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Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

This feels a bit strange, no? Shouldn't all of their drivers immediately stop using Uber?

I think individuals who are living paycheck to paycheck as Uber contractors probably aren't able to respond to the possibility that their job will be replaced by automation. Very few people are able to prepare for that kind of thing, actually, even if the warning is in the foreseeable future.

If they quit, what should they do to pay the bills in the mean time?

Uber's design inherently makes any kind of collective bargaining almost impossible. As long as money can be made by being an Uber contractor, people will do it -- right up to the moment that Uber replaces them all with self-driving cars. There is no picket line to patrol here, no way that the drivers can meaningfully coordinate with one another. Dispatch communicates with drivers, and vice versa, but there is no possibility of lateral communication between drivers.

It's pure, emotionless capitalism. Labour is now a commodity like any other. Depending who you ask, this is either the harbinger of a widening wage gap and the poverty that accompanies it, or a long-overdue development which paves the way for optimum efficiency.

I have an idea for unionizing Uber drivers via a smartphone app. It would work around the problem you mentioned, which is that Uber can quickly replace workers who strike for 1 week or more at a time.

Basically, do "flash strikes" for 30 minutes at at time.

It would work like this: Uber drivers install an app to join the union, and when the union decides to "strike", it sends a message to all drivers in the union. The drivers cancel all rides for some short period of time, say, 30 minutes, and then they resume driving like normal. This driver outage would be disruptive to Uber in terms of user experience, but it wouldn't be long enough to replace the striking workers.

Part of the reason unions work is because they sign agreements with employers that prevent them from hiring from outside the union to fill jobs during a strike. I can't imagine a scenario in which Uber enters such an agreement. Even if a union exists, Uber is free to hire non-union members and pay them as much as necessary to get them to work during a strike. In the long run, economics wins out and Uber ends up paying the minimum that enough people are willing to work for, which is exactly what they were doing anyway.

Then the people who don't join the union (or join but don't follow the instructions) get all the rides during those 30 minutes, and everybody who canceled all their rides during the strike gets kicked out of Uber, and word quickly spreads that going on strike is a good way to instantly lose your livelihood.

You'd have to somehow get 100% penetration, not only among current Uber drivers but among all potential Uber drivers in the area, before doing anything. Doesn't sound feasible, especially since anyone who declines to participate will make a killing.

What would they be trying to achieve by striking? Getting Uber to stop pursuing self-driving cars?

It's pointless, because someone at some point will launch the self-driving version of Uber.

Also, Surge Pricing would make it difficult to get everyone to hold out for the strike.

Of course uber knows what other apps you have installed.

> no way that the drivers can meaningfully coordinate with one another

Except that 100% of drivers have a smartphone on a public network.

Well, they could just switch to working for Lyft instead of a company that is actively trying to automate their jobs away, if for no other reason than to put some upward pressure on Uber's driver payout percentage.

By that logic, shouldn't all of the workers in [manufacturing|food service|sales|etc] do the same?

Virtually all firms are going to invest in optimal production/service methodologies in order to stay competitive and capture the largest margins. In the (somewhat) near term, that means replacing a whole lot human labor with automation. But until then, there is still a job there to be done and a lot of people that would like to have the money for doing it.

With that said, I don't disagree that the long-term career prospects of taxi driving are plummeting. I think many other careers are nearing their expiration dates as well, though I may be overly pessimistic...

As scientists, we work towards a better future, where human does not need to work, and machine does everything for you, the only tiny bit of work human will do is to ..... be a battery... it is paradise...

This doesn't represent an immediate threat to Uber's drivers, and I doubt most Uber drivers see themselves as Uber drivers in 3-5 years.

Be serious.

Neither Uber nor Google have ANY experience making cars. They aren't the simplest products to sell. Complex regulations that varies city by city, state by state, country by country. And even then the minute you become successful the existing car manufacturers will simply jump into the market and swallow you whole.

Uber drivers have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Uber and Google don't need to sell cars. They only need to sell rides.

All the car companies are working on autonomous vehicles, too. I think you're right that Uber and Google don't know enough about building cars, I think the smart money is that somebody like Volvo[0] or Volkswagen will be first to market with a commercial autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicle.

[0] http://www.cnet.com/news/a-ride-in-volvos-autonomous-car-how...

Self-driving cars is mostly a software / data problem, not a car problem. Google is much better positioned for that than car manufacturers.

(Leaving aside privacy issues for the moment) An existing car manufacturer could build sensors/data collection into their entire fleet over a period of several years. They could monitor the environment around millions of cars and learn to model driver behavior.

I don't know how many Google Maps cars Google has, but if car manufacturers got serious about data collection, there's no way Google could compete with the scale of their installed user base.

That's just collection, but you need also need real-time processing. I'm pretty sure Google has more software engineers and computer scientists at hand than any car manufacturer.

Sure, but a car company could hire software people, or contract with somebody like IBM.

Most of what Google is doing with their self-driving car is not a difficult software or AI problem, they've simply built extremely, extremely detailed maps of a limited subset of roads: http://www.wired.com/2014/05/google-self-driving-car-maps/

Contrast that with the DARPA challenges, where a car needed to navigate unpredictable off-road terrain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

Doing it Google's way, you need some sensors and onboard processing, but the amount of hardware is actually pretty minimal compared to Carnegie Mellon's self-driving cars. Most of the fancy hardware is for making the maps, not driving the car.

They have nothing to worry about.

First Uber isn't going to actually ever do this - programming is not their core competency, and they don't make enough to fund it for the length of time necessary.

Second it'll be decades before there are self driving cars, so the drivers can make money in the meantime.

Third, once the cars do arrive they will start with long distance highway trips, which is not what Uber does.

What is Uber's core competency?

It's organizing and connecting people.

It is not high difficulty engineering projects. Their app and website are pretty straightforward stuff.

For a self driving car you need completely different people.

But surely they can get the right people with their capital.

You need the right people to know who the right people are.

Uber is just not well equipped for this. They could do it certainly (throw enough money at it), but their risk/reward is not in the right place.

(But it I mean setup a research team and at least type, I don't expect a self driving car for decades. Maybe a sort of road train that only drives on pre-marked routes would happen first.)

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