'Levandowski compared Uber’s technology to Tesla’s autopilot feature, saying: “It’s hard to understand why the DMV would seek to require self-driving Ubers to get permits when it accepts that Tesla’s autopilot technology does not need them."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/uber-defi...
ETA: That is, from a business perspective. The fact that you might kill a couple people in the meantime is kind of a deal breaker from a moral point of view.
Let's assume that after the full transition, 0 people will die from automotive accidents. This isn't the case, but it's close enough. Naively, that would save roughly around 30k lives a year: in other words, every single day self-driving cars are delayed kills a bit under 100 people. The dynamics of the transition don't matter too much, assuming everything is simply shifted forward a year: you just move one year from the totally untransitioned state to the totally transitioned state.
That's huge. Anyone who does something that delays the transition one day is basically pretty much committing the Pulse night club shooting and the Sandy Hook shooting.
Now, another question: if a self-driving Uber slams into a group of children crossing the street, how much do you anticipate that to delay the transition to self-driving cars?
There's also a hidden assumption that getting inferior products on the road as quickly as possible is a necessary step in order to start iterating as quickly as possible. A day of clean room testing is worth some small fraction of a day of real world testing. I don't quite dispute that point, but just stating it explicitly.
Since when does Uber care? They never refilled their morality tank since the first time it was reported running empty.
Ironically, if the Tesla scenario is true, this pretty much looks like Good vs Evil battle, SV edition.
Simple: distract investors long enough to somehow make ride sharing profitable.
I also think Uber's move is advancing its own lead at the risk of slowing down the overall self-driving car transition. Their move, as you described, when go wrong, not only damage the company, but also general public's acceptance of self-driving technology. That damage could be more profound and harmful in the long run.
And it's really not just portrayed: Uber'll deserve any and all punishment thrown at them for this, up to and possibly including the shut down of the company and criminal charges for the people who did this. And Uber'll be setting the cause of self-driving cars back years, maybe even a decade.
This is all incredibly obvious too, and I don't think Uber folks are idiots. Maybe they're getting desperate, and they're willing to eat the risk of the company being destroyed because their business strategy for survival is sensitive to getting to production-ready self-driving cars a year earlier than they would have otherwise?