Uber’s Robotaxi Playbook, the End of Human Driving & $10B Bet on Robots | Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber CEO) | EP #244

0:00I'm gonna need to get my driver's license in a couple of years, but after hearing this, I have a question. Well, you may not have to get your driver's license, but it's good. 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 of drivers? Do they have to learn how to drive? And what happens to sports like race car driving?

0:35Mass 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 the moonshot ladies and gentlemen all right so go to the mics for your questions i'm going to start with this this question on slido so what's harder convincing regulators that that autonomous cars are safe or convincing passengers to get into one it's actually pretty easy uh to get passengers to get into an autonomous vehicle what we're finding is um you know for example a lan or austin we let you know that you have been matched with an autonomous vehicle.

1:2980 % 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 say more people are excited about than not. All right, we got to one of our teens. We have a group of 20 teens here in the room. Very cool. Please. How are you doing? I'm doing good. 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 on the road? And how does that end up affecting the next generation drivers?

2:04Do they have to learn how to drive and like what happens to sports like race car driving? Is that like gonna like die out because nobody has to drive anymore? Just that's kind of where I'm asking about. Well, I think that Race car driving is always gonna 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 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.

2:40And 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. Dara, so thank you for that question. I'll build on that. There's a lot of deaths in the Middle East from young teenagers with fast cars. Yeah. 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 question like yeah so um 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 we're uh so we're talking again this is more joby but there's a lot of discussion on vertiport so to speak and 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.

4:05The 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 it's a huge opportunity as well for small islands that are hard to get to. Totally. Elshin, we'll go to your mic too.

4:43Thank you very much. Elshin, I'm building a solid-shaped construction materials marketplace. If you're starting marketplace now at Abandon's 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, et cetera.

5:31And 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 mic one. Burgundy. Hi, my name is Burgundy, and I am definitely biased towards automation. Cool. But as a lawyer outside of this room, everybody is just freaking out. And so my question is, given that we have this automation and sensors and having seen the data on human error for speeding, intoxication, et cetera.

6:20What 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.

6:58And 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. Wow. It's a very, very big industry. What a benefit to society to get rid of that. All right. Shilpa. Yeah. Pleasure. Hi. I'm Shilpi. I led robotic systems at Amazon Air Hubs. I launched them and led them. And now we're building continuous biosensing technology at Quinn Labs.

7:45My 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.

8:46and every um in every city in which we're operating we're constantly taking kind of the state of that city uh real time um or as real time as we can be because we got to kind of recalculate the state of the city uh 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.

9:35um 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 you know kind of 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'll not only be predictable, but they will have kind of acceptance rates that we think are much higher than humans as well.

10:14So 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.

11:05If 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 is 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, the one thing that's very important to us is making sure that as we build out Uber in cities, our service isn't just available in the middle of cities where wealthy people live, but it's available in all kind of throughout the cities and the outer boroughs, et cetera.

11:46so you know 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 you know 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 dar the the concern right now is there's a lot of fear that's mounting about the future. Sure. 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.

12:28And this idea that Mark and his team have 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, you know, those sorts of things, then at least you can now think about dreaming about what do I do next with these incredible tools. So it's the direction we want to head. Peter, to your point also about the bed in it, I think there's a possibility to decouple from land with housing to get to that too.

13:09So I'd love for Uber to be thinking about that. Wonderful. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Let's go to Charles on Zoom. Charles.

13:22So, Dara, this is going to be maybe a difficult question, but hopefully you can address it. So, obviously, in China, Uber's business didn't work out. And now China's expanding into the Middle East and the other emerging markets. I know you're in 70 countries, and their estimate is 70 % of their cost goes away with the autonomous car, right, the cost of the driver. So what did you learn from your experience in China as an organization, and how do you plan to sort of address the Middle East and other emerging markets if they flood the market with cheap autonomous vehicles? Yeah, so I was absolutely I am when I joined uber Travis and a meal and team had already decided to exit out of China China is an unbelievably competitive market I was I competed in China with Expedia and use a technical term.

14:27We got our asses kicked So I can't say I disagree with that decision. I thought it was a very good decision and I think it was absolutely the right thing to do. We have a big stake in Didi, who's the largest Chinese AV player, sorry, ride share player. Haven't monetized that yet. Looking forward to that at some point. We work with Chinese partners. So we work with Chinese OEMs. For example, BYD is a very, very big partner in that they provide affordable electric EVs all over the world and we still believe in EVs. They are great cars. Obviously, they're better for their environment, etc. And in the same way, we're also working with Chinese autonomous players.

15:14So whether it's a Pony or a Wii ride, hopefully Baidu as well, we are working with these players in many markets outside of the US, obviously. but we believe, we think building bridges to China is the right way forward for us. And AV is going to be an industry that we think the Chinese have a lot to offer. And we're working with these Chinese partners today as we speak. Amazing. Andy. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Dara. I'm Andy from Hong Kong. We run an autonomous insurance company, and we insure EV, AV, and robotics. Cool. My question is that, you know, working with underwriters, are there any specific challenges or desires that you would love to work with actuaries or underwriters?

16:11That's number one. And the second one is, would you consider embedder insurance into autonomous vehicles as well? I think the second, absolutely. we would. The model is, it's a model that hasn't been figured out yet, right? This is a very, very young industry. Is it going to be the driver? Is it going to be the platform? Will it be some kind of combination? All of that is TBD. So we'd love to talk to you about that. In terms of the challenges, the challenges as any actuarial kind of a business is, you need the volume, right? And And right now, while autonomous is a reality today and is growing very, very quickly, I think last year, all of the autonomous trips in the world represented less than 1 % of our growth in volume.

16:59Not just the volume that we had, but the amount of rides that we added last year. So this is at this point a very, very small industry, and we need the law of large numbers to start speaking to us as to figure out how to price the services that you provide. Yeah, thank you. We provide the data to Actress. Yeah. It's perfect. Love to have a chat with you. Thank you. Nice. Thank you. Ilya, one of our teens. Good to see you. So I'm going to need to get my driver's license in a couple of years, but after hearing this, I have a question. so you may not uh have to get your driver's license but that was my entire question so so if cars are going to drive themselves and drones are going to deal are going to be delivering everything will i even need to get my driver license when i'm 16 or will robots just do ilya how old are you now 13 you're 13 three years away three years away so ilya i think three years from now, you will still want to get a driver's license.

17:59Because even though these AVs are coming, mass production of these AVs is going to take some time. They are very expensive today, much more expensive than a regular car. But 10 years from now, you won't have to drive and you'll have plenty of choices. But it's kind of fun to drive. So I'd encourage you to get your license. Nice. 10 years ago, I made two predictions. Our sons were four years old at the time. and prediction one was my son would never go to university and prediction two is that he would never get a driver's license. I predict today that in two years he won't need to get a driver's license.

18:36He'll just get it so he can get away from the parents. But the need won't be as much and certainly it's going to collapse over the next few years. My son is 21 years old. He doesn't have a driver's license and he doesn't seem to have any intention of getting one. He's got a big Uber bill, but that's okay. He's got context. Great question. George. Hey, Dara. George Bandarian with Untappd Ventures. So we invest in the autonomous economy. And while myself and for our investors, it's very exciting to see this world where, you know, billions of agents and billions of all kinds of autonomous robots, like the ones you're talking about.

19:14But the human concern comes up. And I love what you said earlier about how you're already thinking about it and kind of extending the kind of work that Uber is. So I wonder if you could expand on that. What are your thoughts about what role Uber might play in that, as well as the rest of the ecosystem? I think in this community, we talk a lot about there's, you know, there's going to be tens of hundreds of millions of people that are going to be out of work because of AI and robotics. And it sounds like this is something you guys obviously already have thought about. And certainly would be great to get Peter and Salim's thoughts on this as well, because I think it's a big problem, but I also think it's a great big opportunity for some new startups to come in and solve that.

19:57What do we do with all of this new human labor in the next 10, 20 years when this transition happens? Yeah, totally. I think the first thing that I'd say is the press loves the drama of machines replacing humans because it's dramatic. It's interesting. It may not be pleasant, but it certainly gets people's attention. And you've got to realize that the press is like any business as well, right? They will tend to dramatize things to be able to earn revenue, just like any other business in the world. It's not a bad thing. It's not a good thing, but it's a reality. The reality that we've seen historically is that automation typically doesn't replace work, but it augments work.

20:39You know, if you go to a, probably the Chinese OEMs are the most sophisticated. When you go to their factories, yes, there's a ton of work that is automated and there are robots all over the place. They're humans. And instead of doing the work, they are overseeing the robots doing the work, performing quality checks, et cetera. And yes, there are less humans working in that plant than there would have been 10 years ago, but there are plenty of them around. So I do think that there's, and we see the same thing in terms of AI at the office as well, just like any other company, we're looking to automate tasks, etc.

21:19But usually we don't get to that 100 % automation, we'll automate 20%, we'll automate 30%, and there's plenty of work to do, so to speak. So I do think that over the next 10 years, you will see a lot of augmentation of work and some replacement of work. And historically, our society has been able to adjust. And as some work has been augmented or replaced, new work shows up, et cetera. That is my hope as it relates to our society as well. There is a real question because, you know, singularity, et cetera, the pace of change is moving so quickly and the pace of change that we're seeing as it relates to AI and automation over the past five years, it's just happening faster than even I expected.

22:10And I'm an optimist as it relates to technology. So I think there's an open question as to how quickly is society going to adjust? And just as it has historically, can it adjust fast enough? And so from my standpoint, if that's a question, well, what can we do about it as a big flexible labor platform? And we are extending the kinds of jobs available so that in 2035, we've got 20 million people on our platform versus the 10 million people on our platform now. They may be doing different kinds of tasks, but there will be plenty of work to go around on our platform. And I think ultimately, whether it's retraining, new jobs, it'll be up to both private enterprise and public enterprise to take a lead here, to lean forward.

23:02I don't think it helps to kind of worry about this stuff because what the hell is worrying going to do to you? So my push is let's do something about it. We as a platform are doing something about it. I think Peter's push on kind of labor, being able to own assets, et cetera, is another great push as well. There's no question that kind of, you know, in our capitalist society, capital is the thing that's being optimized, sometimes at the expense of labor, and to kind of bring labor along so that they can be owners. That is a very, very positive direction that we go in, and hopefully that's something else that we can start pushing.

23:42I love this. Uber is the societal capacitor, being able to absorb and then discourage electrons as required. I mean, the kind of work at Uber, it's obviously, you know, it used to be when I grew up is like you'd have a job for life. Yes. You know, now a lot of times you have a job for a week and move on something else, right? Amazing. Per. Thank you. My name is Per. I'm from Chile. My family has a shipping company and part of what we transport is oil and gasoline and jet fuel. So my question is, do you think that EVs will push out completely the combustion engine? And how can I calculate, if you think so, how quickly will it go?

24:34I think that the onset of these technologies in the physical world always takes longer than the digital world. You need an ecosystem to move these cars over to EVs. And based on what we see, the EVs are a better product. But the ecosystem, especially in the US in terms of charging infrastructure, et cetera, is just not there yet. Which is why EVs have not kind of gone the kind of traction in the US than they have certainly in Europe. One of the benefits of AVs is that AVs are EVs. And so as autonomous becomes a bigger reality in our network, our network is going to move to EVs as well. So I think 20 years from now, yeah, I don't think you're going to see too many combustion engines.

25:29But 20 years is a long way away. And the world is going to be a very, very different place by then. We're going to cigar on mic one. Thank you. Dara, my name is Sagar Chopra. I'm a co-founder of a company called Empower Sleep. Before Empower Sleep, I was actually at Uber for about four and a half years. Oh, very cool. Focused on international expansion. And I always tell people it's one of the coolest jobs that I ever had. So I always really admired your leadership as well. Did you work hard? I worked very hard. There you go. Now you're on the sleep company. Yeah, exactly. There's a whole story to that.

26:05That's funny. Worked too hard. But you know, one thing I really admired about the culture, to your point, Everyone ran towards the fire, super entrepreneurial, very driven. Everyone had a lot of agency over their own decisions, and it just created this magic within the company. How do you preserve that as the company grows and scales and doubles, triples in size? I would love to just get your perspective on it. Yeah, listen, it's something that companies, as they scale, they all have to face. And and we don't get it perfect by any means but the two two things that I would point out is one of the core values at uber is Do the right thing period okay?

26:50And that was a value that we introduced during a difficult time when you could argue we weren't doing the right thing And and at the time, you know most companies when they have values as there's like the headline and then there's a description of the value Would do the right thing the description is period And I remember when we introduced the value to our employees, people were like, well, what does that mean? What does doing the right thing mean? And what I told the team is what it means is you are responsible for doing the right thing. Every single person in our shop is responsible, has to take that responsibility personally as far as what they're doing.

27:29And sometimes doing the right thing may be to play safe or maybe to take a risk or maybe to run fast or maybe to fold your cards. You know, you never know exactly what to do the right thing is. But for us, we have a culture where individuals at Uber, three, four levels down from me, still can impact the direction of the entire company. uh and and that's something that came like i i i was able to take from travis and the and the culture that he built you know there's a lot of criticism about him etc but like he built a culture of go-getters uh and i got to inherit that culture and kind of keep pushing it uh forward so there is you know do the right thing is also a message of responsibility at all levels at the company and then for me you know as companies get larger they tend to get more conservative and the exact opposite should be true you know peter you were talking about when we joined the company we were losing four billion dollars like if we made a decision and we lost a billion dollars on that decision it would be a freaking disaster you know we cash flow we're going to cash flow $10 billion this year.

28:42So we should be taking big bets. And while I'm not rooting for these bets to fail, some of them are going to fail. And so for me, the fight that I have all the time, and it's a fight with myself, sometimes with it, it's my board, and it's with my team is, companies tend to get more conservative as they get bigger. And the exact opposite should be true, because you can take big bets at large scale and you can be just fine if they don't work out. It ain't perfect. I fight it every single day, talk to the team about it, but they're the ones who are the doers. You know, there's only so much I can do.

29:20Love it, love it. We can take one last question from my deputy son, Bear, over here. Bear. Hey there. So following up on that last question, I was wondering, when you run one of these huge companies, how do you decide when to pursue a new field rather than kind of stay conservative and continue just collecting cash flow? Yeah, so we want to make sure that we are continually experimenting. And usually when we go after a new field, the way I put it is it's got to rhyme with what we do. So if it's kind of something new, crazy out here, a startup is probably better equipped to do it. But if you look at the path of Uber, we started with rides.

30:06And then if we're going to move people around, why can't we move things around? So then we went to eats. If we're going to move food around, why can't we move bulk around? So we actually went and started Uber Freight. If we're going to move people on the ground, why can't we move them in the air? That was elevated, et cetera. So what we try to do, the pattern that we find is, hey, what are areas where we have some core skill set that gives us a right to win in this adjacency. Uber AI solution has nothing to do with movement, but actually is a kind of work, flexible work opportunities that we're bringing either to our drivers or entirely new people coming onto the platform to go out and design new models or do labeling for new models or test out models, etc.