How can we decentralise the coming fleet of self-driving taxis? Do we really want uber to own them all?
Or will it be possible for us to create some sort of protocol / system / app that any regular individual will be able to tap into, so they can send their own personal self-driving car off into the world to collect people and drop them off?
Uber will of course have their own system that facilitates the picking up and dropping off of people, but what about all the other people who own self-driving cars?
There’s no app they can use to send their car off for this.
Will this be possible? Thoughts?
We don’t want giant companies to own the world anymore… It’s important society evolves past that, I think.
A bit of an aside, maybe it will be Tesla and not Uber who own them all. Tesla’s plan is to eventually make cheap self-driving cars that people can rent out through the Tesla Network, basically an uber-like app for renting a Tesla. Part of the license for the self-driving software is that if you want to rent out the car in self-driving mode, you can only do so via the Tesla Network, so self-driving Teslas will not be allowed on uber or any other app. I suspect Tesla will have the first self-driving cars and that they’ll also have the first reasonably priced self-driving cars.
The nice thing with decentralization and it’s necessary in-built anonymity is that if big companies like Uber don’t do a great job, then competition will come into the marketplace - as governments (working for the big corps) won’t be able to repress the competition with regulatory Armageddon.
I think you’re thinking about it wrong. We want a system that creates ownerless taxies because if humans own them we’ll just spawn another uber. The point is to have an ownerless self sustaining and self perpetuating taxi system the same way we are building a decentralized internet using maidsafe.
So how about this: Say we did the same thing with taxis we did with maidsafe. A taxi system requires resources in order to run: gas/energy, parts, labour, construction of new cars, software upgrades, money for other stuff, so what if potential riders could trade those things for dubercoins or whatever the same way SAFE users trade compuer resources for safecoin. The taxis could use more or less the same algorithm as maidsafe, perhaps slightly modified considering each car has it’s own individual needs. When you call for a ride you trade dubercoin for the ride. For someone just randomly jumping a ride they could just pay in cash at the going rate, because they’d esssentially be paying for the resources on the fly. However for those who used the service regularly and interested in being more efficient, or perhaps more cash conscious they could barter their other skills and resources for coins and rides.
Yes, smart move on Tesla’s behalf. Companies like Google and Facebook have been successful because they’ve provided a good user experience and the illusion that their services are free in exchange for the massive monétisation of user data. I think Tesla belongs to a new more forward-thinking type of company that goes beyond that - it will allow its customers to earn extra income from the product they buy. In this case a car or the extra electricity generated from owning a Tesla roof that can be sold back to the highest bidder. The customer is the owner of the asset and gets more than a “free” service that they get from Facebook.
I think more companies will realize then that they can create more customer satisfaction and loyalty by allowing customers to monetize their assets. Homes for AirBnB, cars for Tesla. The SAFE network is going to enable a whole generation of new companies to provide the tools that will empower their customers to share their personal data (if they choose) in return for financial compensation. Judging from the market capitalization of Google and Facebook, that data is already worth a lot. It will be worth a multiple of this when other, perhaps more important data like genetic information, are generated in the future.
