# AFR interview with Uber chief Dara Khosrowshahi: autonomous cars



## Jack Malarkey (Jan 11, 2016)

Jacob Greber of the Australian Financial Review has interviewed Uber chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi. This is the first interview Dara Khosrowshahi has given with an Australian media outlet.

The text of the interview is on pages 36 and 37 of the Financial Review of Friday 14 June 2019. The interview has the headline of '"It's pretty cool running a company that is a verb'" (something said by Mr Khosrowshahi in the interview).

The article is behind a paywall so is not readily accessible online. I will make some posts over the next few days quoting the more interesting aspects.

Here's the first.

AFR: There are social impacts from your technology. I think your long-term plan is to go driverless. So you've got potentially millions of people who are going to be made redundant, and they're not necessarily the sort of people who'll get the higher level job that these kinds of innovations generate.

What kind of social role does Uber have in managing that transition? Or is that the job of government?

Dara: First of all the transition is going to take time. I think there's this drama that tends to get played out in the press of machines replacing humans and what I see over and over again is that the better feedback is that the machines alone, or humans alone, or machines and humans working together.

So I think that the autonomous [vehicles] coming into markets is going to be gradual.

I think that autonomously driven cars are going to, very slowly, start to penetrate routes that are incredibly simple, that are basically simple repeatable predictable routes, and over a period of time are going to penetrate into the market.

As autonomous penetrates into the market, the cost-per-mile of taking an Uber is going to come down. And as cost-per-mile comes down, I think that the growth of the service is going to be considerable.

So if you asked me 10 years from now "are we going to have more driver partners than we have today?". The unambiguous answer is going to be "yes".

You may see a higher percentage of our business or miles being driven by autonomous, but we're going to have drivers 10 years from now and we're going to have drivers 20 years from now.

[end of extract]

(I have included additional paragraph breaks to make the text easier to read.)


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## 25rides7daysaweek (Nov 20, 2017)

Jack Malarkey said:


> Jacob Greber of the Australian Financial Review interviewed Uber chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi. This is the first interview Dara Khosrowshahi has given with an Australian media outlet.
> 
> The text of the interview is on pages 36 and 37 of the Financial Review of Friday 14 June 2019. The interview has the headline of '"It's pretty cool running a company that is a verb'" (something said by Mr Khosrowshahi in the interview).
> 
> ...


Apparently there will more people in the future and they will be even cheaper too.


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## Lowestformofwit (Sep 2, 2016)

Jack Malarkey said:


> Dara: "As autonomous penetrates into the market, the cost-per-mile of taking an Uber is going to come down."


Uber's upside-down business model is alive and well, and will live on in his imagination.
Never mind the future rising costs of motoring, Dara!
Translation:
"We will be able to screw drivers rates down below the rates we will charge for Uber-owned autonomous cars, because we'll then have the upper hand".


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## Who is John Galt? (Sep 28, 2016)

Jack Malarkey said:


> Jacob Greber of the Australian Financial Review has interviewed Uber chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi. This is the first interview Dara Khosrowshahi has given with an Australian media outlet.


Thanks, Jack. Being Khosrowshahi's first Aussie media outlet interview, I imagine the irrepressible Cara Waters would really have her knickers in a knot at missing out on the 'scoop'.

.


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## ST DYMPHNA son (Aug 10, 2017)

Lowestformofwit said:


> Uber's upside-down business model is alive and well, and will live on in his imagination.
> Never mind the future rising costs of motoring, Dara!
> Translation:
> "We will be able to screw drivers rates down below the rates we will charge for Uber-owned autonomous cars, because we'll then have the upper hand".


...with so much "bullshit" uber's future is probably hot air baloons with the heat generated by natural gas produced by top executives of uber...


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## Jack Malarkey (Jan 11, 2016)

Former chief executive of Uber, Travis Kalanick, in an interview with Business Insider in August 2016 about autonomous cars:

*[Biz] Carson:* How do you keep Uber's driver partners excited about working for Uber when today's announcement is that you're one step closer to replacing them? I believe your engineering director said you're trying to wean riders off having drivers.

*Kalanick:* The first part is that the timescale is pretty long. We've got income opportunities today and we got ways of serving the city today. That's part 1.

Part 2 is that if you're talking about a city like San Francisco or the Bay Area generally, we have, like, 30,000 active drivers. We are going to go from 30,000 to, let's say, hypothetically, a million cars, right? But when you go to a million cars, you're still going to need a human-driven parallel, or hybrid. And the reason why is because there are just places that autonomous cars are just not going to be able to go or conditions they're not going to be able to handle. And even though it is going to be a smaller percentage of the whole, I can imagine 50,000 to 100,000 drivers, human drivers, alongside a million-car network.

So I don't think the number of human drivers will go down anytime soon.

In fact, I think, in an autonomous world, it goes up. In absolute figures. Of course, in percentage, it's down. But then you also think, what about the tens of thousands of jobs that are necessary to maintain that fleet?

(https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp...n-self-driving-cars-future-driver-jobs-2016-8)


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## Lowestformofwit (Sep 2, 2016)

“Bullshit baffles brains”, they say.
Sorry, Dara (and Travis), not any more, and certainly not this time.
A MILLION Ubers in Frisco?
REALLY?


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## ST DYMPHNA son (Aug 10, 2017)

Jack Malarkey said:


> Former chief executive of Uber, Travis Kalanick in an interview with Business Insider in August 2016 about autonomous cars:
> 
> *[Biz] Carson:* How do you keep Uber's driver partners excited about working for Uber when today's announcement is that you're one step closer to replacing them? I believe your engineering director said you're trying to wean riders off having drivers.
> 
> ...


...if one study a history of Germany after Adolf Hitler became a Furher,one can see parallel.
The way Germany went there was no way back,there was either "win and take all or go crashing down"....uber lost too,not much money left to mask lies, too many knows now,it is smoke and mirrors BS...

...it is just a matter of time,uber is not going to survive, it will be split,sold and remember as one of the biggest con jobs ever known...


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## RabbleRouser (Apr 30, 2019)

Khosrowshahi and Kalanick
are living the American Dream✅
Super wealthy from exploiting the feeble minded working poor.

?with ALL ur Hate & All ur Protesting YOU CONTINUE to chauffeur Khosrowshahi & Kalanick's clients ?

Drivers are the reason Drivers are continually kicked in the nutz by U/L

Wall Street ❤ Loves a success story especially when the Sloth poor get shafted.? It confirms to, and sends a message to the Nation's population to get educated, get a skill, learn a trade
OR, U TOO will be the exploited working poor.


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