Uber Co-founder Travis Kalanick's Newest Venture? 'Gainfully Employed Robots' (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0180996978
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/15/1750229/uber-co-founder-travis-kalanicks-newest-venture-gainfully-employed-robots
- Source link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/travis-kalanick-debuts-plan-gainfully-192647148.html
"I left Uber in 2017 heartbroken," writes Kalanick [2]on the new company's web site . Kalanick resigned under pressure in 2017, and complains he was "torn away from an idea and a movement that I had poured my life into... I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building. Digitizing the Physical World is my life's work... "
> Kalanick is remaking his real estate company, City Storage Systems, which owns ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens, and renaming it Atoms, according to a manifesto posted on the new company's website. [Bloomberg notes that the company's food robotics division "makes a food assembly machine called Bowl Builder, according to its website."] In addition to its work on food, Los Angeles-based Atoms is expanding into robotics technology for mining and automotive transport. Kalanick said on the livestreamed tech talk show TBPN Friday that Atoms has effectively been in stealth for eight years and has "thousands" of employees....
>
> Kalanick wrote on the Atoms website that the company will make "specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large." That will include "infrastructure for better food," he wrote, as well as "more productive mines to power Earth's industries" in addition to "wheelbase for robots" in transportation. "The industrial thing is probably our main jam," he said on TBPN. "Once you crack movement in the physical world, there are lots of people who want access to that..." Kalanick also said he was the biggest investor in Pronto, a self-driving trucking startup that currently focuses on closed sites like mines.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/travis-kalanick-debuts-plan-gainfully-192647148.html
[2] https://atoms.co/vision
Abundance... to whom? (Score:2)
"specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners" In other words, to his company. The companies developing fully autonomous vehicles figured that out almost as soon as they set up business: why sell these things if you can rent them out and keep extracting fees from the users? If humans have been made redundant at last,. why keep billions of them around?
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"why sell these things if you can rent them out and keep extracting fees from the users" .. that's only a good business model if you're sure there's no competitors. Robots will have tons of competitors, the Chinese are on it. So is figure.ai and Tesla. It's not like some Adobe Photoshop monopoly thing.
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I don't know if I'd want to invest in the Adobe Photoshop "monopoly" right now. Most people just have AI edit their photos now.
Sure, a talented human can do a better job, but for a dumb social media meme or a lame marketing portal picture.... who really cares? Just take a stock photo and change the background color to match your corporate approved color palette.
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Kind of like how Africans with productive jobs brought abundance to their owners. Worth fighting a war over, especially when it's the poor doing the dying.
Can you have one send me its resume? (Score:2)
Want to make sure it has the proper experience for the job.
So they know they're getting ready to fuck us over (Score:3)
To an extent that can't even be imagined.
Google the phrase 70% middle class jobs taken by automation and you will find a study about it. They have been devouring middle class jobs through automation since the 1980s. And they are about to accelerate it.
People forget the luddites were real people with real problems. They didn't just walk across the street and get a job working for Henry Ford they lost their jobs with nothing to replace them. It took decades for technology to catch up and for two world wars to blow up enough infrastructure to get us back to full employment following the industrial revolutions.
The reason we were able to get back to full employment is we had a fuck ton of land that we could still expand into. That land is now either owned by billionaires or full of people or both. That was a one-time Bonanza.
We have made jobs a resource necessary to live and we are going to constrain that resource. Traditionally when a resource necessary to live is heavily constrained we murder each other until there are few enough people that the resource isn't constrained anymore.
Only this time we have nuclear weapons.
But hey how about those trans girls in sports right?
just what we need an amazon dps for robots where t (Score:2)
just what we need an amazon dps for robots where the local owner takes all the risk + upfront costs and has little real control.
It seems appropriate to quote Maya Angelou (Score:2)
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
Made to order (Score:2)
Would you like your acai bowl with a shot of Mobile 1?
As I predicted (Score:2)
I told people that white collar jobs weren't the only ones in danger. Once robots with LLM equivalent AI become commonplace, suddenly that cozy plumber job or construction job is on the chopping block too. I said blue collar work would take a little longer than the white collar jobs to be replaced, but that it would.
Looks like things are playing out as I expected.
"You will live to see manmade horrors beyond your comprehension."
will (Score:1)
Kalanick wrote on the Atoms website that the company will make "specialized robots...
Oh look, yet another company bragging about how awesome their robots are going to be some day. How is this even news? I'm intensely interested in what a robot can accomplish today, right now. Not the following: can lift, can move, can carry, can (in one specific circumstance with no confounding factors and when new and with a full battery) do.
I want to see the robot that can walk into a laundry room it has never seen
So brave (Score:5, Insightful)
> I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building. Digitizing the Physical World is my life's work... "
And all he had to start with was $2B of stock sales of Uber after his ouster. Truly an every-man we can all relate to, overcoming such huge odds.
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That, and "gainful employment" usually means a person has a job with pay that meets their living expenses plus a bit. What living expenses do these robots have, except for the livings they take from humans?
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Robots don't take away livings, they grant livings. It's called production, they produce stuff we can use. Do YOU take away someone's living when you do your job?
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> Robots don't take away livings, they grant livings. It's called production, they produce stuff we can use. Do YOU take away someone's living when you do your job?
No, because I filled the open job the company had. If a robot takes my job and I no longer have a job, who are the robots producing stuff for if I can't buy it because they took my job?
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Nobody else applied for that open job?
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No, the job was replaced by a robot. A human lost income and the government lost tax revenue.
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Given that robots are equivalent to slaves, living expenses are something they do not have. Did "gainful employment" ever apply to slave labor?
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Robot is literally from mechanical slave; you can find English saying so before the robotinic came over to English to replace the politically incorrect phrase.
These people are like Mr. Burns when they try to be good they end up doing *more* evil! (see "The Old Man and the Lisa.")
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The word "robot" comes from word Karel Capek's play "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots), where machines were made to perform difficult and dangerous work, and he used the Czech word "robota" meaning forced labor.
Re: So brave (Score:1)
[1]https://youtube.com/watch?v=AP... [youtube.com]
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=APo2p4-WXsc&t=100
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"Alright everybody back in the pile"
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The government should make him pay taxes on his "employed" robots, since he was dumb enough to call them employed. Apparently he's been employing robots for the past 8 years and has 1000s, that's a lot of dodged taxes.
Of course, robots aren't employed. They are capital that are deployed. Government should still tax this guy for thinking that was clever.
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And what a great new idea this every-man has. What's the one problem Uber had? A limit to the amount of exploitation of human beings. Solved!
Let's get Super Pumped! (Score:2)
So it sounds like... [1]Travis Kalanick [wikipedia.org] is offering 24/7 robots for business owners that are tired of dealing with humans. That's the dream of every techbro of the moment within the techno optimist grift.
And both he and Elon appear to be way behind the Chinese.
And don't forget his partner "brother born of another mother" [2]Anthony Levandowski. [wikipedia.org]
"Google later sued Uber for allegedly stealing proprietary information. Levandowski was convicted of stealing Google/Waymo trade secrets, but avoided a prison sentence than
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_Kalanick
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski