Training self-driving engineers
Self-driving cars aren’t just going to destroy jobs. They’re going to create some, too.
For tech-minded types who want to catch that wave nice and early, there’s now a 36-week online program to gain a nanodegree — a kind of certification — as a selfdriving car engineer.
Otto, the self-driving truck company recently acquired by Uber, has joined forces with distance-learning company Udacity and others to create the program, which promises to fasttrack its graduates for jobs with its partners. Other companies involved are MercedesBenz, Nvidia and Didi Chuxing. In July, Uber sold its Chinese operations to rival Didi, China’s leading ride-hailing company. As part of the deal, Didi invested $1 billion in Uber.
“We will be the only company in the world with a self-driving car degree,” Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference Tuesday.
While in the long term, self-driving cars and trucks are expected to operate autonomously, for now, they require a human in the driver’s seat both for regulatory reasons and to take over when the technology runs into trouble. That means a new category of jobs created by the transition to self-driving vehicles.
The curriculum goes far beyond what an Uber driver might need to know to navigate city streets. Topics covered will include “deep learning, computer vision, sensor fusion, localization and controllers,” Otto and Udacity said. The program will consist of three 12-week semesters, costing $800 each. At the program’s end, students will collaborate on code that will be run on an autonomous vehicle owned by Udacity.
Thrun said he hopes that graduates of the course will ultimately design a “crowdsourced” self-driving car.
Applications are being accepted from through Sept. 27.
Nanodegrees, pioneered by Udacity, AT&T, Salesforce, Autodesk, Hack Reactor and other tech companies, are online certificates in basic programming that students can earn in six to 12 months for relatively low cost, qualifying them for entry-level jobs.