I'm going to need to get my driver's license in a couple of years, but after hearing this, I have a question.
You may not have to get your driver's license, but it's okay.
That was my entire question.
So much of driving now is the technology in the car, around the car. So technology is always going to be a part of the human experience. Humans will be demonstrably less safe than autonomous. And then it's going to be up to regulators to decide what a human license looks like.
How does that end up affecting the next generation drivers? Do they have to learn how to drive? And like what happens to sports like race car driving?
Mass production of these AVs is going to take some time. They are very expensive today, much more expensive than a regular car. It's just happening faster than even I expected. And I'm an optimist as it relates to technology. Is society going to adjust and can it adjust fast enough?
And so from my standpoint, now that's a moon shot, ladies and gentlemen.
All right. So go to the mics for your questions. I'm going to start with this mic, this question on Slido. So what's harder? Convincing regulators that autonomous cars are safe or convincing passengers to get into one?
It's actually pretty easy to get passengers to get into an autonomous vehicle. What we're finding is, for example, Atlanta, Austin, we let you know that you have been matched with an autonomous vehicle. 80% of people say yes, 20% say no. And the 80% who say yes love the experience. Regulators obviously move a little bit slower, but this is a technology that I think more people are excited about than not.
All right, go to one of our teens. We have a group of 20 teens here in the room.
How you doing? I had a quick question just about like in 15, 20 years when most of the cars on the road are self-driving, does it ever become illegal for human drivers because do they become like a safety hazard risk? And how does that end up affecting the next generation drivers? Do they have to learn how to drive? And like what happens to sports like race car driving? Is that like going to like die out because nobody has to drive anymore? Just that's kind of what I'm asking about.
Well, I think that race car driving is always going to be a thing because it's just so damn cool. Again, you may be augmented, right? You think about so much of driving now is the technology in the car, around the car. So technology is always going to be a part of the human experience. I do think, I don't think it's going to happen in the next 15 years, but certainly in the next 25 years, humans will be demonstrably less safe than autonomous drivers. And then it's going to be up to regulators to decide what a human license looks like. Maybe the driving test is going to be much more demanding than it is today. I like free will. So I'm like, hey, if you want to drive, that's not a problem. But I can definitely see a future where there are going to be fewer and fewer drivers on the road. Just like there are less people who know how to ride a horse.
You know, Dara, I'll build on that. There's a lot of deaths in the Middle East from young teenagers with fast cars. And I guess I could imagine a future in which an AI overlay allows you to drive your car as fast and crazy as you want, but it knows the car's limits and it stops you from ever swerving off the road, right? It's like bumper bumpers that you go up against. So that would be fascinating. That's just a comment. Let's go to here the question. Mike two.
So just a question regarding when you have the flying cars. Now from a real estate perspective, what will be the opportunity here? Will you be putting on top of buildings or heliports?
So we're talking again, this is more Joby, but there's a lot of discussion on vertiports, so to speak. And we want this product to be a mass market product. So these vertiports will have to be designed to have multiple vehicles coming, landing, and taking off. The location of those vehicles is going to be based on kind of very high traffic areas. I think obviously airports or city centers or the size of cities are going to be targets, so to speak. And we've got perfect data in these cities as to what are the best places for you to place vertiports to be able to have the most business and reduce the most amount of traffic as well. So there's absolutely a real estate opportunity. If you're interested, give our Uber folks or the Joby folks a call.
Yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity as well for small islands that are hard to get to.
Totally. Elchin, where are you? Mike two.
Thank you very much. Elchin, I'm building solid shape construction materials marketplace. If you are starting a marketplace now at abundance era with AI, what would you focus on first? And we're using Uber for our LTL. Thank you.
So if we start a marketplace, what would you focus on first? Is that the question? I mean, our marketplace has always been supply led. And one of the differences when I first came to Uber from Expedia, Expedia was very focused on building out audience. Uber has always been focused on building out the liquidity, whether it's more cars in a market, whether it's more restaurants, more retailers, etc. And if you build liquid supply, if you have product market fit to some extent, the demand just shows up. And obviously there's always a challenge in marketplaces, how do you build both sides? But to me, put real tools in place to become kind of the easiest to use and the most liquid as it relates to supply. And then if you do have product market fit, the demand will show up.
Great point. Thank you. Let's go to Burgundy on Mike one. Burgundy.
Hi, my name is Burgundy and I am definitely biased towards automation. But as a lawyer outside of this room, everybody is just freaking out. And so my question is, given that we have this autonomization and sensors and having seen the data on human error for speeding, intoxication, etc., what are some opportunities for insurance to cover this through, for example, products liability so we can take the human out of the equation and yet still give people an assurance that they're going to be covered if accidents do happen?
Yeah, so I think it's a great question. First thing I would say is that with Uber, the professional driver is safer than the human driver and the data bears that out. But I do think that you're going to have different layers of insurance as well. So the autonomous provider will have kind of the specific insurance related to the car and they'll have to take responsibility for the quality of their driver. And then we'll also have another insurance layer on everything else that happens so that people are covered and they can feel comfortable kind of taking an AV to wherever they're going. By the way, there's a hidden statistic that very few people know about, which is about half the court cases, legal court cases in the US are car accident related. What a ridiculous number. There's a very, very big industry as... What a benefit to society to get rid of that.
All right, go to Shilpa, is it? Shilpi.
Hi. I'm Shilpi. I led robotic systems at Amazon Air Hubs. I launched them and led them. And now we're building continuous bio-sensing technology at Quin Labs. My question to you is as you start moving towards multi-robot type super systems, right? Joby aircrafts working in coordination with ground vehicles, autonomous ground vehicles. I think the hardest part is the coordination and the continuous monitoring and upkeep of these multi-robot type systems. And we faced a version of this at Amazon as we were managing these large robot fleets. So I'm very, very interested in your vision of this infrastructure and what do you believe is the bottleneck to this? Hardware, software, regulatory?
So you've kind of described exactly what we do in that we have a very, very large marketplace team that is essentially, you know, we've got over 9 million drivers, probably 10 million drivers now globally. And in every city in which we're operating, we're constantly taking kind of the state of that city real time, or as real time as we can because we got to kind of recalculate the state of the city. And every time you hail essentially an Uber we are not dispatching you just the closest car, but we're actually also predicting kind of what's going to happen over the next five or six seconds. And kind of getting you, connecting you with the right driver at the right time in a way that's most efficient for the overall network. So there may be another driver that's closer to you, but we think that Peter is going to hail that driver and we'll leave that driver free and we'll hail another driver to you. Our systems have to deal with human beings who are highly unpredictable and highly erratic as well in terms of their behaviors. So sometimes if a dispatch isn't going well, we'll do another dispatch, etc. So I'm actually kind of psyched for machines because they're much more predictable and they usually say what they're going to do. One of the contracts we have with our human drivers is that when we dispatch a ride to them, they can accept that ride or not accept that ride. With machines again, they're not only predictable, but they will have kind of acceptance rates that we think are much higher than humans as well. So of course there will be a coordination problem. How do we stitch together one ride with another ride and make sure that that experience is perfect. But this is exactly what we're doing at scale, 40 million trips every single day with markets that are very, very different from each other in terms of behavior. So I'm very much looking forward to that future that you described.
Nice. Let's go to Mark on mic two here.
Thank you Peter. Dara, my moonshot is what I call affordable living as a service, housing, food, energy, connectivity and mobility for $250 a month. It won the Xprize Visioneering contest in October and so it's going to be a $50 million prize to deliver this.
If I could... Mark, one of the concerns... $250 a month? Wow.
$250 a month and I think people in this room know it's possible, but delivering it sooner than later as a stability lever in this moment of transition is going to prevent us from having chaos. And so I want to challenge you to be a funder and a competitor in this prize.
Well thank you. I will tell you that one thing that's very important to us is making sure that as we build out Uber cities, our service isn't just available in the middle of cities where wealthy people live, but is available throughout the cities and the outer boroughs etc. So happy to talk in terms of the provision of transportation to a lot of these transportation deserts where you don't have mass transit available etc. One of the promises of autonomous is going to be safer, check, but then eventually autonomous will make transportation cheaper as well. And we want to make sure that that kind of cheap, affordable, safe transportation is available to everybody regardless of where you live.
Dara, the concern right now is there's a lot of fear that's mounting about the future. Uncertainty, all of this. Last night we launched a future vision Xprize asking teams to create films that envision a very positive vision of the future so we have something to look forward to. And this idea that Mark and his team has had is about universal basic services. So if a family doesn't know where they have a roof over their head or where food is coming from or anything. I mean you had a disruptive childhood growing up in Iran. You can't think of anything else. And so if there is a delivery of basic fundamentals, food, water, energy, health, those sorts of things, then you at least you can now think about dreaming about what do I do next with these incredible tools. So it's a direction we want to head. It's great.
