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Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

Good on 'em, but autonomous cars are on their way and it might displace the union.

In my city, Zoox are already rolling out driverless taxi services, and the vehicles they are using are completely autonomous.

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It will likely play out exactly like California’s disastrous special $20/hr fast food minimum wage[1]: a near immediate reduction in the number of people employed. They replaced a couple of $20/hr workers that were present taking orders with $3000 kiosks that run for $0.10/hour of electricity. And chains also closed locations whose fiscal viability were already close to the line, since “the line” jumped.

I don’t really blame the drivers for trying, I just think it’s probably not a viable long-term career, unfortunately.

[1] except of course if you’re Panera, coincidentally owned by a Newsom friend/donor. Good ol’ Bake-bread-on-premises exception!

The fast-food worker being replaced by a kiosk is inevitable and not limited to California, but even the kiosk is mostly transitory and destined to be largely replaced by a phone app.

Except that’s not how it played out at all! Fast Food employment did not go down but wages did go up 11%.

Prices of food went up 1.5%, which covered half the wage increase, and the employers ate (pun intended) the other half of the cost.

Here is the study by UC Berkeley from this April

https://irle.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Effects...

Other papers have found both employment losses and more significant price increases. A discussion of the topic was in the Ask Economics subreddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1smjx29/was_c...

Didn't those kiosks go everywhere? Part of the reason I get fast food less

I'm not sure. It may be cheaper for Uber to offload the insurance, depreciation and maintensnce of the vehicles to their human driver/owners, than for Uber to own, lease, and maintain autonomous cars. I haven't seen any analysis of that idea (not that I've looked very hard).

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