Immediately after leaving this thread I saw a post on Bluesky where someone was discussing the GUARD act and used AV to mean "age verification." It's out of control!
> The insight driving the program, Naga said, is that the limiting factor for AV development is no longer the underlying technology. “The bottleneck is data,” he said. “[Companies like Waymo] need to go around and collect the data, collect different scenarios. You may be able to say: in San Francisco, ‘At this school intersection, I want some data at this time of day so I can train my models.’ The problem for all these companies is access to that data, because they don’t have the capital to deploy the cars and go collect all this information.”
You can’t be the CTO of Uber wanting to do AVs, and get the data collection requirement shockingly wrong.
Waymo is able to deploy with very little data collection by having world class simulation capabilities. They have most efficient operation in the AV industry.
The best example of why data collection isn’t the bottleneck is Tesla. They boast about billions of miles of data, yet they’re struggling to put out fully autonomous vehicles.
I feel like they should have done this 6 years ago. Most AV companies already have tons of their own data today. But how would it work to install expensive LIDAR sensors on privately-owned vehicles?
Exactly my take as well. This would have been the right diversification move a decade ago.
Uber did invest early in self driving back in 2015, but in 2018 there was a fatality which pretty much deleted their whole program. And looks like it's taken them way too long to try picking it back up.
FWIW, a large fraction of Uber drivers aren't actually driving their own personal cars, at least around me nowadays. They're either rented or some sort of fleet vehicle (complete with TCP #)
I'm honestly surprised that Tesla never took advantage of all the cameras in all its cars to do some kind of mapping project. I always thought that was incredibly valuable data. Sort of an automatically crowd-sourced street view.
Some people would tell me that they do, but only for training their internal self-driving AI.
I'm not sure about the privacy implications. You say "all its cars" but you actually mean "all its customers cars". The relationship between Uber and the cars/drivers is fairly different.
Isn't Uber also replacing itself? If you use your human drivers to train other companies' robot taxis, aren't you gonna ruin both the human driver service and the data collection service?
I'm not too worried about it. Yeah, it's bad that people don't understand how labor organizing works. It's bad they're not willing to stand up to shitty employers and take a little risk to make life better. But in this particular case the fear is totally illusory. It's just another silicon valley conman selling some warped "dream" that probably won't actually materialize[1]. "Autonomous Vehicles" are nowhere near production ready, and they're not going to be any time soon. Wake me up when a serious truck or car manufacturer starts rolling them out en masse, then I might start to get worried about it. Until then, it's just about the same category as flying cars--sure, we have these hexacopter contraptions which can (barely) lift a single person for 20min. Not interesting.
[1] Here's how you know:
“Our goal is not to make money out of this data,” Naga said. “We want to democratize it.”
> Wake me up when a serious truck or car manufacturer starts rolling them out en masse, then I might start to get worried about it
I think enough people haven’t been in a Waymo to realise that the technology is basically here, and that we’re like 10 to 20 years of doubling away from AVs doing tens of millions of trips a day in America. By the time anyone has invested in true mass production of AVs, we’ll already be so far down that path that the policy deck will be dealt.
My Subaru can lane keep in a Wyoming blizzard. There isn’t some unsolved technical problem with snow for any system with radar, i.e. anyone who isn’t Tesla.
Keep in mind that like a fifth of Americans and half of humans live somewhere is rarely or never snows.
People don’t understand the slow motion horror movie that this is becoming. Labor demand begets population growth for all of human history. Demand conditions set the stage for population growth. Labor surplus set the stage for population declines. Again, this has been true for all of human history.
So what are we walking into? Not 8-11 billion happy cows. A crisis. People deciding not to reproduce. The human population declining. The irony as we achieve a technical pinnacle while justifying our own extinction by choice. The great filter as it turns out is actually capitalism, a race to business efficiency against all else including the incentives of your very own species. This is the mind virus.
this whole argument depends on the supposition that if brith rates ever drops below replacement rates, then that inexorably implies the extinction of the species. whether or not now is a good time, at some point growth has to stop. and there are plenty of conceivable social arrangement that are perfectly workable with a constant population size.
the only real argument for continued growth in to preserve the current structure of investment. that's your great filter, and it will result in economic collapse which isn't the same as extinction.
It’s here and it’s been here for decades - it’s just finally impossible to ignore or wave away
Gig workers are self-chattelizing because there is no floor to the depravity that society will accept, and an endless supply of people who will chattelize themselves for a moment of pleasure
> an endless supply of people who will chattelize themselves for a moment of pleasure
Or perhaps they "chattelize" to survive?
There's not much pleasure to be had from gig work apart from the freedom to perhaps choose your own hours and perhaps be free of a human boss. Both of which are quite the opposite of chattelizing, in the short term.
Define survival first and we can have a conversation
They have birthday parties and loving embraces in deprived ghettos that have community solidarity
The most beautiful human interactions I’ve ever seen are in the absolute most deprived poor places including when I was working in the fucking Balad hospital in 2010
I won't debate the definition of survival with a tired old developer (oh sorry, "founder") who's idea of virtue is summed up in their own quote regarding creating yet another app for the Apple/Google chattel system:
"I rarely get to see my kids. That's a risk you have to take."
It's more productive to discuss and bring to light the floor's underwriters than it is to blame gig workers for "chattel-izing themselves for a moment of pleasure".
> I asked if he had ever heard of collective bargaining or knew about unions and he said no.
collective bargaining or unions do not prevent technological progress, but merely retard it in the hopes that their members can benefit at the cost of progress for everyone else. Look at dock workers and how they tried to prevent automation with unions.
Dock workers are really the best example. We should have been automating at least a decade ago. I don’t know why folks would think unions or collective bargaining should be used to prevent automation. You will just lose on the medium to long term.
Reminds me of when dockworkers resisted the shift to cargo containers. Those ports ultimately lost business in the end.
> ... [T]he company eventually wants to outfit its human drivers’ cars with sensors to soak up real-world data for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies — and potentially other companies training AI models on physical-world scenarios.
I assume this is possible because the costs of adding the sensors to vehicles has dropped?
> [Uber] currently has partnerships with 25 AV companies... and is building what [Praveen Neppalli] Naga, [Uber’s chief technology officer] described as an “AV cloud”: a library of labeled sensor data that partner companies can query and use to train their models
So Uber's edge here is that expanse of their driver network allows them to build a comprehensive data set.
The original title says "self-driving" and that's much more clear.
I saw the title and thought it can't be AV, they must mean AI and made a typo.
You can’t be the CTO of Uber wanting to do AVs, and get the data collection requirement shockingly wrong.
Waymo’s bottleneck has never been data. When they want data about a school intersection in SF at a certain time of day, they just... synthetically generate it and simulate: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
Waymo is able to deploy with very little data collection by having world class simulation capabilities. They have most efficient operation in the AV industry.
The best example of why data collection isn’t the bottleneck is Tesla. They boast about billions of miles of data, yet they’re struggling to put out fully autonomous vehicles.
Seems par for the course. Nintendo turned legions of Pokemon Go players into unpaid sensor grids for delivery robots.
Uber did invest early in self driving back in 2015, but in 2018 there was a fatality which pretty much deleted their whole program. And looks like it's taken them way too long to try picking it back up.
Don’t they [1][2]?
[1] https://www.privacyinternational.org/examples/1929/tesla-lea...
[2] https://electrek.co/2020/10/24/tesla-collecting-insane-amoun...
I'm not sure about the privacy implications. You say "all its cars" but you actually mean "all its customers cars". The relationship between Uber and the cars/drivers is fairly different.
He said he “didn’t care and besides what was he going to do about it anyway, it’s going to happen no matter what”
I asked if he had ever heard of collective bargaining or knew about unions and he said no.
I think we’re only about another generation before the only purpose for human labor is to train and check the outputs of a machine.
[1] Here's how you know:
I think enough people haven’t been in a Waymo to realise that the technology is basically here, and that we’re like 10 to 20 years of doubling away from AVs doing tens of millions of trips a day in America. By the time anyone has invested in true mass production of AVs, we’ll already be so far down that path that the policy deck will be dealt.
My Subaru can lane keep in a Wyoming blizzard. There isn’t some unsolved technical problem with snow for any system with radar, i.e. anyone who isn’t Tesla.
Keep in mind that like a fifth of Americans and half of humans live somewhere is rarely or never snows.
So what are we walking into? Not 8-11 billion happy cows. A crisis. People deciding not to reproduce. The human population declining. The irony as we achieve a technical pinnacle while justifying our own extinction by choice. The great filter as it turns out is actually capitalism, a race to business efficiency against all else including the incentives of your very own species. This is the mind virus.
the only real argument for continued growth in to preserve the current structure of investment. that's your great filter, and it will result in economic collapse which isn't the same as extinction.
It’s here and it’s been here for decades - it’s just finally impossible to ignore or wave away
Gig workers are self-chattelizing because there is no floor to the depravity that society will accept, and an endless supply of people who will chattelize themselves for a moment of pleasure
The pleasure of being an Uber driver? Wouldn’t the better analogy be survival for most gig workers?
it is simply how do I get more money sex property attention etc…
There are no monks door dashing
Might want to remove the "Wizard" from your bio, it'd be far more accurate.
Or perhaps they "chattelize" to survive?
There's not much pleasure to be had from gig work apart from the freedom to perhaps choose your own hours and perhaps be free of a human boss. Both of which are quite the opposite of chattelizing, in the short term.
They have birthday parties and loving embraces in deprived ghettos that have community solidarity
The most beautiful human interactions I’ve ever seen are in the absolute most deprived poor places including when I was working in the fucking Balad hospital in 2010
Virtue does not come from work
"I rarely get to see my kids. That's a risk you have to take."
collective bargaining or unions do not prevent technological progress, but merely retard it in the hopes that their members can benefit at the cost of progress for everyone else. Look at dock workers and how they tried to prevent automation with unions.
Reminds me of when dockworkers resisted the shift to cargo containers. Those ports ultimately lost business in the end.
I assume this is possible because the costs of adding the sensors to vehicles has dropped?
> [Uber] currently has partnerships with 25 AV companies... and is building what [Praveen Neppalli] Naga, [Uber’s chief technology officer] described as an “AV cloud”: a library of labeled sensor data that partner companies can query and use to train their models
So Uber's edge here is that expanse of their driver network allows them to build a comprehensive data set.