Uber’s View of the Future

Since 2014, when it started hiring top robotics technologists from Carnegie Mellon, Uber has been pushing strongly into autonomous transportation. Yesterday, Uber announced a strategic partnership with Volvo, the Swedish automaker, that will put 100 modified self-driving SUVs on the roads of Pittsburg by year’s end.

In addition to the Volvo partnership, Uber announced that it has acquired Otto, a startup focused on building self-driving technology for trucks. This acquisition makes Uber a major player in long-distance logistics.

In an interview with Business Insider, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick described how autonomous vehicles will change the world:

I think it starts with understanding that the world is going to go self-driving and autonomous. Because, well, a million fewer people are going to die a year. Traffic in all cities will be gone. Significantly reduced pollution and trillions of hours will be given back to people — quality of life goes way up. Once you go, “All right, there’s a lot of upsides there” and you have folks like the folks in Mountain View, [California,] a few different companies working hard on this problem, this thing is going to happen.

So if that’s happening, what would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by, basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way.

Transportation is a major challenge for cities around the world. But in Kalanick’s view, Uber’s self-driving fleet will fundamentally change how people and things move around cities. If this happens, it will have a large cascading impact on urban innovation — energy, healthcare, and productivity.