I wonder how Uber drivers feel about working for a company that is actively trying to make them obsolete.
Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate..
Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.
In the same way McD and other places are replacing attendants with tablets. Or, in a similar vein, how Netflix replaced sending DVDs through the mail with the Internet
It's a job, not a career
And I suspect there's some 3 years at least before self-driving is "production ready"
Uber wants to be the leader in the field because it's a threat to their business model but I don't think your average Uber driver has much to worry about for a long time.
Most Uber drivers i've talked to about this, and i basically always talk about this when using Uber, all see themselves as just doing this for a short while, 2-3 years, so they don't see themselves being affected by this.
But that's a short view, right? As Uber moves into more and more places, that means more and more drivers that will eventually be replaced. You're absolutely correct that it will not affect people driving for Uber right now, but it certainly will affect those who start driving in three years[0].
[0] This, of course, assumes that driver-less cars will be ready for prime time in three years.
Most all of us work for companies that would like to make us obsolete. Payroll is a necessary evil in the enterprise, as far as "the business" is concerned.
The irony here is that I would say most companies are, in one way or another, driven by consumption. Our present economic system, generally speaking, relies income earned in jobs to fuel this consumption.
If everyone is obsoleted, who will have the income to consume what the robots and fancy technology produce? I personally don't see the current business / economic system being very well prepared for the possibility of a post-consumer economy.
I always talk to the drivers about their feelings and so on when taking Uber. Maybe my data is skewed but most accept it as inevitable and are not worried much as they have other side jobs. The cab drivers are the ones who must be anxious. It will be really bad if they cannot be retrained for other jobs as it will add to the existing frustration around automation. We simply cannot afford to leave people out as we move on to other things. Outsourcing moved manufacturing jobs to China, our focus on climate and global warming will leading to moving out of coal leaving coal miners behind, Amazon is automating their warehouses, Self driving will leave cab drivers behind...So, how do we create new type of jobs for these people? Humanity cannot progress by leaving people behind.
> The cab drivers are the ones who must be anxious. It will be really bad if they cannot be retrained for other jobs as it will add to the existing frustration around automation.
I used my "training" - a very expensive CS degree - to drive a cab. I developed a nerve condition in college, so really I just suffered through the program without becoming competent as a programmer. Also, I dance to the beat of my own drum, and do not take orders well. My kuro5hin.org (RIP) story "Humanity's Second-best Hope" [1] is about the seasonal job I had at Amazon, just before I started taxi driving.
Cab driving offered me freedom to be my own boss. The cab company's rules were reasonable, and easy enough to comply with. As long as I paid my lease, I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted with my time. No one in the company's administration cared if I took a short break, or a long break, or spent the night in bed.
Something more important came up, and ridesharing ruined the economics of the business (Arizona makes it easy and cheap for anyone to start their own transportation company. The upstarts couldn't be bothered with playing fair), so I don't drive around in a taxi anymore.
I think these money-losing "ride sharing" companies were founded by people with delusions of grandeur and venture capitalists' money to burn. When they run out of their investors' money, the realities of transporting people from place to place will reassert themselves.
I guess we should still be using horse and buggies then. How dare we leave buggy drivers behind.
Change is inevitable. And for many people, painful. If the automation revolution occurs too fast, it will be a pretty economically painful transition period for a large chunk of humanity. On the other hand, if the transition is really really fast, the painful period may not last too long. Most things will become so cheap and abundant that most people won't have to work, or we will transition society to a 10-hour work week or something.
> Humanity cannot progress by leaving people behind.
You're way overestimating the value our civilization places on an individual human life, doubly so if they're unexceptional and male.
And that's even more true for less developed societies. The sanctity and preciousness of human life and desire to avoid suffering and achieve equal outcomes is a relatively new concept, unique to the developed nations of post WWII era.
You could stash a helpful little Asimo in the trunk. It would be like a trunkmonkey, except without the tire iron ;) But that could also be a far, dystopian-future option: agile I-Robot style bots that leaps out of the trunk to beat down anyone who tries to jack you when you stop to charge your battery.
I have a mental image of a slow, but patient Asimo trying to winch a wheelless Jeep back onto a dirt road, in a soaking wet tropical jungle, like that scene in Jurassic Park. Meanwhile, the occupants get eaten. Asimo has no event handler for that situation, and continues working patiently to get the car back on the road. He does not smell interesting to the raptors, who leave after their meal.
I worked in an IT dept as it was migrating it's staff to India. I bailed as soon as I could, and half-assed it while I was there, because that's the American Way
Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate..
Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.