The battle between academia and business for research talent

September 11, 2015 7:40 PM

Uber would like to buy your robotics department Today’s early-stage inquiry — so-called basic research, the Level 1 work, where scientists are still puzzling over fundamental questions — is financed almost exclusively by the federal government. It’s too far out, too speculative, to attract much investment; it isn’t clear if anyone will make any money on it. This wasn’t always the case.
posted by modernnomad (27 comments total)

When CMU (my alma-mater) partnered with Uber, I knew it was a bad idea. Serves them right.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:59 PM on September 11, 2015 [3 favorites]

Who is missing out here? Seems like a win for the researchers, and a win for Uber. Are we supposed to lament the academic fiefdoms bearing namesake of the robber barons of yore?
posted by oceanjesse at 8:20 PM on September 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

Weren't we complaining about large corporations funding basic research a while back?
posted by zabuni at 8:24 PM on September 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm just glad someone thinks basic research is worth paying for. As scummy an operation as Über is, it is putting its money where our elected officials will not. We keep electing rednecks who cut funding for science in favor of Jesus, stadiums, prisons, guns and other conservative ideologies, and (just as important) we keep attaching strings to how what grant money is left gets spent in a way that impedes research, so scientists will either go looking elsewhere for money to do their work, or they will simply leave the country entirely. Some scientists are indeed leaving the country while it is still legal to do so — Homeland Security isn't issuing exit visas, yet — but at least the US isn't yet suffering large-scale brain drain that has made it near impossible for other countries to run successful scientific research programs.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:21 PM on September 11, 2015 [7 favorites]

Although I know some of the people involved here I don't really have any inside info but from experience, this story seems a little blown out of proportion. Engineers and researchers have always been leaving CMU for industry and the school generally encourages that. I've worked for two companies founded by CMU professors and they were constantly pulling staff, students and even faculty from the ranks to work for them.

The university does neat stuff and it's looks great on your resume to have been a research engineer for them but their pay sucks compared to industry.

At least Uber pays property taxes which is more than you can say about CMU (or Pitt, UPMC, etc) and it's a big win for the city to get another big tech company investing here.
posted by octothorpe at 9:24 PM on September 11, 2015 [9 favorites]

I'm baffled at the idea of Uber wanting robot cars. A huge portion of their business model is tied up in the fact that they have an incredibly negligible capital outlay for the service they're providing because they offload the vast majority of the capital costs onto their (totally not, honest, totes contractors, eventually some court will rule in our favor on this but not today) employees. The second Uber goes to robot cars, they suddenly become responsible for millions, maybe billions of dollars in capital outlay between buying the cars and investing in the infrastructure (even if that's just a handful of local offices in every city) to coordinate the maintenance and repair of those cars. As it is, their bank accounts are hemorrhaging like a decapitation victim, and that's while running a 1099 scam on their employees- if you think they're burning runway now, imagine what it'll look like when they're actually responsible for running the business they are trying so desperately to deny they run while making that business's income.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:37 PM on September 11, 2015 [9 favorites]

Pope Guilty, you're assuming they plan to own their fleet. It seems obvious they want to be the platform to allow consumers to rent out their self-driving cars to others while they aren't using them. This fleet would have vastly higher availability than a fleet operated by human drivers - just think of all the suburban couples with kids who'd stay home and just let their cars shuttle young people around town all night long. And of course Uber'd take a bigger cut of the fare, because there's no driver to pay anymore. The car owner is paying for gas and maintenance but not actually performing any labor. And there's no question that the car owners are employees - all the legal questions disappear overnight.

AND Uber makes a bundle on each car sold too because they're licensing the self-driving tech. If they can get this working before anyone else they stand to make a fucking mint.
posted by town of cats at 10:34 PM on September 11, 2015 [8 favorites]

You think ubers loan partner program is predatory now, wait until they're basically subprime loaning cars to poor people under the promise that the car will pay for itself, then repoing them and selling them to someone else.

I mean this is totally made up but it sounds imminently believable when you think about it.

You also get in to the problem of people needing their car back to pick up their kids, but it's doing the "higher priority" task of ferrying someone to the airport for über who wanted to make 3 stop offs.
posted by emptythought at 10:41 PM on September 11, 2015 [13 favorites]

Isn't the big reason to go into STEM fields in the first place to gain knowledge that is actually in demand by employers? Or are all these people obligated to stay in academia or non profits for some reason?

I swear, people, mostly on the left it seems, get absolutely goofy when it comes to uber.
posted by 2N2222 at 11:01 PM on September 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

I swear, people, mostly on the left it seems, get absolutely goofy when it comes to uber.

Sadly, not enough people get goofy enough, so it's not like the new hotness in exploitation and profiteering will ever get a serious critical eye from society as a whole. It's just too damn convenient to take advantage of the people who have the least to benefit those who have the most.

Subprime loans for laborers they won't admit that they utterly depend on, annual bonuses for managament that steals scientists from their "partners," and cheap rides for us, all funded by cash from pensions and REITs. Same as it ever was.
posted by frijole at 3:21 AM on September 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

On a side note, the two security researchers who hacked a Jeep are moving to Pittsburgh to work in Uber's research lab.
posted by octothorpe at 4:45 AM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I imagine most Ethics departments are ghost towns after being raided by corporations.
posted by jade east at 4:58 AM on September 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

I mean this is totally made up but it sounds imminently believable when you think about it.

I'm not a big fan of the "Metafilter: ...." meme, but if there was ever a sentence that called for it, this is it.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:58 AM on September 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm too close to this one to be able to comment much about it for work reasons but I'll say the article seems mostly fair. From what I know, which is all second or third hand so could be wrong, what happened with Uber is far above and beyond the typical flow of work and hiring between industry and CMU. But CMU is getting some benefits out of the arrangement too,

I suspect we're going to start seeing more things like this. This may not be so much an outlier as a harbinger.
posted by Stacey at 8:05 AM on September 12, 2015

I'm baffled at the idea of Uber wanting robot cars.

Um...As a hedge against an increasingly likely future where all of their human drivers have to be re-classified as employees?
posted by Thorzdad at 8:18 AM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I suppose the Mobot competition will move to the Uber campus as well?
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:23 AM on September 12, 2015

NEVER. I will chain myself to the Fence before they take Mobot from me.
posted by Stacey at 9:34 AM on September 12, 2015

Um...As a hedge against an increasingly likely future where all of their human drivers have to be re-classified as employees?

I'm not sure a massive, worldwide fleet of cutting-edge high-end vehicles is really an improvement in that regard.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:15 AM on September 12, 2015

I suppose the next step is self-driving Buggies.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 6:41 PM on September 12, 2015

Seriously, anyone who thinks they're going to own more than a few tens or maybe a couple hundred of these cars for testing is a rube. The people who finance priuses to drive for them now will be financing the self driving priuses or tesla model E's or whatever.

This is as much of a hedge against the reclassification as it's a move to take the other humans who aren't customers that they have to deal with managing/supporting/problems from out of the equation as anything but the people who clean the cars and contribute the funds to pay back the banks that actually own them.

Basically, shifting the "drivers" to being even more purely liability shields.
posted by emptythought at 9:03 PM on September 12, 2015

Could also be a patent shield. Lock up enough tech to make self driving cars from edging in on their business.
posted by Mitheral at 11:44 PM on September 12, 2015

I think that cat is too far out of the bag, honestly. If they try that, their tech will end up being the MCA slot, or the equivalent of crappy tablets pre ipad or smartphones of the early 2000s. They might sit on enough tech, but it's such a gigantic target that someone else(possibly a chinese company that just doesn't give a shit about their patents and licensing) will release the alternate version, and everyone will swarm all over that.

It took us what, 13 years to go from the segway to a bajillion variations of self balancing unicycles/airwheel type stuff, little two wheeled balancing scooters, etc and the tech just being dirt cheap and available to any company that wants to clone it? And that sort of stuff is accelerating. Apple was sitting on essentially all the tech for multitouch and it only took what, two years for other people to start getting saleable products out the door that cloned nearly all the meaningful functionality that made the iphone special?

Uber might slightly slow it down in the US, but they wont slow it down for long. And really, i think it's in their interest to roll it out.

Imagine the difference between a fast food company franchising out stores that need employees, and simply leasing out or allowing the purchase of branded vending machines. There's a million ways for employees representing the brand to cause problems for the parent company that the internet can instantly turn into national scandals. But a vending machine? The worst it can do is eat someones money. And their overhead of inspecting the franchised out "stores" and vetting them as compliant to standards immediately vaporizes.

Hell, part of the agreement will likely be that they get a 24/7 always on connection to the car, which i can't really see operating without a network connection anyways.

You see it as them betting against self driving cars, i see it as them eliminating the possibility of these situations and a hell of a lot of their bad press in general ever being created again. No more crazy drivers or just drivers doing illegal things, no more labor/contractor/employee issues, no possibility of the drivers making errors that cause accidents and bad press, or being shitty to customers, or just any of that.
posted by emptythought at 12:15 AM on September 13, 2015

I work for Carnegie Mellon, and this was obviously a big deal when it happened. I also dislike Uber for many reasons, but nobody should be forced to accept payment in prestige when someone else is paying in dollars, so I don't begrudge Uber for writing the checks or the folks who left CMU for cashing them. Everyone has their price, but there will always be some people who prefer the academic environment for reasons that are hard to overcome by throwing money at them, and it's not like the universities lack the financial resources to retain talent if they decide it's a priority for them. Which I obviously hope CMU does ASAP, because I gotsta get paid.

We need to fund pure research more than we do in this country, so I do worry when we're moving some of the more talented folks toward the applied end of things, but as octothorpe alludes to above, it was always like this, and it's really only the size of this particular poaching and the fact that Uber is involved that are making it a national story.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:01 AM on September 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think it makes perfect sense for Uber to hedge against the future with self-driving cars. The thing that most resonated with me as a Big Deal with self-driving was a comment from someone about the fact that cars sit unused for 99% of the time you own them. A self-driving appliance opens up the question about why you would want to fully own one at all; press a button, get in the car that shows up, get out when you're at your destination and the car fucks off to whocaresistan.

That sounds a lot like a business Uber is already in, and I don't know that who owns the actual vehicle or the financing is all that important. Apple, despite having a cash store that requires 64 bit processors to count up, has some other company actually underwriting and owning their new weird payment plan thing for iPhones. If Uber can create a demand there'll be someone who will underwrite it. Perhaps they think the folks who want to own a self-driver - even if they don't need it most times of the day - will be their future car fleet provider.
posted by phearlez at 12:27 PM on September 14, 2015

There's no way that renting out a car doesn't make sense if you're actually getting paid a reasonable share of the take for it. It's like airbnb. Uber wants the owners to be the landlords, and any underwriting company would want to be the person posting the listing.

So yea, i think they will want individuals to add their car to the service, otherwise they wont get a cut.

To elaborate, they would need way less self driving cars than they need drivers+vehicles now. A self driving car, barring charging or refueling time and when the owner needs it, can drive 24 hours a day. It never gets tired or fatigued, and could even drive itself to the dealer or repair shop for oil changes and new tires and such(or honestly, any repair that wasn't a failure of the sensors and system needed for it to operate itself, or some catastrophic drivetrain failure. And even then it could get itself towed).

The average income per person adding their car to the system would be much higher. There's no reason the car couldn't drive 70+ hours a week or even more. Shit, there's no reason it couldn't drive 120. Obviously the rates would plummet more, but there's just no way that it doesn't make sense to buy a 35k car(or even a 50k car) if you're taking in 60-80k a year.

And that's at the pittance rates uber pays out to "drivers". I'm sure any major company partnering with them would work out a sweatheart deal.
posted by emptythought at 2:26 PM on September 14, 2015

Meanwhile those cars are going to last about two years before they disintegrate like the Bluesmobile on the Daley Center sidewalk.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:40 PM on September 14, 2015

That's not really all that different than consumer cars used for taxi service now. Consumer-targeted products that get used 12x as much don't do well, to put it mildly. It's even worse in markets where taxis are individually owned and don't get good fleet maintenance, as anyone who had had the joy of being stranded in a broken-down cab can attest.

Certainly an interesting question how that will be handled in self-drivers. Now you have a cabbie who will flag you down a new ride and help you get situated in the new vehicle. How on your own are you going to be in that self-driver? Will the ride arranger handle getting the new vehicle to you? Will it try to screw you on the fare, billing you for the privilege of dumping you on a sidewalk nowhere near where you really wanted to go?
posted by phearlez at 6:48 AM on September 15, 2015