So I use Uber from time to time; it is extremely useful. It’s ridiculously nice in a city setting where one can simply pull out there phone and have a ride within minutes. Today I was driving home from work and when I took a detour through downtown Pittsburgh in order to avoid the ridiculous traffic on the Liberty bridge I just so happened to end up behind the car seen in the above photo. The spinning device on top caught my attention so I ended up doing a quick Google search to discover that Uber just so happen to be testing self driving cars.

It really wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how genius of an idea that Uber actually was. They are in essence a taxi service that does not own an actual car. They employ drivers as well as their own personal vehicles and collect 20% off of every ride by simply providing the software to connect the drivers with their riders. It’s absolutely genius and the company has made billions off of that model.

Nearly every major city is loaded with Uber drivers at any given point in time. Heck, even as I sit here typing this post I could have one at my front door within the next two minutes! But now Uber plans to take their newly found fortune and  invest heavily into self driving vehicles. What exactly does this mean for the thousands of already employed Uber drivers?

It will be quite interesting to see how they go about transitioning into drive-less vehicles. Obviously we will have to wait until it is legal for a car to be driver-less but, what will happen to the drives? Would it be ethical for Uber to go ahead and put all the drivers that made the company profitable out of a job? Or will they keep the same business model and rely on other peoples cars that just use Uber’s software? Imagine a day where you could enlist your car as an Uber car and you wouldn’t even have to be there to drive it.

Either way it will be very interesting to see how Uber evolves. Feel free to share your thoughts on the evolution of Uber in the comments section.