Uber poached people from Carnegie Mellon robotics lab to build self-driving cars
theverge.com
theverge.com
Damn, should have went into robotics.
You're a liability to the company who is now openly plotting your exit, a target for the old boy taxi network, and a target for government.
I really would say it's far safer than a taxi. Someone planning on robbing someone probably wouldn't use a GPS capable device to first have the potential crime scene come to them with continuous tracking the whole time, only to steal what they could get from basically anyone on the street.
Right now, we have two conditions where autonomous systems work well: on the highway, where you can use products like Delphi's sensor package to do adaptive cruise control and lane assist, and in more urban environments with very detailed maps (see the Google autonomous cars).
I actually think there's a good chance Uber can create very detailed maps of places like Manhattan and San Francisco, and make autonomous vehicles that can use these maps to drive around.
Uber is under such a microscope when it comes to drivers that it makes a lot of sense for them to sink the R&D into this problem. All the cost going into paying people, paying to find people, and paying to clean up when people make a mistake, goes away.
One thing people forget is that building cars is hard and expensive. Autonomous vehicles is not only about mounting some sensors and computers. Its about interacting with a slew of systems that were not designed for autonomy. A fully autonomous car that can drive people around like a Taxi requires a complete engineering overhaul from the wheels and up.
Clearly this move by Uber rewrote the book. They took the director of the center, Tony Stentz, and a lot of others besides.
That's not the only case of significant recruiting decimating robotics staff members recently, either. There have been a lot of departures from my own lab.
At your office, have you experienced any "lingering resentment" -- similar to that in the article?
The suddenness was rather amazing. Salary bumps were given but it was not enough.
If making competitive bids for labor is "sleazy poaching", god help us all.
Is the problem that they hired "too many" people? Is there some maximum rate at which you're supposed to hire employees at another organization before you're the bad guy?
People here rant about the anti-competitive no-poach conspiracies, and we're supposed to compartmentalize that away while we get outraged at the exact opposite?
Sorry if I'm missing the point here; I just don't get it.
When the smartest people work for the richest people, to make the richest people so rich that hardly any of that wealth can ever get spent in even ridiculous ways, it automatically makes the system more unequal, less stable and secure for everyone involved.
More importantly, how do rich people get rich? How does Uber make money? Uber provides a service in over 300 cities which people can choose to use, and evidently a lot of people do use it. Over a million per day. Now, they are voluntarily paying for a service which people are voluntarily driving for. These people see value in the marketplace which Uber has established, likely due to it's cost and time efficiency. So, Uber makes money by saving people time and money, in comparison to the alternatives. If they do not provide a quality service they will not exist.
That doesn't mean what they're doing is necessarily a good thing. A lot of people argue that Uber saves people time and money by circumventing legislation designed to protect passengers and drivers. Uber's entire business lives or dies on whether or not they're a taxi business and whether or not their drivers are employees. If it's the case that they are a taxi company or their drivers are employees then Uber are definitely in the wrong at the moment. I don't have an opinion either way because I'm not qualified to say.
If they do not provide a quality service they will not exist.
Plenty of terrible businesses that provide shockingly poor quality products exist. I could save people time and money on their building needs by starting a construction business that ignored building regulations. There'd be plenty of trade because lots of people put cost before quality but that wouldn't be a good thing.
Copyright/patent law and same-sex marriage are two quick examples of things that clearly need legal review as the world has changed. We wouldn't just say: "well that's how the law's written so that's how it should be and everything against it is wrong" would we?
Uber's success is an expression of the general public's desire for a different and better system. Taxi's aren't extinct, they're still around and they've even made lots of upgrades to try and win back customers, however it's pretty clear that ride sharing services just provide better quality and value. I personally believe there are some rules that should exist (disabled/wheelchair + underserved areas) but it doesn't need an entire encumbent taxi industry to remain solely through legal mandates. When there's such growing demand for a service, we should start looking at whether the legislation itself needs to change.
BTW: With all the self-driving cars stuff happening, both taxis and ride share drivers might be out of a job anyway, and our current auto laws will definitely have to change when that becomes a real thing.
What exactly is the issue with wealth? The business owners are rich yes, but you don't get to that level without providing something of massive value to someone. In this case, Uber is helping millions of people every day. Also you don't die and leave with all your money, it always gets dispersed eventually, even if it's longer than a single generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
I don't think there's anything wrong with making some money, but the magnitude of the wealth gap is clearly a serious problem (and evidence against the idea that wealth trickles down in some useful way).
I'd argue we are all dramatically better of due to Microsoft and Apple.
Don't forget that Uber have screwed every robotics researcher who doesn't work at Carnegie Mellon with this. These are probably some of the best paid, best funded, most exciting robotics engineering jobs going, and Uber handed the posts to their preferred group rather than using the free market. That's not fair or reasonable.
I've hired people before on the spot because of who they are and what they know. Is that somehow wrong?
Life isn't fair and sometimes the right team is who they already know. Do you want them to interview every robotics researcher on the planet in a massive interview round instead of getting work done with a pretty great group that's already proven themselves?
Why should they? It's their money and they can choose to spend it (within reason) however they choose to. That actually is how a free market should work, with independent actors doing ludicrous things with their money, irrespective of what you or I think.
That's not fair or reasonable.
Not sure those ex-CMU engineers/researchers would agree with that statement.
If you really want that change in the world, and you really want to see cancer research progress or robotics, then YOU should get going and do it.
Universities like CMU are responsible for recruiting and training the next generation of great roboticists and there's a difference between responsibly harvesting researchers from an institution in a way that allows the lab to maintain its culture and bounce back vs plundering it in such a way that would take many years to recover from.
It's a prisoner's dilemma style situation where all companies involved in robotics would benefit from a thriving academic robotics community, even if it would be more competitive if those researchers were in house. Uber was the first one to publically defect which might cause further defections to the detriment of everyone.
All the companies in robotics making hiring agreements would actually be illegal. Collusion in fixing salaries/blacklisting whole categories of employee candidates is a much worse evil. Maybe we can stop trying to social engineer, and address the situation as it exists.
It's better for both CMU and Uber if they perform the former. It just requires Uber to take a longer term view of things rather than optimizing for immediate gain.
I'm not arguing that this is the reality on the ground. But I see this as a potential line of argument worth considering.
I agree that this situation hard to avoid, and its hard to blame Uber for being a better employer then public but still, there is nothing to celebrate about the fact that CMU got stripped of its research lab and that the tech will land in this company's sleazy hands.