Interesting. But I have personally witnessed poverty and people dying of hunger in front of my very eyes. I’d rather help those people than invest in failed moon missions.
We are currently in the AI winter. What we have now is not AI it’s curve fitting. Don’t be fooled, the computer does not “understand” it’s doing blind curve fitting.
Funny thing is I know of of at least two other women that currently call themselves Crypto Queen, or a variation of that, who are doing the TED circuit and similar.
This is not Uber's real problem. The much bigger problem is that Uber's business model by definition cannot be profitable, and here is why:
Let's start with the costs of the business model.
What are the two costs involved in transporting a customer from point A to point B? They are:
- The car’s time
- The (human) driver’s time
Operating or leasing a car for a certain amount of time (maintenance/insurance/gasoline) has not become significantly cheaper since Uber was created, so there is no cost reduction here.
Hiring a human's dedicated time (at least minimum wage) has also not become significantly cheaper since Uber, so here too there is no cost reduction.
Therefore the cost to transport something from point A to B has stayed exactly the same, before Uber and after Uber.
To transport something from point A to point B, someone must still carry this unavoidable cost. If the customer is not carrying this cost, then Uber must be carrying it. Uber can do so for now because investor money has subsidized the cost. But Uber can’t do this forever because investors will lose patience and stop the subsidy.
Uber can only be profitable once the unavoidable cost transport is passed on entirely to the customer. At that point, Uber will have to charge the same price as any taxi. Stated differently, Uber can never be more profitable than a taxi company on a per-ride basis.
Given that customers have no loyalty to a ride-share service, because every ride is virtually identical, any taxi company can build a similar service, removing any "walled garden" or "network effect" Uber may have hoped for. In fact, Uber clones are doing well in other countries and are creating significant headwinds for Uber.
Uber therefore has no hope of ever delivering its promises unless it can deliver driverless cars. Even if it can do that, the technology will quickly become commoditized and ubiquitous, meaning that any other ride-share service could offer it as well, once again removing any advantage, and driving margins for all ride-share services to near zero.
It’s funny how Uber simultaneously says it’s all about supporting drivers and treating them like family, and at the same time they want to fire them all so that robots can do the driving.