Uber CEO reveals cars will be DRIVERLESS in just four years and use ‘humanoid robots’ to deliver pizza
Travis Kalanick believes the ride sharing app will become a robotics company once it ditches drivers
UBER wants to replace drivers with "humanoid" robots that can deliver pizza to your door, the taxi firm's CEO said.
Travis Kalanick revealed the business was planning to use self driving vehicles and would move into the robotics industry to stay competitive.
Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday, he was asked where he saw Uber in 2021.
He said: “What we are going to see is that Uber is really the beginning of becoming a robotics company.
“It starts with the cars, when they go self-driving. But imagine a car which is delivering food that doesn’t have a driver. How do you get the food? Well you could come down and get the food, but if you are looking after your kids, you can’t leave your kids alone you need someone to bring it up.
“So at some point there is going to be a humanoid that unfurls out of the car and crawls up your stairs and knocks on your door and gives you pizza.
“Once the movement becomes autonomous and ever city becomes autonomous, there is going to be a whole set of interesting robotic and AI challenges.
“These are the things we should expect in the next five to ten years. It sounds futuristic and sci-fi but that’s where the world is going.”
The co-founder of the ride share app also spoke about his vision to reduce traffic in cities across the world, and said he saw Uber being a way for everyone to be able to afford to get from A to B at the touch of a button: “I love telling people who are residents of a city that in five years there will be no more traffic.
“Going to Delhi and telling someone from Delhi there will be no more traffic in your city well – Delhi is maybe more like seven years – they roll their eyes and they laugh.
“That is what is fun about being an entrepreneur and seeing the future.”
Kalanick said he saw self-driving cars as the only way to achieve that and joked: “It will take quite a while before that gets to Delhi, mainly because of the way humans drive in Delhi. You are going to need some serious breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.
“But self-driving capabilities will super charge the kind of benefits that a city will see.
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“Around 1.3 million people die from cars every year. When self-driving technology is out there in force, no more people die from cars.
“There is a lot of benefit from this. But there are still a lot of folks who are still working on that technology and we have got to get it so it is safe than a human.”
Kalanick withdrew from US President Donald Trump’s advisory council last week in the wake of his executive order to introduce a travel ban of seven countries which are predominantly Muslim.
The entrepreneur explained that while the company would use self-driving cars, he had no desire to get involved in making them: “I think there are folks who manufacture cars and you only have to go on a couple of big factory tours for cars to say ‘I don’t think that’s for me.’
“It’s an incredibly complex thing to build these cars and built them to last.
“We will not be in that business but we will partner with all the folks that make these things.
"The way we look at it, we want our mission to make transportation as reliable as running water everywhere and for everyone.
“That’s where we see it, so at the push of a button a car comes and you are ready to go, and do that as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.
“When you get into that self-driving world, you are looking at transportation being a fraction of the cost it is today. And fully democratized where literally everyone can push a button and get where they want to go.”
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