I had cab drivers nearly drive off with me hanging off the car in San Francisco, because they were far more concerned with screening my destination than, say, not killing me. If Uber destroyed that industry, it was only a net benefit to society. They created immense value, and the "destruction" was only to eliminate a layer of corrupt parasites who made money by preventing a free market (in this case, the medallion owners, but the entire industry was corrupt from top to bottom).
Yeah, I don’t believe you. It sounds like you’re making a just-so rationalization for why taxis are good and Uber is bad.
In pretty much any mature taxi market Uber is as expensive (if not more expensive!) than the conventional alternative. And yet Uber survives.
Most of the drivers providing that service split their time between Uber, Lyft and traditional corporate black car service.
Lots of posts on this topic in the UberDrivers subreddit.
We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.
The agricultural revolution displaced farm workers with machines. There was unrest and migration to cities, and eventually that fed the Industrial Revolution and created a working class.
Change is tough, but we will all be fine.
What it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements.
Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.
It may have worked out fine for humanity as a whole, but it ignores the suffering of a lot of people.
In a world where AI has not yet taken all the jobs, when a company provides lousy service, why do its employees deserve to keep their jobs more than the customers deserve good service?
Counterpoint: It is increasingly impossible to get to a human at Uber when you need support, as most of their support channels are gated by LLMs and self-service support workflows.
I mean, maaaaaybe a Jevon's Paradox kicks into play with human labor and replacing people with robots somehow creates even more jobs, but whenever someone says this your immediate response should be: "ok, now put your money where your mouth is and bet on it by strengthening the social safety net."
(Eg agricultural revolution in the US)
I do believe in good safety nets as well and I think that shows in my voting record, so I’m not sure what else you would expect from me, if anything.
I’ve only read the article, not the full book, but I’m not sure I buy the premise.
Maybe we can’t see what the new post-AI society looks like yet, but I tend to believe society progresses as it evolves.
It doesn’t mean it won’t be rocky for many people, and good social safety nets will make this easier, but I generally don’t think there will be some kind of dystopian future where society runs out of work to do for humans.
Easier for them to adopt AI than AI companies to rebuild the networks
Ghost kitchens might since that’s the only sales channel they are utilizing.