An Interview with Asser Yehia, CTO of Redcab LLC
Recently I had the opportunity to sit with Asser Yehia to understand his idea about RedCab and the future of the car-hailing industry, cryptocurrencies and the future vision of the company.
-”What are your thoughts on investing in self-driven cars?”
Asser: I don’t think that self-driven cars will solve any problem faced by humanity right now. On the contrary, it will create a social engineering problem, as it will eventually replace humans by machines and a wide spectrum of people, who earn their living from the car-hailing industry will be impacted in a negative way. We can apply AI in many useful forms that can help to solve real issues. Me personally, I would not accept spending investor’s money on such kind of researches that neither have economic returns nor solving the real pain in our daily lives. Whenever someone opened this topic I always relate to the famous Pink Floyd song “Welcome to the machine “. Mankind has the ability to create its own reality and I do not think that we want to create another Metropolis [1]. We should use technology consciously.
-”Can you reveal some information about Cabbi the new AI assistant in the app?”
Asser: I wrote an article about this feature that is already published on our Medium blog. Currently, we are negotiating with 3 AI companies based in Europe & Asia Pacific to start developing Cabbi with all his features. Once the deal is finalized, we will announce it officially.
-”What does the partnership with WishKnish mean for RedCab and what are the opportunities that you get with this partnership?”
Asser: The partnership with WishKnish means for us infinite opportunities. Redcab will leverage the services provided by WishKnish to implement the ‘Geo-Ads’ feature which will change the concept of a marketplace and how businesses can do advertising.
-”How Redcab can help in solving environmental & social issues?”
Asser: Currently we don’t take any commissions from trips that are completed with “Electric cars”. Our aim is to encourage people to switch from the fossil fuel powered vehicles to electric ones in order to reduce the carbon footprint. This will be also more profitable for drivers especially when we see the gas prices in a rapid increase like it happened in Egypt [2] last year and a half. Moreover, we will be introducing the carpooling feature to help to reduce the traffic congestion.
-”What is the future of crypto investments?”
Asser: Crypto investments are very promising. However, they are currently only adopted by a small segment of people. To achieve a transition from traditional business models to a more decentralized model using blockchain where people can make profits and support the ideas they believe in, we need to offer the crypto ecosystem more and more decentralized solutions solving real-life scenarios. I believe Redcab has provided a gift to the crypto community by providing an opportunity for people to invest and benefit. The crypto community can define a roadmap for the future and come together as one. This way they can invade new industries and compete with the traditional market giants.
-“What are the challenges faced by the crypto community and how can cryptocurrencies achieve global adoption?”
Asser: Crypto community needs more successful businesses that evolved with the help of successful ICO investment as well as the adoption of “Utility tokens” in our daily life routine. There are brilliant ICOs coming to the surface every day with impressive high-tech ideas which is great. However, we need ICOs invading all business sections and allowing us to use the utility tokens for our daily transactions and this is how we can build a mature eco-system. The word “utility” is derived from the Latin word ūtilitās which means usefulness [2] so in essence, this kind of tokens should be used, exchanged and traded in our everyday transaction and the average person should be able to use it. If this happens, it’s value will be determined by the supply and demand, not by the ‘Pump and Dump’ hype and hysteria which badly affects the reputation of the crypto-investment in general.
Sources:
1-Source: A 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama film, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)
3- Source : http://www.dictionary.com/browse/utility
