Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver II: How we doing?
615 Responses
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Those wet robots may be necessary at the moment
Here's hoping the new 'wetbots' may evolve into 'wet-ware wolves' and bite back!
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Uber's current business model has the drivers providing the cars.
It seems quite a fantastic leap to Uber providing the means of transport. Not least because it would place an unaccustomed level of responsibility on Uber itself. -
Drive, she said...
Fairfax opines*:OPINION: The Uber service in North America reports that a quarter of its drivers are over the age of 50.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/82799449/sharing-economy-is-clearing-the-way-for-new-job-opportunities
BnB and Pet sitting are other grey areas for post-retirement earnings too, we learn.
gissajob...* Janine Starks is a financial commentator with expertise in banking, personal finance and funds management. Opinions in this column represent her personal views. They are general in nature and are not a recommendation, opinion or guidance to any individuals in relation to acquiring or disposing of a financial product. Readers should not rely on these opinions and should always seek specific independent financial advice appropriate to their own individual circumstances.
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Alfie, in reply to
Uber’s current business model has the drivers providing the cars.
It seems quite a fantastic leap to Uber providing the means of transport.The more likely option is wealthier people buying autonomous vehicles and leasing them to Uber during downtime. That would see Uber running a good deal of the transport network and clipping the ticket on every journey, without the necessity of owning the infrastructure or having to put up with those uppity drivers.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
wealthier people buying autonomous vehicles and leasing them to Uber during downtime
Timeshare and rideshare!
What could possibly go worng? -
BenWilson, in reply to
A lot of drivers in NZ are over 50. But I think the over 65 group is pretty small. Unless they're actually impoverished, I'd think people doing it at that age would be doing it for a hobby and for company. If they're doing it in an expensive car, like what a lot of old people have, they could even lose money doing it.
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I can't say I'm worried about Uber's end game. What they have made is so easily reproduced that the dominance of that particular company is very much in doubt. An UberAutonomous would really, really break their existing model so much it's hard to consider them to have any competence in it at all (quite aside from the Sci Fi ness of the idea at the moment). Their whole thing has been exploiting workers, getting them to go above and beyond in customer service for peanuts. Suddenly it's not going to have that in there at all. Instead you get a vehicle that you basically have to control yourself solely through the app and voice commands (that will be great fun, I'm sure), which has just had any number of unsupervised people in it who could easily have left rubbish in there, vandalized it, stolen things, vomited on the seat. Getting laws altered to allow such vehicles on the road is a massive, massive compliance job. Which is not exactly Uber's core competence. It won't be them driving this technology.
But they do love to talk it up, and I think that's mostly a rhetorical assault on the value of drivers. It's their little way of saying that drivers are basically worthless, despite being 99.99% of their employees, most of their capital investment, and almost all of what is good about Uber from the customer POV.
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You don’t have to think very hard to think of scenarios that are all in a day’s work for a human driver that are nightmare scenarios for programmers, could represent tens of thousands of hours of programming each. And these just go on and on and on. How will it handle:
-McDonald’s Drive Thru
-Long right of ways
-Passengers dropping the pin in the wrong place
-Passengers being in inaccessible locations
-Requests to drive in a particular way, slow down, stop, go back, a little further, looking for number 89B/2 thanks
-Drunks generally
-Being stopped by police, road works, detours
-Breakdowns, particularly on the motorway
-Anyone needing any assistance in or out of the vehicle.
-Lost property
-Fare jumping
-Homeless people who just want to sleep in the car
-Vandals
-Multiple pickups and dropoffs
-Waiting by the roadside as people shop
-Getting luggage in or out
-Some having a medical issue like an asthmatic attack
-Passengers overloading the vehicle
-Passengers carrying babies in their arms or sitting small children in adult seats
-People using it to transport dirty things like a lawnmower, or bags of fertilizer, or animals, or garbage
-People eating in the vehicle, and leaving their rubbish there
-An irritated taxi driver standing in front of it stopping it from working indefinitely
-A passenger who disputes the destination or route
-People just stealing it and stripping it for parts
-Emergency usage
-Verbal commands to do anything that would be expected of a human to understand, coming from a police officer, road worker, emergency worker, film crew, civil defence
-The enormous possible array of natural impediments that can occur randomly on the road
-Getting trapped
-Getting a dirty camera
-Getting a busted microphone
-Going offline due to a network outage
-Passengers disputing who is actually in control of the vehicle
-Hearing commands over loud music
-Not acting on commands that might be heard in loud music
-Reading road signs and acting on them
-Working out changed road conditions that have not been entered into the database, like unpainted lines, or newly scraped lines.Now think about how they programmed the human drivers to do that stuff. Oh, yeah, they didn’t. They just work. Hard, and well.
Of course you can always invent a cunning solution to each problem, with sufficient programming time and systems engineering. But I can think of another problem in a whole lot less time than that. These are just things off the top of my head, not an exhaustive list. Ultimately if you want fully autonomous dangerous machines fully coexisting with humans using their existing infrastructure and all the assumptions that go with it, you need to solve the “common sense problem”. Which is not even close to being solved.
The best you can do (before then) is engineer an infrastructure that is different in which the conditions are tightly controlled. Guess what? It’s already been invented and it’s called a railway.
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Hi Ben, this crap about driverless cars is just a red herring from Uber, it basicly says do what we want in the way of removing regulations or we will let lose driversless cars on you. As you say how in the earth can they progamme a vehicle to do all sorts of things when the basic app does from time to time has faults. Is the passenger always where the app says they are for instance, this usually gets corrected by the driver or the passenger manually contacting the other party.
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The thing with driverless cars is that because they don’t need the owner to be driving, the paradigm where you always have a car with you parked at home or your destination goes away. One option is that the car takes you into town and then goes off to a parking area some way away until needed. But it makes more sense that it becomes available to others and thus either costs the owner less or doesn’t have a personal owner?
And it’s not a one-for-one swap for a taxi or a normal car, any more than a car was a drop-in replacement for a horse. I’d imagine the mode of access would be much like an Uber – but the vehicle would turn up, you’d load your own bags, it would go to where the hirer instructed, and you’d disembark. If you trashed it, slept in it, or otherwise misbehaved, you’d get charged. (Just like if you rent a car and and abuse it).
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BenWilson, in reply to
I'd pretty much expected someone to come in and start proposing solutions to my list. This is what keeps the dream of this kind of thing alive. That as a person it's easy to see a solution to every problem. Each one sounds trivial.... to a human. But the list of them just goes on and on. And each solution isn't just a guy sitting there making up his mind to do it that way, but a software engineering problem involving designing, testing, then rolling out the changes to millions of units. Rinse and repeat ten thousand times.
In theory, it can be done. So can interstellar travel. That doesn't mean it's not something that's well beyond practical to actually do. This is a truly colossal change. What does it actually acheive in the end? The destruction of the extremely cheap labor of millions of people who are already doing this job as well as such a system could ever hope to. As in literally the aim is to be almost as good as what we already had. Or cheaper, maybe, by the billionth ride.
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goforit, in reply to
how is the computorised car going to know and react to a drunk and his mates entering the car with food being eaten and open bottles, these two things are the curse of the taxi industry. At least a human driver can say f^^k off with that crap come back when you can respect the enviroment I work in.
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There will be a way to engineer a response to that. Expensive vomit detectors perhaps. Or maybe a STASIesque bank of people watching a video stream, statistically narrowed down by triggers. It will employ 50 geeks for 5 years designing it. At the end it will be 90 percent as reliable as a dude sitting there and smelling some arsehole puking in his car.
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Alfie, in reply to
What does it actually acheive in the end? The destruction of the extremely cheap labor of millions of people who are already doing this job as well as such a system could ever hope to.
I suspect you're railing against the inevitable march of robotics Ben.
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BenWilson, in reply to
I suspect you’re railing against the inevitable march of robotics Ben
It certainly doesn’t need any more cheerleaders. But there’s an awful lot of applications in which robotics might not actually be inevitable, and an even bigger, by several orders of magnitude, set of applications in which it is incredibly unlikely to be profitable to anyone except the engineers (but not the people paying them) in our lifetimes. That already goes for most technological businesses in spades in the first place, they’re mostly risky as fuck. But to add “insanely difficult” and “replacing something that isn’t broken” to that puts the projects well beyond viable.
And no, I’m not “railing against” it. I’d be happy if it wasn’t the case that robotics is actually not going to do what Sci Fi reckons, much as the space race hasn’t, and a whole lot of other science applications. Because it’s not interesting to write about Sci Fi reality. No one likes to hear about practical limitations, except as a fictitious plot device that brings it back to merely impossible from hyper-impossible, and we get to watch another sad superheroes story in which humans use magic to act like children.
I’m simply stating my case that I’m not at all worried about it, when it comes to the replacing of human drivers in cabs, and pointing out that cheerleading this shit might actually be serving a more sinister side effect. I actually have a checklist on what is likely to be a successful intelligent agent project, and have done since I studied the engineering of systems like this in the mid 1990s, before embarking on a career in it. I can remember exactly all the same bullshit rhetoric about self-driving cars even then, and similar videos in which someone sat in a self-driving car with their hands hovering suspiciously close to the wheel, given that their actual lives finally depended on their own development, and the million things that could go wrong literally approached them at speed. Always, they were confident that in the next few years this system would be ready to drive on roads. That’s actually the main constant in this kind of development, that it’s always just around the corner.
<continued below, as my longest ever single PAS rant>
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<continued from above>
I’m sure that it will one day actually be true that it’s just around the corner. When is that day? How long is a piece of string? Could this ball of string even be of interstellar length? Until we reach the end of it, no one will know. But always the fact that it must be finite drives people along. People seem to forget that a Googol is also finite. As is (10^100)!.
But the part I particularly don’t like, having seen it from close up, is the extent to which the appeal of AI systems is driven by management-by-numbers types. There’s a particularly cynical dislike of skilled workers that pervades all their thinking. Which is why they always fund such unimaginative projects, things that are “technically possible” and have a “provable payback” (saved wages) if successful. The fact that there are way, way, way lower hanging fruit that could multiply the worth of their companies at way less cost seems to them less interesting than the fact that they can see the small step from replacing a skilled local with a lower paid skilled immigrant has a natural progression to replacing even that person with a machine.
So we get a future vision in which we are required not to change our habits at all, nor our infrastructure – we just destroy the human labour to get something that does the same as before, only cheaper. Somehow the vision of driverless Ubers filling our streets is better than, for instance, railways that would actually solve commuter issues for realz. The best thing about the Uber model is that it not only allows government inaction, it actually requires it. This is the most perfect win for management-by-numbers. The perfect neoliberal business model, it actually requires that their main job is going to work on keeping government complacent and the workforce illegal, and in constant churn, and the population kept happy by low prices and dreams of a brighter future, and ignorant of the disgustingly seedy underbelly of the present.
Against THAT, I am certainly railing.
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Austin in Texas shows it's possible to stand up to these guys.
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BenWilson, in reply to
They went further than just standing up to them. The not-for-profit "Ride Austin" which is a cooperative version of the same thing got built.
In NZ, there's already several competitors. If Uber pulled out, the hole would be filled in a few weeks. I doubt that they would be better behaved, so far they all just offer the same or worse as a deal to drivers. Because the free market knows best, right?
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Camera?
The point is, it's not a taxi, it's a shared car. Similarly to when you rent a car from Hertz or Apex, they expect a credit card with enough available to cover them if you steal or wreck it.
If somebody puked in a car, then the next renter would report it, the car would run off to the depot to be cleaned and the puker would be hit for a $500 bill on their card. It's a proven system (see also rent-a-bike schemes).
Of course, it would raise the question of how people with no credit get transported. Maybe they won't be - cut down on the aggro and mess in places like Courtney Place, or at least we'll get a higher class of vomit.
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BenWilson, in reply to
I get several drivers a day complaining that Uber does not reimburse them for soilage because the camera proof that someone puked is not good enough, and the cost of cleaning it can't be proved, and they don't cover lost income. People puke sneakily, that's almost always how it happens. No one wants a puker, but it seems to be biologically programmed to puke sneakily so people do it like that.
Sure you can offload the cost of discovering a puke to the next rider who hired the vehicle, who waited for it and may end up sitting in it. You'll probably also need a process for the inevitable dispute when the puker simply reports the puke as already being in the vehicle, to be charged the previous rider. If that is anything like Uber's current dispute resolution they will simply lose a customer every time.
As I said, after a whole lot of engineering you get something that is not quite as good as what you started with.
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goforit, in reply to
An experienced taxi driver who has over the years had to deal with arseholes puking up, covering the interior with food and booze soon learns there is only one way to protect your investment and maintain income from that investment and to be happy working as a taxi driver there is a very simple approach. F**K off you arsehole and walk. Result your car is clean and presentable for decent traveling customers and every one is happy even the arsehole as they don't get hit with fees for cleaning, most arseholes don't have the money to cover these fees anyway.
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BenWilson, in reply to
That’s pretty much true, I’d say. It does take a while to learn it, though, and Uber drivers don’t last very long. They’re not meant to, they’re an externalization of the cost of providing a good service. The puke in their car is an externalization, a visceral display of where the driver stands in the order of business – unpaid puke wrangler. Not compensated for lost income, and often not compensated for the cleaning cost without a long time consuming email war. This is not a long term model, of course. It would seem that they’re already finding it hard to get drivers – the commission for new sign ups jumped to $500 last week.
ETA: Already people are talking about gaming it, signing up a mate to do the 20 ride minimum (which would take a single evening), and then leaving it at that and splitting the $500, with whoever actually did the driving keeping the income from the actual rides. You don’t typically get this sort of behavior from a happy satisfied workforce. Nor do you have to literally pay $500 to outsource tricking someone into working for you in your below-minimum-wage-no-barriers-to-entry job.
ETA2: When I say "whoever did the driving", that's because you can literally drive on someone else's license at the moment. There are guys driving Ubers now who haven't even signed up for Uber. Their mate did and he's letting them use his setup when he's not doing it.
ETA3: So whatever background check Uber is doing on the drivers is now rather moot since the people they're checking aren't even necessarily doing the driving. Yet another reason for the P endorsement, which does have a big photo ID, and an ID number you can call NZTA about. The Uber app shows you a little thumbnail, and no one even looks at the driver to check if he's like the thumbnail. Since both the signed up and the non-signed up driver are in trouble with the law if they get caught, there's no reason not to be pulling this scam.
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On the various chats that go on over the net there appears to be a lot of resistance to P endorsements, COFs, PSLs, log books etc, we in the industry have to comply, sometimes we think this compliance can be over the top but when you see what is going on now without regulations being complied to it becomes very clear why we have these regulation in the first place as there has always been cowboys on the fringes. In time I think you will find the easy to comply regs we have now will be progressively tighten up to over come the abuse Uber encourages in fill the ranks of Uber drivers.
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linger, in reply to
It's possible a govt keen to seem "tough on crime" might react that way, but it would be entirely the wrong move, because it's not the ease of compliance that is the issue, so much as the misdirected (by which I mean, targeting individual drivers rather than the inciting companies), and (therefore) weak and inefficient, enforcement of the existing regulations.
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Alfie, in reply to
...there is a very simple approach. F**K off you arsehole and walk.
My Dad had a similarly simple solution when he was driving taxis in the 1960s. Anyone who threw up in his cab or beligerent drunks got taken straight to the Dunedin Central Police station. The cops would turn out the guy's pockets and pay Dad for the fare plus the cost of a cleanup. Then they gave them free overnight accomodation.
That couldn't happen these days, of course.
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