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.