The dark side of ‘sharing economy’ jobs
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Uber is similar. All the planning and deciding is done by computers. Failure to serve on demand three times costs them their jobs. The computer gives the orders and the serfs must obey.
It's not even a market system. Serfs can't bid on requests for rides. Uber sets the price.
These drivers will likely eventually be replaced by driverless cars when their cost declines below the cost of employing drivers. Will that that be better or worse?
Unlike real serfs Uber drivers can set themselves free at anytime (i.e. quit). Instead 40,000 more signed up last month alone[1].
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/22/inside-ubers-staggering-u-...
I'm certainly not on the Uber-hating bandwagon that's been doing laps around HN lately, but this isn't always true. Some people drive an Uber car because they need a paycheck and a flexible schedule, not because they want to. There may not be many (or any) other opportunities ready available.
A serf could quit too, as long as he was willing to abandon everything he knew and set out on the road going far away from his old master. But he knew he'd probably end up destitute and serving a new master in a strange place, so he stayed.
People are risk averse. Some people do jobs that pay bills because they need them, not because they want them. Freedom to walk away from something doesn't imply a desire for that something.
In other words, Uber is a positive force in their lives, an employer who made them a better offer than any other, and they've getting shit for not making the drivers an even better offer?
So none of these people can currently do better than driving for Uber?
And the answer, frankly, is that they'll all be out of jobs when Uber moves over to a fully autonomous fleet.
You've never needed to work, have you? And I don't mean "have a job to afford the lifestyle you prefer" I mean been poor, unskilled, and needed to work to put food on the table.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
"There's a lesson in that, too. What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger."
"I point out to you...a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."
And just like Marshall Brain's story, we are also without laws protecting people of the right to live.
The reality is in many jurisdictions Uber drivers are violating criminal law [1], and Uber drivers have been arrested. I was personally informed by a driver in Houston that Uber actually pays for a driver's lawyer when arrested. Maybe that is a start-up itself...connect Uber drivers with Uber lawyers paid for by Uber; however, my prediction is there will eventually be a major class-action by drivers who have been arrested while a contract driver for Uber. While corporations will continue shifting from employees to contractors in their own interest, it is a matter of time before someone realizes Uber is liable for contracting people and paying them specifically for acts deemed criminal.
[1] I am not taking a position as to the morality of such laws or whether they are just, simply stating many jurisdictions have laws in place criminalizing operating taxi's without permits
If you make more than that, you're being squeezed down to it. Below that wage, machines don't make sense, yet. And with the squeeze happening with all of the 'sharing' economy, your wages will go even lower.
In effect, capitalism has failed us, as a country and as a world. Do I know the answer? Nope. Some will say communism, socialism, anarchism, or some -ism. But something will need to be set up differently. Lest we will see the US come out as a 3rd world country. And I'm not entirely sure it's not a good way there.
The only thing that's failed here is your perspective. The world is a very complex place and the last thing it needs more of are people pondering half-thought "solutions" to problems they haven't given an iota of thought to.
now, what do we do about this? Honestly, I have no clue.
Where is the market for a driverless taxi if nobody can afford to catch one?
If you're an optimist, there will always be meaningful work to be done (for some kind of credit), supported by a government that knows to placate a society, they need to feel useful.
A pessimist on the other hand might subscribe to the cyclical nature of the rise and fall of civilisations. They catalyst this time being technological development moving faster than our ability to mentally and socially digest it.
We have only got about a billions years left. Let's make them count.
Because that is the phrase for extra bad capitalism, right? The regulatory capture of the rent seeking income inequality causing corporatism, occupy HN!
I'm seeing a lot of posts lately that remind me of Randian villains. Two dimensional characters who are uniformly ugly and buffoonish - so that the reader instantly knows the bad guys.
More than 50% of mexicans live with less than that.
That's why USA is so atractive to millions of inmigrants.
$4/day in Mexico vs $8/hr in the USA?!
It's a no-brainer.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/10/a...
This is a story about income inequality, and the forced assumption of liability by the weaker parties to an employment contract. It's also about the abject failure of regulators in the face of politically connected companies. It's about tilted playing fields where startups that work within the existing system fail; and startups that act like robber barons succeed.
It's about the psychopathic cult of "success" that says that making more money is always a supreme good; no matter the economic externalities you create for the rest of us.
We're on a path to becoming a third-world planet where the rich live lives of robot-pampered luxury and everyone else starves in favelas trying desperately to make a living by bartering on craigslist with their smartphones.
Oh, and do you think you're good enough and psychopathic enough to be living in a mansion in Atherton? The odds are against you. And that type of self-delusion is part of the story too.