An Uber Story

Carnegie Mellon — and to some extent, Pittsburgh itself — is known for robotics. Which explains why Uber would locate its Uber Advanced Technologies Center in the Steel City, and not Silicon Valley. And yet! Uber’s official announcement of the center, first reported by the very handsome John Biggs, nimbly elides that the ultimate project of the research conducted there is to replace its thousands and thousands of human drivers with bundles of sensors and algorithms.

Uber and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are announcing today a strategic partnership that includes the creation of the Uber Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, near the CMU campus. The center will focus on the development of key long-term technologies that advance Uber’s mission of bringing safe, reliable transportation to everyone, everywhere.

The partnership will provide a forum for Uber technology leaders to work closely with CMU faculty, staff, and students — both on campus and at the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) — to do research and development, primarily in the areas of mapping and vehicle safety and autonomy technology.

“We are excited to join the community of Pittsburgh and partner with the experts at CMU, whose breadth and depth of technical expertise, particularly in robotics, are unmatched. As a global leader in urban transportation, we have the unique opportunity to invest in leading edge technologies to enable the safe and efficient movement of people and things at giant scale. This collaboration and the creation of the Uber Advanced Technologies Center represent an important investment in building for the long term of Uber.”

— Jeff Holden, Uber Chief Product Officer

One of things that Uber excels at, in terms of its public policy, is its ability to tell many stories at once. One of those stories is about job creation — like that, on average, twenty thousand new drivers sign up every month. This story is told forcefully, by design, in order to allay concerns in a roundabout way that the jobs it is creating are both shitty and temporary; the story of how it will replace most of those jobs is one that it is telling here, softly, gently. Given all these stories, perhaps we should be less-than-credulous when we hear them!

Anyways, another story still, one that we should expect to get louder, perhaps sooner than we might expect, is one about this statistic that’s a little buried in a blog post:

UBER IS AVAILABLE TO 137,451,768 AMERICANS WITH AN AVERAGE PICKUP TIME OF LESS THAN 10 MINUTES — THAT’S 43% OF THE U.S. POPULATION COVERED IN JUST FOUR YEARS

The primary measure by which Uber will be judged as a ubiquitous utility that transports things — not just people! — won’t be jobs, but availability: When was the last time you cared about how many jobs your electric or cell phone company has created or shed as technology has changed? Covering seventy-five or eighty-five or ninety-nine percent of Americans with a pickup time of less than ten minutes is a goal — one that Uber surely has — that could never be accomplished with a human labor force, no matter how vast or indentured the new app-tasked servant class becomes. (Probably? Other apps need laborers too! Until they are rich enough to have their own drones, anyway.) Some may lament the passing of the Uber driver, but drones shed no tears — and, eventually, nor do the people using them.