The number of humans employed by Uber will actually increase as self-driving vehicles become more commonplace, the company’s head of autonomous mobility and delivery Sarfraz Maredia predicted at the World Economy Summit. One reason is that the company’s driving and food delivery businesses are still expanding into new markets. Also, it must balance between providing enough vehicles to serve consumers at peak times, without so many that cars are sitting dormant during other hours. The solution, Maredia said, is humans and robots working together.
“The benefit of having a hybrid marketplace is that there are human drivers and couriers that are doing billions of trips around the world, and we expect them to continue to do that,” he said. “As we introduce autonomous vehicles, they will be able to take up some of that market growth, such that when there are spikes in demand, we don’t have to have an irrational number of autonomous vehicles in the market that are sitting around the rest of the day.”