Reimagining Autonomy with Travis Kalanick | FII PRIORITY Europe 2026 | Day 2

Hello.

Look, I think an entrepreneur's journey sort of is never just modular and separate. It's all kind of part of the same story. And from the very beginning, I've always been about what I call digitizing the physical world. And that means treating atoms like bits. And Uber was maybe the first chapter in that. Which is when you first use it, you had glass, you know, phone with glass and you would tap on that glass and a car would appear. That was sci-fi for some period of time. A car would physically in the physical world move towards you because you tapped on a phone. And so, it was the beginning. But it was really an app in an app store. And where we're going is to a sort of much more integrated place where you're really treating atoms like bits. I like to say there's a you know, the bits world we know is a computer. There's CPU, storage, network. CPU manipulates a bit, storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. If you're treating atoms like bits, CPU manipulates atoms, sorry, bits. What manipulates atoms? That's manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? That'd be logistics or transport. And so, these are your three core computing resources in an atoms-based computer. I know I'm going a little long here, but I'm trying to explain.

That's kind of how we view the world. And so, our company is about physical automation, sort of a physical automation to transform industry. Making machines very specific around different industries, food, mining, and transport. To sort of bring AI into the physical world. Yeah.

I guess it depends what your goal is. If your goal is about progress for cities, progress for people, then you want to have a sort of foundational model for an even playing field for people to sort of compete and offer services to consumers. But, it shouldn't be about control. It should be about progress. And I think that may be where sometimes regulators in lots of different jurisdictions get it wrong.

Yeah.

There's a couple things. First is, yeah, I always used to think that when I was running Uber, I didn't really understand how it got so controversial for one citizen to take another citizen across town. How did that become so controversial? And this comes back to the comments about progress and about control and power. It should be very straightforward to have a system like Uber or something else that moves people really efficiently at a low cost. But for some reason certain jurisdictions around the world just are not okay with that kind of progress and they hold on to the past. Autonomy's like a whole new layer of that. And so, at some point cities, countries will be surrounded at their borders with progress. And they will eventually move forward. I think we saw in Germany recently they sort of adopted Tesla's FSD. Almost a decade after it rolled out. You will eventually get it. The question is when. And is it good that the people of Germany didn't get it for 10 years? I don't think so.

There are a number of people who are sort of, I mean, well, we already know that FSD is way safer than driving a normal car, that when you have FSD plus a driver, it is way safer. So, you're less safe. You're more stressed. You're living not in the future, but in the past. And the question is how long do you hold the future back in the name of regulation and control?