We don't have software driven vehicles, we have software driven humans.
Wow, this is a very prescient quote. I think we will hear this repeated often in the years to come.
The quote takes a very dystopian view of the augmenting of humans with technology, sure there are people who will blindly follow the directions/"knowledge" of a machine, but just as many will be consciously and intelligently using the machine as a tool to further their own goals.
As above, so below. The comment mentioning people above/below the API doesn't remember how much background stuff us developers use every day to be capable of so much more (and also less) than the developers of yore.
And really expands possibilities of the Chinese Room Argument.
One is to lament how previously specialized professions like taxi drivers become replaced by low-skilled laborers who just need to drive and use an app.
The other way is to appreciate how technology augments what humans can do and be more productive. It's not like all accountants got fired when Excel started being a thing: It's that they got way more work done!
There is no sign of a decrease in demand for labour in countries like the US or Germany: Quite the opposite, we have to get a lot more efficient in order to sustain an aging population!
In fact there is growing evidence that increased automation actually increases demand for workers in the economy. It might reduce employment in the actual factory itself, but the remaining jobs there are more skilled and technical, the higher efficiency draws investment and allows companies to scale up, there's a significant trickle-down to the surrounding economy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2020/06/18/why-deep-...
This makes sense when you look at the history of automation, but it's only recently that the processes that underly the way automation actually stimulates and enhances an economy have been better understood.
There is an argument that AI is different because it will substitute humans more completely, but we are a long, long way off from anything like that. The kinds of automation we have now, in terms of the effects on the economy and employment, are much more like automation over the last century or two than strong AI that renders humans fundamentally obsolete.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334386191_Digitaliz...
They also conclude that only 9% of all US jobs are actually at risk due to automation, using a much more reasonable approch that Frey and Osbourne [2017] who conlude 47% of the population with a risk > 70%:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00401...
So the drivers were replaced with organic hardware (other, non-knowledgable humans) and their knowledge was replaced with software (google maps, or whatever Lyft/Uber use for maps)?