But the vehicle's route is chosen by exactly-known demand rather than following a centrally-set and inflexible schedule and route. It's not much like a bus at all in actual practice.

I've never seen a bus that dynamically picks a point-to-point route based on the needs of the passengers on it at the moment.

The blog post cites the prior practice of informal carpooling with strangers; it is somewhat dishonest to insinuate that they claimed to invent anything.

Not quite. More like the shared taxi stops that operate in poorer countries. I saw many of these in Cuba. Not like a bus in that it was:

  1. Faster
  2. Carried fewer people
  3. Had route flexibility. You could pay extra to go off the route, negotiated with the driver and checking it didn't inconvenience the other passengers.

This is radically different from how we run transport in North America.

With self driving cars, I could see Uber running shuttles around the city that decided optimal multi-user routes taking into consideration all the various route requests users had entered.

I always figured this was their end game as far as consumer transport was concerned.

Hmm yeah, this kind of technology combined with vehicles that can carry large numbers of people could be very effective. Not quite the same as a bus, significantly better in fact.