One month after Waymo and Above announced a partnership To bring autonomous ride-sharing services to two U.S. cities, a vice president at the ride-sharing app said the company is developing some new job opportunities for workers to make money in an autonomous future.
But a situation in which Uber drivers are completely replaced by autonomous vehicles is still a long way off, Camiel Irving, Uber vice president of mobility operations in the U.S. and Canada, said at the conference Assets Conference of the most powerful women on Monday in Laguna Niguel.
“The need for mobility is infinite,” Irving said. “One of the statistics I use is that people in America take an average of 1,500 trips per day. You go to or from somewhere four times a day. Today, ridesharing accounts for 2% of those trips. There are so many ways to move people that we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.”
There will be a long period of time where human drivers and autonomous vehicles will take journeys together, she said. Should there ever be a future where autonomous vehicles would be the only cars on the road, Irving confirmed that Uber would still remain a platform for flexible work outside of driving. However, Irving kept the details to a minimum and foreshadowed more specific announcements from Uber in the future.
Irving was joined on stage by Anna Edwin, global human resources director for a private equity firm TPGand Chrysty Esperanza, chief legal officer of parent company Square and Cash App blockwho both said their companies are using AI in innovative ways to help employees.
At TPG, Edwin said her team recently used AI to meet regulatory requirements faster, processing a “huge data set” in five minutes that would have taken a human employee months.
“Everyone’s dealing with the same question: How do you create something that’s sustainable and doesn’t upset people because it’s going to replace their jobs?” she said.
AI has been a core part of Block’s business for years, as the tech company uses it to monitor transactions and detect loan fraud, Esperanza said. The company’s legal department also uses AI to help with contract management and document review.
“We view it as a complement rather than a replacement,” Esperanza said. “It’s something that can be an accelerator and help people move faster – a way to curate information more efficiently. We want to get involved in that.”
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