. I used to be in that field; I had one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams in 2005, and was a visiting scholar in robotics at Stanford in the early 1990s, where I figured out how to get legged robots run over rough terrain. It was all too early back then. Now I'm too old.

Nobody is making any money yet, though. Other than teleoperators for the military, vacuum cleaners, and industrial robots, there are no robot products that sell in quantity. Industrial robots with some limited AI are now available[1] but sales are small. This still isn't a commercial technology.

[1] http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/

An important distinction for sure. I wonder if this will make academic jobs more competitive with corporate jobs at those levels.

Side question, but where is the line drawn between something being considered "robotics" vs. something else? For example...is a Nest a robot? If it controls the temperature in my home by regulating various valves and such, isn't that robotic, even if the device isn't physically moving from thermostat to thermostat to change the temperature?

It matters that robotics isn't making money yet. Google has a big automatic driving research operation, but to make money from it, they will have to get into the auto business in a big way. That's a huge, risky investment. Also, making cars has lower margins than search ads, which means Google's stock would go down if they did that. Google could become a parts supplier to Detroit, but that's not very profitable. All the big carmakers already have their own automatic driving systems. Cadillac has one developed with CMU which is almost as good as Google's. It's hard to see how Google turns automatic driving into a big moneymaker.

Google isn't a patient company. They kill off products and research that don't pay off within a few years. At some point, they may "put more wood behind fewer arrows" and dump automatic driving. They've done it before. Google hasn't historically spent big outside their core business area. Google Fiber is still just a few demos, and that's been going on for years now.

Uber is in a better position. They're in the transportation business. They're losing their labor lawsuits and will end up buying cars and hiring drivers. As a high-volume car buyer, they can get car companies to put their self-driving technology in the cars they buy. For Uber, automatic driving adds to the business model.

While the question on profitability and margins still exists, I think there are some fairly obvious monetization angles for Google with self-driving cars.

A couple off the top of my heads:

- Freeing up all that additional time lets people use their devices to browse the internet which leads to more ad revenue

- Knowing that an AdWords ad engagement results in physically driving a customer to my retail location helps prove the value of "clicks-to-bricks" in a huge way that is worth a lot to big advertisers (speaking from experience).

- Licensing the technology and having access to all of that data can be leveraged for some very interesting targeting capabilities.

- Defensively, it keeps them in a position of power over auto makers, Tesla, Apple, etc.

Also, Google Ventures has a significant investment in Uber, so if Uber succeeds, in some ways Google succeeds.

> Google has a big automatic driving research operation, but to make money from it, they will have to get into the auto business in a big way. That's a huge, risky investment. Also, making cars has lower margins than search ads, which means Google's stock would go down if they did that.

This argument assumes that Google would want to generate from the sale of the car itself. Such a scenario seems unlikely to me. The car is simply a new platform - like the web and mobile devices - for Google to deploy their service layer on top of and collect more user data and deliver more ads.

Terminology like "mobile robotics" or "mobile manipulation" can help clarify that the system is doing perception, mapping, autonomous navigation, etc, in additional to the domain-specific tasks dictated by the application.

These phrases also to distinguish from classic industrial manipulation, where everything is bolted to the floor.

I think a more common phrase is "autonomous robots" -- meaning that the robot is able to do its job on its own -- being equipped with the systems you mention, perception, mapping, movement planning, reasoning about goals.

I think the article mentions Uber just gave CMI $5.5 million. Maybe that's User's way of compensating them. Certainly it makes sense to maintain a good relationship with the talent pipeline.

But CMU has no robotics talent pipeline - the faculty were hired away; the department is gutted!

Totally.

But we can rebuild it. Make it better, stronger, faster....

The name is still very valuable. How long do you think it would take to re-build Harvard's econ department if everyone were hired away? Not that long, because plenty of excellent young researchers (though by no means all) would join a skeleton department with the Harvard name attached.

"There’s a useful high-tech concept called the Technology Readiness Level that helps explain why Uber pounced when it did. NASA came up with this scale to gauge the maturity of a given field of applied science. At Level 1, an area of scientific inquiry is so new that nobody understands its basic principles. At Level 9, the related technology is so mature it’s ready to be used in commercial products."

There's a often a big difference between the people who like to work on level 1 verse level 9 stuff. "How do I scale this to be used by 10,000 people?" isn't even an interesting/relevant question to a researcher pursuing level 1 areas of science, but it's one of the most important questions for an engineer of a technology at level 9.

It seems to me that Silicon Valley's unicorns are themselves turning into incubators for future spin offs. Uber is taking a ridiculous amount of funding and investing in what can barely be called related technologies. It's not a conglomerate, it's not a global taxi firm, it's not a VC. It's ... Something new. And it's not alone.

Google, Amazon, AirBnB for heavens sake, all are placing bets on future innovations and models a long way from their core. I don't have a problem with this, but it's going to have a lot of knock on impacts. From traditional business valuation techniques to how to tax R&D globally, we are going to see a few decades where unfair and undemocratic could be the global theme, or, we could see better forms of governance emerge.

This, Uber going robotics crazy, is for me just a trigger to realise what has been going on for a while, from Pikkety to Varoufakis, tech has emerged from nice career to political engine of the next decades.

The boy has started saying the emperor has no clothes on. We the people need to know how to deal with a naked emperor and a new species of global something's. We the developers are not isolated from the political effects of the fun technologies we work with.

Gosh I'm pontificating now ...

Robotics for Uber is not a "barely-related technology." For a lot of us, it was always obvious that the core operational model for autonomous cars was Uber-esque. The fact that every major automaker is investing heavily in autonomy should convince you that autonomous cars are an existential threat to Uber.

(Not to mention that the driver situation is one of Uber's biggest issues at the moment!)

That last point is really fascinating: The employment status of Uber's drivers could have a significant effect on the speed at which autonomous vehicles are introduced in this country.

Uber may accumulate a tremendous amount of cash, only to suffer unfavorable legal rulings that jeopardize its current business model. One of the obvious solutions would be to devote that money towards replacing the drivers with automation, so that the entire "independent contractor vs. employee" issue becomes moot.

The employment status of Ubers drivers is a tiny proportion of the impact autonomous cars will have, and to be honest unfavourable legal rulings is factored into their model (Uber seems to be going after 100% of all taxi regiemes, but if they get locked out of only x % - where x is some unknown factor say around 60% - then they are still a vast global cash cow.

But just look at the changes that autonomous cars will have apart from solving Ubers W2 and pension provision:

- 1/3 of major city ground space is parking - replace that with new housing, or nice green parks.

- we think drones will revolutionise delivery - but put a lock box into every cars trunk and add in clever routing software and see what happens - freight and passenger changed the railways. What happens when my commute is merely part of a longer freight haul.

- social effects - an hours commute facing forwards and concentrating suddenly becomes ... Family time? Sleep time? Work time? Sex and drugs and adultery?

- ownership - I own my car. I choose the colours. If Uber buys 1 million cars they won't ask me my opinion - or will I rent my car to them when I am not commuting in it? Will I part own with several others I am fairly certain will not be doing sex and drugs on the nice upholstery?

- it's so big it's scary.

PS - completely agree with the "it's out of the labs into the real world - great !" idea you wrote at top of the page.

PPS

A more useful answer would be that Uber developing autonomous cars to defend against regulatory difficulties is such a huge leap it cannot be defended as a business strategy and only as a VC style investment. These unicorns are not planning on surviving by growing their current business but by starting up totally new ones. It's as if Barclays Bank said, well, we don't need all you employees, we're moving all our assets over to that 12 line peel script over there

Introducing self-driving cars might harm Uber as well. Drivers might leave en-masse in protest since they're being replaced anyways. If Uber can't roll out SDCs fast enough (maybe parts shortages or whatever) they'll be screwed.

Now that I think about it, Uber might have to stockpile the SDCs and release them all at once.

That's never happened before when industries have become automated. It's not likely to happen this time.

Most drivers need the income. They leave en-masse in protest and there's a lot of incentive for poor drivers to defect from the protest and pick up even more fares.

If that happens it will only be a short term hit. You can say anything about capitalism you want, but nothing beats it if you need a particular thing and have the money to pay for it.

(I'm going to make some flat statements that are not meant to be inflammatory about Uber, but are there to be a bedrock to the next step in the logic chain I think is important - so read the next few lines with that in mind please :-)

Uber's core operating model is to forcibly standardise taxi regulations in a huge number of regulatory regimes by appealing over the heads of regulators to the market in the hope that if they move fast enough all the regulators won't gang up on them all at the same time. It's probably going to work in much of the Western world (apart from France :-)

Now this is a regulatory play - something that needs a very different core skill set to autonomous cars. Ubers recent purchase of Nokia (?) maps is a clear "related" area because right now today, having better maps than the opposition will yield benefits whether humans or robots drive. There is not much of a chasm to leap

However autonomous cars are a leap. The technology is only "slightly" there. The legal, regulatory and business models over autonomous cars are nowhere like settled. Who owns the cars, what power source they will have, who will build them, who will even let Uber use them. These are all undecided questions - no way of monetising them on the scale to justify a billion dollar investment

This is not to say I don't see a market here - it's going to be staggeringly huge, as plain as the belly found my middle. But it's not yet a related business - it's not a business yet.

So what I mean is that all these unicorns are taking huge amounts of suddenly available private capital, and making R&D bets on vast new industries that have yet to become businesses. It's like building petrol garage forecourts because you see potential in the Model T. It's coming yes, but it's not your traditional way to invest billions.

The traditional way is to find a repeatable process like "buy a shop on a corner and sell coffee at five bucks a pop"

So, there is a new source of huge capital, feeding a new species of R&D company that have structures and (potential) business models that have not been seen before, thus not taxed, regulated or understood before.

So, long winded, but the distance between Uber today and a potential autonomous car taxi company is enourmous, and that distance implies a lot more fundamental change to our society than just an investment decision implies.

Everybody thinks Uber wants to make robotic cars so everybody will just use uber robotic cars.

But, why won't people buy their own robotic cars and put them on day time "search" mode for fares that get directly paid back to the owner of the vehicle? Then the vehicle can still return home for evenings/weekends when real people need immediate on-demand driving without waiting to be picked up.

That's lyft's model, no? :-)

You could do that... and Uber could be handle all the fulfillment in "search" mode. Heck, there is precedent with "normal" cars already [1].

[1] https://help.getaround.com/hc/en-us/articles/204371664-Guara...

Under this model, you're just providing capital investment in a depreciating asset in return for special privileges. You'd have to do a cost-benefit analysis to see how it would work out for you. Personally... I'd leave the capital investment in automobiles to others and just pay surge pricing in the few instances where I need immediate transportation.

why don't people have their home computers automatically join cloud computing clusters during the day so they can be used and paid for computation while the people are at work?

Because the cost of moving the data to the computer is too high. Locality is king. My private car is parked, unused, near potential customers right now.

The same reason relatively few people AirBnB their homes. There will be an administration overhead of at least some kind - who cleans the car? What happens when someone throws up in it? And so on.

I'd say, why will people buy their own robotic cars at all? At least in major cities anyway - you could buy a membership to a program (ala ZipCar, car2go, etc) and just have "a car" on tap. The downsides of ownership (maintenance, etc) will be gone.

I think this gets to the heart of Uber's play. They're up against a seemingly endless string of employment-practices lawsuits, and it increasingly looks like they're not going to win.

The way out isn't to become a cheaper taxi company, or suddenly overcome entrenched protectionism in a dozen nations. It's to keep pulling in funding and stalling legal battles for just long enough to render the entire argument irrelevant.

Driver background checks? No drivers to check on.

Driver insurance? No one to insure, sue the manufacturer if you hit something.

Employee benefits for drivers? Fire all the employee-contractors.

It's obvious that automation is a huge win for Uber. The question is whether they can live long enough to preserver their first-mover advantage, and whether they can find stop-gaps to cover the interim where autonomous cars still need drivers. I wouldn't be surprised if they let licensed passengers get behind the wheel to comply with laws before full autonomy hits.

Serious question.. what is AirBnb doing that's highly innovative and somewhat speculative? Got any links?

It's not clear to me that private businesses having research labs is entirely new. The mouse came out of Xerox Parc. Unix and C came out of Bell Labs. And so forth.

As someone who knows very little about economics personalities, could you explain how Pikkety and Varoufakis fit into this scheme?

There is a (re)surgence of left wing politics detectable as we move away from the old certainties of 20th C. The right is mired in a religious spiral and the left has yet to discover a seam of genuine connection across class to unite over. However it is clear that economics is changing and that class divisions will likely align along wealth.

Pikkety is French economist who claims he proves that returns to capital are increasing faster than incomes. The means the rich will get richer faster. The last time this happened was Edwardian era (staving children in London, banquets on the Titanic, massive unrest). The wars of 20 C removed wealth from rich and reallocated it more fairly as democracy and technology spread.

However it's going back. Varoufakis is left wing Greek economist (used to work for Valve) and became Greek finance minister when Greece elected a left wing government in January.

Greece has been the European gateway to Middle East and Russia - it spends ten times average on military and when it joined the Euro (effectively a gold standard) it joined at wrong exchange rate - really badly wrong.

Their economy was shot - Germany for example is able to import Greek olives and export more Greek olive oil than Greece does (Greeks have not invested in automation, their farm subsidies are against it, German farm subsidies fuck up a different part of German agriculture)

Anyway Greece economy collapses - but they are in the Euro, so they can't make Greek Drachmas cheaper to help exports - so the only option is to pay people less (it's called internal devaluation or something) it is clearly a shit system for balancing out productivity across Europe

What should happen is a federal agreement to reallocate funds through tax and spend and bonds. But federalism is political death in Europe.

So a well meaning elite has for decades been pushing a European project - stop war happening again by building trade links, then improve trade by harmonising standards, then improve finance by using same currency, then we will join as a political union and never kill 100 million people again.

Unfortunately the Euro is a gold standard and will kill you at the wrong exchange rate - and you can either have federal reallocation of funds (sensible but politically impossible) or you can force the people to take pay cuts till their productivity matches their income.

Varoufakis has been pointing this out for years, then got elected and stood up to the European project and said this is economic madness, the people have given us a mandate, you can't manage the structural change like this. He probably called the German finance minister a Nazi during heated discussions.

This all went down like a lead balloon - either Greece toed the line and dumped it's democratic mandated and got fucked over, or European project (peace not war) had to end. The Germans held the debt over Greeks till Greeks blinked first.

So we have a Western economic consensus of austerity and "fudging" the worlds second largest currency, a renminbi that is based on spreadsheets massaged by politicians desperate to look good while Chine goes from industrial to manufacturing, and a willingness to overlook 1930s level suffering to keep from facing deep political divisions over federalism.

At the same time Russia is trying to foment a war or two in order to grab something just East of Greece.

Sorry I seem to have lost the thread and scrolling upwards on iPhone textbox is hard.

So two left wing economists represent the zeitgeist - we are seeing greater returns to private capital (do you wonder why all those unicorns funded by A16Z have not IPOd? Because they can get as much cash as they want from sovereign funds and banks.) Greater returns to private capital, no left wing intellectual consensus on what is happening and democratic outpourings asking for debt relief are forced out of the way.

Now with a new set of massive tech companies, who are making bets on far reaching changes, not because they are white elephants but because the industries that will wipe out today's global stars are already visible on radar, those industries are going to reward tech skills highly (and increase returns to capital) for say 20% of us, and then will break the social convention of sharing in increased wealth through regular jobs because robots will be doing the jobs.

So it's a perfect storm of technology taking away jobs, no political will to get behind legitimate democratic discontent and meet difficult decisions about the structure of society, returns on capital making class divisions wider, and new forms of global companies being created without Public company style scrutiny, and without a global consensus on how to effectively tax such structures.

We can use technology to usher in a golden age - the economics of technology almost mandate another century of massive wealth creation planet wide. But sharing that fairly and in a managed way is the challenge - and that challenge is represented by those two economists.

Sorry - wall of text, unedited. Will come back to it after my no-procrast timeout !

Proto-'philes' a la "The Diamond Age"

> It's not a conglomerate, it's not a global taxi firm, it's not a VC.

Of course they're a global taxi firm. They're just a taxi firm that does their own R&D instead of outsourcing it to car manufacturers. Right now, they're investing in robot taxis.

>Varoufakis, tech has emerged from nice career to political engine of the next decades.

Uh, he is universally regarded as a failure in Greek politics and a national embarrassment. He resigned in disgrace. If anything, Greece accepted terms worse than the original terms he fought against. He'll be forever known as the guy who hysterically yelled "terrorism" at his creditors and refused to look at Greece's spending, its tax cheats, and its over-abundance of social entitlements. Turns out his "Modern Marxism" is just as much of a failure as classical Marxism.

Yeah, I think the blowback for "Revenge of the Geeks" started long ago. The mainstream long appropriated internet/geek culture, rules and regulations have long been in place, and ideas of some kind of tech-led political revolution are fairly silly. A different kind of taxi isn't a revolution. Its boring.

I'm surprised by that assessment - my perception of his actions (well apart from the in person in the negotiation rooms which seemed to be beyond what even diplomats were used to) was a consistent planned approach - there is no way to pay back Greek debts, no matter how it came about. Reform is needed but first take the debt yoke off.

As the yoke was used to effect reforms the EU thought were needed as opposed to any democratic slice of Greece, it's in no way democratic. And that seems to have been Varoufakis position all the way through too.

Structural reform that deep is always going to be painful - but it needs to be bought into by the people - not imposed from outside. Britain still has deep divisions (North South, Labour Tory) from years of transferring manufacturing and heavy industry to cheaper off shore locations in the 1980s. But Greece will just hate Germany without any political tranche to explain why the reforms were necessary.

This should have been a Greek decision - if they needed to leave the Euro to be free to make those decisions then so be it. No one learns from being forced to do the right thing.

As a CMU grad it was kind of a gut punch when I heard about this. However, I'm confident that the CMU robotics program will be just fine in the long run.

The thing that worries me more is if this makes universities afraid of partnering with companies like Uber in the future.

They can be afraid if they want. What are they going to do about it? Faculty will want to do it. If the administration forbids that, they will not attract good faculty.

I think some increased consideration of public/private partnerships can only be a good thing. They generally seem to benefit the private side of the partnership from this example and others.

I'm a CMU grad as well. And CMU has a long and storied history of being raided for talent like this. 40 at once is unusually big, but this story plays out regularly.

It's good for the profs, it's mostly good for the school, and it's part of why we have such a good reputation in industry -- so it's good for alums like you and me personally, as well.

With that said, sure, 40 is a lot. But the Robotics Institute will recover.

Science used to be a gift economy. Today, stuff like physics still is. That's why we have physicists working on problems, building on each other's research. The collaboration aspect is key. This is what the free software and open source model was based on.

Now next door to the physicists are the biochemists who have been snapped up by Big Pharma and now their stuff is patented. And when it's not patented, it's a trade secret. Their colleagues can no longer build on their research.

So the real danger isn't that the companies are willing to pay these researchers to work on commercially viable robots. It's that there will now be an explosion of PATENTS encumbering the whole field! Robotics researchers won't be as free to build on each other's work, like the physicists, whose results are less monetizable.

The public pays for research and, when it gets profitable, the profit is taken away from them. What should happen is that the public universities should be able to continue giving their professors free access to the research whose whole beginning, false starts and proving out, WAS FUNDWD WITH PUBLIC MONEY! Instead, the public is shut out of benefiting from the very research they helped fun. The only benefit they'll derive from now on is as consumers, the profits will go to the private sector.

I guess the private sector owns the means of distribution, and the public essentially funds "incubators" and is forced into an early exit. That's the best we can hope for, in our system... but the sad part is that the research could go a lot faster, like the explosion that open source software fueled, if these guys weren't shut up in silos. The public's money would go a lot further.

Replace patents with prizes.

What's the connection between Uber and Robotics? Computer vision for driving?

Computer vision for self-driving, then longer-term, automating logistics. Something has to load all those self-driving trucks...

Automate the driving function.

This happened to the University of Toronto's Machine Learning lab. Microsoft just came in and handed out salary offers to everyone. Makes complete sense compared to buying out an actual company.

Hopefully this will drive more funding to privately funded research by non-academic groups. I've struggled with such issue in the past.

Excellent. I shall dig it out from under the stairs then and give it a bit of a dust.

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