Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, is already looking to the future by saying that his company is trying to get in on the self-driving car bandwagon.
Kalanick, however, claims that contrary to popular belief, Uber’s self-driving cars would create more jobs as opposed to destroying them.
Kalanick’s argument goes like this:
"If you're talking about a city like San Francisco or the Bay Area generally, we have, like, 30,000 active drivers. We are going to go from 30,000 to, let's say, hypothetically, a million cars, right? But when you go to a million cars, you're still going to need a human-driven parallel, or hybrid. And the reason why is because there are just places that autonomous cars are just not going to be able to go or conditions they're not going to be able to handle. And even though it is going to be a smaller percentage of the whole, I can imagine 50,000 to 100,000 drivers, human drivers, alongside a million-car network.”
In other words, he makes the argument that although the percentage of humans giving rides will dramatically decrease, more humans will drive for Uber in total.
Kalanick also believes that new jobs will be created from the influx of self-driving cars, such as car maintenance specialists.
As for the jobs that will disappear, Kalanick claims that that’s just what happens when new technologies arise.
It remains to be seen how self-driving cars will affect Uber and the overall economy.
