Uber Launches Robot Food Delivery in California

Uber on Monday said it launched pilot food delivery services with autonomous vehicles in two California cities, and said it was adding electric vehicle charging stations into its global driver app. From a report: The announcements are part of Uber's annual product event where the ride-hail and food delivery company showcases the latest updates to its app. Uber announced one food delivery service using autonomous cars, and a separate pilot using sidewalk robots. Both services are available to Uber Eats users in Santa Monica and West Hollywood in California, and consumers will have the ability to opt out of the programs. The autonomous car pilot is in collaboration with Motional, the self-driving joint venture of Hyundai and Aptiv, and was initially announced in December. read more It launched on Monday, Uber and Motional said. Uber said the sidewalk robots are provided by Serve Robotics, a spin-off of delivery company Postmates, which Uber acquired in 2020.

Robots need food?

[nic]

Who knew?!?

Re:

[mmell]

And regular oil baths. If you could just pop that restraining bolt off, that'd be swell!

Re:

[wyattstorch516]

I thought they only needed alcohol: [giphy.com]

R.I.P. gig economy

[OrangeTide]

Unskilled labor will be replaced by robots. And the owners of the robots (capitalists) will control the means of production. The changes in society and the economy created by technological advances is not even a new concern [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[OrangeTide]

No, I'm suggesting we all join the bourgeoise and own shares in the robotic overlords.

Impossible

[rsilvergun]

I have it on good authority from /. posters who haven't had to look for a job since 1995 that it's scientifically impossible for automation to reduce employment. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain [businessinsider.com].

Re:

[kurkosdr]

Don't worry, the people will realise what's going on and will demand minimum wage to be adjusted for inflation (protip: an unskilled worker working for minimum wage needs to work 1.5 jobs today to have the same purchasing power they had in the 90s) and they will also demand a 4-hour work-week (at least for unskilled labor jobs).

Bahahahaha! I almost had you there for a minute. The people will divide themselves by race and gender and then seek solutions at the fringes of the political spectrum (far-left or

Re:

[jellomizer]

1980's Departments Stores were to cause doom to the economy because it would replace all the small local shops.
1990's Big box stores were to cause doom to the economy because it would replace all the Department Stores
2000's Online Stores were to cause doom to the economy because it would replace all the Big box stores
2010's Gig Economy will cause doom to the economy, as it will replace traditional shipping used by online stores.
2020's Robots will cause doom to the economy, as it will replace the Gig Economy

Re:

[OrangeTide]

There are winners and losers. Usually the winning side is not coincidentally the one that controls the money and property.

Ultimately we will all be unskilled labor. Even those of us with experience and education in a field may find that we must retrain to adapt to the changing world. If that retraining isn't paid for by someone else, then people will slip through the cracks and be unemployable. That's not an ideal system by any measure.

Re:

[Catvid-22]

The unstated factor underlying your largely optimistic outlook is the need for growth. Continued growth is what allowed these transitions from one type of "economy" (for want of a better word) to another. Before you say, yes, the world has always been growing (give and take a few hiccups like war), our world today has become so interconnected that we're now effectively one global civilizations.

And we have many examples in history of civilizations collapsing. So even if human civilizations eventually reached

Re: R.I.P. gig economy

[NewID_of_Ami.One]

Just because people keep needlessly crying "Wolf!" doesn't mean the wolf won't come one day.

Oftentimes the magnitude of something gets so big once in a while that it results in unbelievable upheaval.

Like tiny waves for 100 years and then ome Tsunami.

A lot of changes in human behavior are now going into unprecedented territory. For example I tried the twitter chronological feed after complaining for years that their Algos are screwing up everything.

Turns out I dont like it bcoz it's like a newspaper or goog

Re:

[awwshit]

Someone will have to keep the robot fleet working and on track. That won't be a high paying job, you'll be trained to swap parts, set robots upright again, a series of menial tasks to keep the robots moving. It will be a long long time before robots all the way down works as expected.

Re: R.I.P. gig economy

[NewID_of_Ami.One]

That's the 1st thing robots will do. Fix other robots.
Humans will only design. Then only ideate. And finally just wish or fantasize.
And it will be done. Everyone will have everything they can want.
At which point it, does it really matter whether we call our selves alive or humans or gods - it will all be equally boring and pointless so....

Interesting

[muh_freeze_peach]

This is certainly a creative approach to solving hunger.

Robots are good, free market is good

[FeelGood314]

And so is the flexible gig economy. The free market has always out performed every other economic model we have ever tried. And enough of the anti capital strawman arguments. A functional free market needs rules against monopolistic abuse, insure fair contracts, allow equal access to information and things like that. I'm even fine with unions when the playing field is not equal between employers and employees. Our current economic problems are cause more by the left being taken advantage of by rent seekers than anything else. We have a huge lack of housing near job opportunities in the rich English speaking world because existing home owners are a majority and they are doing everything possible to create a housing shortage to push up the value of their homes. F#@k the NIMBY crowd. If someone owns a plot of land they should be able to put up a 20 story apartment building. We have convinced ourselves that a college degree is needed for every middle class job so we should subsidize secondary education and force kids to spend 4 or 5 years getting more education but really all we are doing is trying to reinforce the value of the education we already got and the subsidy is for our own kids because poor kids can't afford to spend 4 or 5 years not working. Full time employment, like housing, is a yet another scam to transfer wealth from the young to the old. The old and those with large families use far more benefits than a 24 year old single employee. If employees competed just on salary I might pay an experienced person more but I won't pay them more and give them what is effectively better benefits. Health insurance should be socialized, maybe even life insurance and if you have that then employers should compete for employees based on salary. The gig economy is a frictionless job market. Anyone can try it with minimal opportunity costs and if it turns out it pays better than the alternative you can stay with it. Every employer is trying to find employees they can pay less and the gig economy is at least more transparent than most. Trucking is terrible for exploiting drivers, healthcare outside of the USA is almost as bad. We even need more free market for the environment. Farmers in California should be able to sell their water rights instead of being left with the choice of growing almonds or not getting anything for it. Pollution should be taxed and let the market figure out that maybe coal is bad. Electric consumers should pay the spot price so that we consume more when renewables are plentiful and aren't subsidizing consumption on a hot summer day when the coal plants are at capacity. If the free market was fixed then we would welcome robot drivers to free workers up for more valuable things.

Free food!

[algaeman]

I assume this food wandering around the streets in SoCal is free for the taking.
Also, will they provide food for the Santa Monica diet?

From the press conference

[Provocateur]

Food delivery will be performed by robots. As you all know, we also started Grub Hub, and with Uber, we have come up with a project known as Gruber

Our prototype will be known as Hans.

Robbery

[khchung]

So, how does the sidewalk robot avoid being robbed?

I mean, it is literally free food for the homeless, isn't it?

Robots are eating food in the US ?

[NewID_of_Ami.One]

Robots are eating food in the US ? That's advanced.
What about poop ?

Crocodile

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Good timing with the news that Black Mirror is coming back. Crocodile rocks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]