Dan Machen: Can Uber Save Lives?

I had the rare privilege of seeing Malcolm Gladwell at SXSW recently. He’s a canny magnet, to say the least. This guy looks like a lit match - his hair is a riot of curls like antennas extrapolating on a head of amazing ideas.

He also weighs about 90lbs and every ounce of him seems to be a sinuous vehicle for the electrifying intellect that lies beneath impish features.

On this occasion, the intellect was put to great use in an hour-long joust in Texas with Bill Gurley, the biggest VC in the US – at about 6’ 9” – and one of the main investors in Uber [the app-based taxi service that has revolutionised the sector].

The main thrust of the argument was around tech disruption and whether it's a good thing. After talking about jobs (gained or lost depending on your perspective), the speakers shifted onto technology and driverless cars.

Gladwell confessed that he - perhaps irrationally – took the contrarian viewpoint. As a person, he doesn’t like the idea of driverless cars. Even cars with lots of tech in them freak him out. Getting in an Uber in New York, Gladwell said the driver had about four screens which terrified him: “I was in the back in the foetal position,” he quipped.

This really echoed our [HeyHuman's] talk on people’s brains getting overloaded with task switching and potentially disastrous implications for attention and outcomes.

It's a little known fact that a massive contributor to the Air France Flight 447 crash [in 2009] was pilot cognitive overload. The pilots had too much noise and alarms blaring at them to make the correct choice to dive the plane to fix an engine stall caused by bad weather.

Very sadly this led to the plane going into the sea with massive loss of life.

Life was exactly the counterpoint from Gurley who stuck to the rational side of the argument (also the Uber side, as you’d expect).

Gurley suggested that professional Uber drivers and almost faultless driverless cars could significantly reduce the tens of thousands of deaths caused every year on American roads; either through human error or by driving under the influence of alcohol.

This is where the talk went from good to great. Gurley casually offered that Uber is a great way for young people to avoid drink driving at weekends – because it’s just easier. From a behavioural point though I think they could make that harder hitting.

In America alone the level of drink driving among 21 year olds is a gob-smacking 23.5 per cent. Also 66 per cent of people in the US will be involved in a drink driving road accident in their lives.

An interesting interjection in the tech vs. people debate is what if, in doing a task better, the mechanisation can actually save lots of precious human lives?

So at weekends, the behavioural motivation for Uber marketing aimed at young people could evolve to ‘Last Night An Uber Saved My Life’. Now there’s a thought to curl Malcolm’s hair even more.