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Comment by pgsimp | Hacker News Reader

I get that scenario, just trying to gauge the maximum price a customer might be willing to pay. But that wouldn't be surge pricing, or would it?

I suppose a "nice" company would not try to do that "price maximization" thing at all to begin with. Auctions seem fair, though.

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No, surge pricing would be "lots of people want to travel right now and we don't have the capacity, increase the price to maximise return". The averaging there is "all users in a wide area" rather than "all people that need to go to local place X". Both may cause ethical issues but the latter has a specific kind of problem.

What a smarter but unethical system may discover is "people having a heart attack will pay almost any amount of money to get to hospital". Substitute heart attack for any other medical issue, if that is something you'd say should require an ambulance.

Location based pricing may be fine, charging more for airport travel because there's less competition (due to waiting times, etc) could be fine. Charging more for getting medical treatment is not.

Optimising blindly for profit is not something we want to do, but can easily be what we task a machine to do.

There is a difference between trying to determine the highest price somebody may be willing to pay and auctioning off to the highest bidder (with an AI trying to guess the auction prices also being a kind of auction). The point is exactly that somebody with a heart attack has the option to pay more so that they can a ride. Yes it would be nice to be able to detect "this person has a heart attack, let's give them a free ride to the hospital". But it is not really viable in practice yet. So giving them an option to pay more is the second best option.

Now they decided to remove that option, so how are people with heart attacks supposed to get to the hospital?

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