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.
The restated version of your comment is simply “I think drivers should get paid more,” which is fine, but not an argument. Everyone who has ever had a job thinks the same thing.
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.
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.
Just to clarify, are we referring to the American Civil War? The reason I ask is that the idea that it is not a topic that is broadly covered in history books and discussed at depth all throughout schooling is simply false.
It may have worked out fine for humanity as a whole, but it ignores the suffering of a lot of people.
Progress will result in better standards of living for many, and then we take care of the people left behind.
I’m in software - in all likelihood, I will be displaced at some point. But I’ll figure it out (I hope). When I started out, I was writing Perl. Then I had to learn Python.
You don't put on your seat belt during an accident, you don't start driving until it is on.
This is taking a weird tone where it sounds like you’re asking me to change society for you, and blaming me for not doing it fast enough when I haven’t heard you mention a thing you’ve done either.
Like I said man, I voted for people who support sensible welfare programs. That’s my contribution.
Stop taking this out on me - if you’re so fired up about it, go get involved and start knocking on doors.
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?
So they drivers spend their life Ubering, not learning new skills or anything and next thing you know - AI takes their jobs.
Then what? That's how you get revolutions.