So Satya Nadella shoves Recall in Windows so that it takes screenshots every few seconds. Satya then sits there scratching his head wondering what to do with all these crap pictures his highly innovative product has captured.
Uber is silently watching and is highly impressed by Satya's innovation and decides to pay its large fleet of employees (sorry, no, they aren't employees) to label these pictures. Having nothing better to do, they start labelling these pictures as hot dog or not hot dog.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is outdoors surfing and hunting but doesn't want to be left out from these once in a lifetime innovations. Mark, a very smart individual, has already foreseen where all this innovation is headed. He rushes home and gets busy and throws around money to buy people who can use these labelled pictures to build him a "AI" bot which can tell him how to make korean sauce.
Very impressive bunch of highly intelligent individuals bringing us billions worth of artificial intelligence revolution. Marvellous.
I've always wondered what the world would look like if these huge powerful corporations were run by average people instead of multi-billionaires completely out of touch with what it's like to live in the world. Like have a lottery where everyone gets a single ticket, and the person whose name is drawn gets to be the CEO of Apple for a year, and the 10 next-drawn tickets get to be the senior staff.
This is similar to my idea for a better democracy. Every cycle involves a lottery where, say, 1000 random citizens become eligible to run for public office. A small enough number to make ‘career politician/sociopath’ an unviable life path but large enough that there will inevitably be some excellent potential candidates in the pool that wouldn’t have entered politics otherwise.
I had a recruiter reach out for a company doing Agentic SRE's due to my years of experience as an SRE. Second sentence was describing their mission as making the SRE role no longer necessary for companies. I know if you read between the lines that's the goal of many AI companies, but I was surprised how upfront they were.
There's no reason to hide it anymore. A CEO can go on CNBC and openly admit "Yes, we are excited about AI because if it works we won't have to pay so many middle class white collar workers anymore" and there are many average people who will ideologically defend it, as if they'll somehow be immune.
I recently browsed engineering job ads at x.ai where they looked for experienced software developers as data labelers for about 60 bucks / hour - so they work on replacing their own profession for a low pay. Funny times.
The whole "AI revolution" feels distopian opposite from what I'd naively thought it would do.
My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
In which only legit people, and never spammers or scammers get me on the phone. Where I don't have to juggle appointments, pdfs, portals, dossier-codes to have my drivers license renewed. In which I can write software and all the boring stuff is taken care of so I need to only do the creative and fun parts. In which I can go surfing, and AI takes care of my taxes, my home, my income and my dishes.
In which tasks like labelling art, driving a taxi, or annotating pdfs is done by machines. So that the humans have time to make art, get transported anywhere for virtually free, or write stories.
But alas, it's the complete opposite. AI companies promise to replace the people that make art, demand ever more humans to stare at screens in order to "generate useful training data" rather than those humans spending time with each other, or spend time in inspiring surrounding. AI increases robo calling a hundred fold. AI generates more email, content, slop, and other noise that I manually have to wade through to get the actual info.
I get where you're coming from — the naively thought part. You may though just have to get a good deal more cynical. Perhaps you already are.
Tech fascinated me as a kid—and, because of my age, we're talking Apollo-era tech, promises of a moon base, the introduction of the Metric system is U.S. schools, elementary school libraries full of science books for kids on chemistry, electricity, model rocketry, etc.
I have come around to see, as I get older, that tech for tech's sake is often a hollow thing. Its biggest cheerleaders are (of course) the ones that stand to make a lot of money from it.
Change for change's sake follows in stride—is disruptive, unasked for, often benefits a few.
I dislike my modern cynicism on tech but it has also served me well.
To quote several other people who have made thoughtful pieces around this in the past: the futurism espoused by people like Elon Musk seeks to engage with the aesthetics of Star Trek, whilst ignoring entirely the post-scarcity socialism that Roddenberry’s worlds very clearly represented.
That’s not quite as apt today, as it seems he’s just as happy to engage with the aesthetics of Blade Runner while also cheerfully engaging with the fascist dystopia of Blade Runner…
> My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
I can't quite square people seriously believing such things, it seems like it must be wishful thinking crossed with denial. We have more than 200 years of technology taking away the hard and dangerous jobs and it hasn't been playing out that way at all, so why should the latest kind of automation have a dramatically different effect on society?
A hydraulic excavator can do the work of dozens of men with shovels, dozens of times faster too, but that hasn't lead to easy lives of luxury for the sort of men that would have been breaking their backs with shovels. They all had to get other manual labor jobs, because they weren't the capital that got to own and profit from the new machines. The best we can hope for is that when all the women manually spinning thread get replaced by factories, that at least some of them will get to have new factory jobs and the rest will at least be offset by society at large benefiting from clothing so cheap that even the poorest people can own more than one outfit.
This is pretty wrong. We went from 90% of the population working in agriculture in ~1800 to (now) 80% working in services. Most services jobs are much nicer (and require far less manual labor) than those in agriculture.
Funny. I don't claim to be a person of extraordinary intellect or a tech-visionary. However, the very first time in my life I heard the argument "robots are bad because they will take all the jobs" I immediately realized "oh, so 'who will own the robots' is the question we have to think carefully about". This was in the mid-nineties and I was about 10.
>My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
That didn't happen at any previous industrial revolution step either. Instead work for humans became more mechanical and soul-crushing.
Farmers ended up having to work on some factory line for 12 hours. Small store owners and employees were turned into huge chain cogs. People "freed" from household work, were send to the cubicle.
Pretty wishful thinking to think software and hardware is advanced enough to figure out very advanced materials science and physics to do those tasks requiring manipulation of objects in the real world.
Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t, but manipulating digital output seems like a step that would come before manipulating real world objects.
I think you need to get past the literal examples to the concept that they are saying "I wanted AI to free me from the mundane, not imprison me with it". This has long been the promise from the same people who now appear to be quite happy to turn us into the Matrix-style feedstock for AI (again, not literal - but maybe literally?). Natural extrapolation: they may be the last to go, but it won't need them either. How can so many smart people all be Wile E. Coyote?
> How can so many smart people all be Wile E. Coyote?
Money. A whole lot of money. They won't live in the dystopian reality of most people in the near future, they'll buy their way out and live their comfortable lives.
That explains the ultra-wealthy, who likely will be able to buy their way out and live their comfortable lives.
But how do you explain the non-elites who are cheering on this dystopian reality? Some of them here in the HN comment section? If this thing that you are cheering for comes true, you'll be just as out of work and underclass as everyone else!
Do people really think the measly $2M 401(k) they got from their tech job is enough to buy them a ticket to the Elysium space station?
The literal examples show that their concept is or was a fantasy (within a short timeframe of one person's lifetime).
I don't know why one would have expected "AI" to be capable of stamping out machines that have fine motor skills, but to me, it seems perfectly in line that they can re-arrange pixels on a screen to mimic something humans previously made.
The parameters for folding laundry in each individual's home or doing the dishes are so much greater than deconstructing and re-arranging digital information based on prior probabilities.
All the "smart" people I know were not expecting to replace their HVAC/plumbing/electrical/house cleaners/etc work with automation.
I always believe technological advance eventually bring us to the point that 1) the elites have total control of all resources, and 2) impossible for ordinary people to rise up and clean the slate.
As someone on both sides of the issue I think this is good. I worked in tech my whole life and then drove an Uber in retirement. Uber is basically saying "We're partnering with Waymo to eliminate drivers, so here's something to help pay you while you transition to another job."
> Casserly said that tasks will not be related to any of Uber’s autonomous partnerships or the development of driverless vehicles.
But also it would be hard to provide them with tasks that are genuinely useful to training autonomous vehicles with only their phone.
Think about what data Waymo needs at this point. Where I am, they're driving street by street to get sensor maps of everywhere to prep for launching, which requires people to be driving a car with their specific sensors, not a phone.
When I was a kid growing up in the space age 1960's a popular phrase was "you can't stop progress!" I guess it helped people cope with the world changing.
Somebody really needs to put a stop to what Uber and the like are doing.
They are doing their best to destroy basic labor protections, by circumventing employing their workers. Why are countries just allowing them to clown on established worker protections?
If you want to pay someone to do something employ them. The roll out of the gig economy is only viable because it allows companies to push costs on to the labor force.
> If you want to pay someone to do something employ them.
There is a purpose for casual/contract labor. If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.
How that person chooses to relate to an employer (whether to be self-employed or work for someone else) is their business, not a concern of mine.
However, from a policy standpoint, I certainly don’t want to prohibit them from being a solo entrepreneur or similar.
So, there’s a reason to allow contract work, even with individuals. Whether you extend that to Uber transportation or to Uber’s new business is a fair question, but “employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber.
In addition to your very good points: an economy of people who take this live-and-let-live view is going to be far more flexible and efficient in different scenarios.
An economy made up of people who think it proper to make entire classes of employment like gig work (or work that pays under a certain minimum wage) illegal is not only interfering in the decisions of adults, but can only prosper under the exact set of circumstances those people consider ideal.
Your spherical cow version of economics is laughably naive and misguided. If "adults" decided tomorrow that it was fine to employ people at only the infrastructure cost of preventing them running away, people would be outraged. But somehow flooding an ecosystem with money to starve meaningful competition and capitalize on people's inherent lack of options, which is "preventing them from running away with extra steps", is somehow... "a robust and dynamic economic ecosystem between consenting adults".. let's not be naive on HN.
> How that person chooses to relate to an employer … is their business, not a concern of mine.
I could try and score points and ask if you would be okay if the lawn employee was prison-labor—if you would be okay employing them (money to go to the prison, of course).
My point though simply is that I don't think anyone should be okay hiring someone whose labor may be being exploited.
I was going to say that I don't think that is ever the case with lawn care but remembered that when I was maybe 10 years old, a neighbor had a lawn business during the Kansas summertime and he "hired" me and my sister (she was 9) to come with him (with his own two kids) to mow lawns for his business. I mean he bought us lunch at a fast food place and we made maybe $0.50 an hour—we were happy to have pocket money in order to buy candy at the drug store. I suppose we were being exploited though. ;-)
If they're an adult professional, yeah. Helps smooth out the home insurance if something happens and they get injured on your property or damage your property.
How far away are we from AI running the business (marketing, contracts, payment, scheduling, etc) while the humans compete with each other to do the lawn mowing for subsistence food & shelter? Put one of these tech bro CEOs in charge long enough for the AI to get good enough to do the top-level coordination and then recycle them into energy to power it all, and we're good to go!
The gig economy is neither contract work nor casual work.
>If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.
Error of categories. This simply is not the same.
It is normal employment in everything but name. Uber is replacing the taxi industry, which can not compete, because the taxi industry has to pay for labor protections. It is a scheme where Uber tricks existing labor laws to have employees it does not need to treat as employees.
>“employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber
It is. Before Uber ride hailing existed and it was done by employees or self employed people.
You know that when you cut the last two words off the quote “is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber” and respond to only the part you quoted that it leaves the impression that you’re arguing in bad faith, right?
I left it off because I did not know what you meant by "non-Uber". It is a category so wide that I have no idea what you were talking about, so I decided to focus on the part where the subject was clear. In the case of Uber I know that it is possible to replace it by employee labor.
You did not give any examples for "non-Uber" companies and we certainly were talking mainly about Uber, as was the article. I do not consider it at all bad faith to focus on the "Uber" part and ignore the totally unspecified and somewhat irrelevant "non-Uber" part.
To be honest you calling me dishonest because I focus on the topic, namely Uber, and leave out a category which I can say basically nothing about such as "non-Uber", seems to me like you are trying to dodge making any argument at all. Since you are ignoring what I said and focusing on what I did not say.
I recall a startup doing this a few years ago but I think they went out of business.
I think the issue is lawn mowing is usually done on a set schedule for a long time so the transaction cost is fairly low and you don’t want to pay a third party to handle the matching problem.
They're really missing out by not moving into federal services. Current administration would be all over firing federal employees and paying a fraction to gig employees.
Someone should write a "Gig Striker" app (or web site) for mobile phones.
When you sign on you select the company you work for and have access to group chats, forums (by region?). If a thread gets going on striking, the word can be put out on the app and all Uber drivers, just to pick an arbitrary example, refuse to accept calls for one day (again, as an example).
It would be an interesting experiment and tell us a little more about the world and economy we live in today.
I’ve got a brilliant idea! What if, hear me out, we had some kind of united alliance of workers, and they could do things like leverage their collective labor power to negotiate better working conditions and/or pay? We might call them something, let’s say “unions”, and we could even setup some sort of National Labor Relations Board to ensure fair access to them, and to help settle disputes? Then we might get some of the things we need, even without resorting to labor strikes, which are disruptive and expensive to everyone on all sides.
Surely this is possible, and companies like Uber haven’t been sandbagging and poisoning the well for decades?
I bet it’d be so popular, we would set aside a whole Federal holiday to commemorate all of the people who fought, and/or died, to win these basic labor protections 100-years ago! We’ll call it “Labor Day” and everyone will eat hot dogs while totally not spacing on the fact that they even enjoy “holidays” at all due to these very fights.
Because trust in governments and their ability to execute has been successfully eroded by the holders of private wealth. There are also plenty politicians that simply work for private wealth and deliberately sabotage government from the inside.
The current situation is that even a government that wants to work for the majority of people is too scared to go against a corporation like Uber, or simply doesn't have the means (means being political capital as well as skills within the civil service).
Building that means is a project that lasts beyond election cycles, and needs one elected government to not immediately undo the work of a previous one.
We always where going to, a star trek like society benefits the maximum number of people at the expense of curtailing the excesses of the wealthiest people.
The wealthy people don't like that, why would they and since they have a disproportionate amount of power via their wealth they oppose it successfully.
They'll keep the bread and circuses going and keep refining what is the minimum amount of bread they can get away with until they cross the line and then things get whacky for a bit, it resets and then they start taking the bread away again.
"Game the system", ha ha. Pretty sure "employers" that push for a gig economy are doing a bit of gaming themselves. Unionless, benefitless, interchangeable employees…
An Uber driver doing DoorDash or Lyft between Uber work would be working for a direct competitor, whereas an Uber driver doing errands that require a car from TaskRabbit would not be working for a direct competitor.
>> Should your employer tolerate you working another job while you are being paid to do yours?
When the company fights hard & dirty for decades to classify you as a contractor to externalize the majority of the costs in their business model? Yes.
you can stop working at any time, so that's what they do, and then start working for another company. Any employer can't have a problem with working a second job, so long as you're not violating a non-compete.
Pretty tough to have a non-compete when you're casual and/or a contractor. Some jurisidctions make this illegal in even more of an employer/employee relationship, most aren't going to enforce it in an Uber-style job, and it would never be cost-effective for Uber et al. to go after a contractor. They would just kick the "offender" off the platform - which might still be very bad for them.
>in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense.
I did not know this. Is this verifiable? I thought the whole reason Uber and other “gig” businesses work is because they can pay piecemeal and not have people classified as employees. There were multiple high profile court cases and even attempts to legislate that Uber drivers are employees, but I believe in the US they are still independent contractors, hence they can work for whoever they want, whenever they want.
Frankly, if you are driving around doing your job by simply being available, you are doing your job. If you are, e.g. not doing your job by picking up door dash and then an Uber that takes you out of the way and you deliver the food in an even colder state than if you drove to the DoorDash destination directly, then no, you are not doing your job and it should be apparent to DoorDash that you are not performing as is expected.
But what is your apparent assumption that Uber, dorodash, or any other employer owns your body or time. Frankly, that's both a holdover and also a bit of a crack that reveals that what we call slavery, is really just exploitation and abuse and it comes in many forms. Today it takes many other forms, but one of them is what you may unintentionally have internalized, that when you are "working for someone" you are effectively owned by them and you are not free to do anything but what you are told when you are "on the clock", like a part time slave, only with worse benefits.
It's an odd characteristic of seemingly all of humanity to varying degrees, but for whatever reason, one set of humans is not only exploited, but often even participates in their own exploitation (be it the "gig-economy" types or the corporate cheerleader types) while another set of humans enjoy the fruits of that exploitation and facilitate it with things like abusive, narcissistic manipulative language like "freedom of choice" and "democracy" and "gig-economy" and any other of the manipulative, word-smithed terms and buzzwords the PRopaganda people come up with.
If you want to keep your jobs, then it’s time to poison that well. Take their money, and provide critically flawed feedback to hobble their machines. (Insert “bodies upon the gears” speech by Mario Salvo at Berkeley)
Very impressive.
So Satya Nadella shoves Recall in Windows so that it takes screenshots every few seconds. Satya then sits there scratching his head wondering what to do with all these crap pictures his highly innovative product has captured.
Uber is silently watching and is highly impressed by Satya's innovation and decides to pay its large fleet of employees (sorry, no, they aren't employees) to label these pictures. Having nothing better to do, they start labelling these pictures as hot dog or not hot dog.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is outdoors surfing and hunting but doesn't want to be left out from these once in a lifetime innovations. Mark, a very smart individual, has already foreseen where all this innovation is headed. He rushes home and gets busy and throws around money to buy people who can use these labelled pictures to build him a "AI" bot which can tell him how to make korean sauce.
Very impressive bunch of highly intelligent individuals bringing us billions worth of artificial intelligence revolution. Marvellous.
I've always wondered what the world would look like if these huge powerful corporations were run by average people instead of multi-billionaires completely out of touch with what it's like to live in the world. Like have a lottery where everyone gets a single ticket, and the person whose name is drawn gets to be the CEO of Apple for a year, and the 10 next-drawn tickets get to be the senior staff.
This is similar to my idea for a better democracy. Every cycle involves a lottery where, say, 1000 random citizens become eligible to run for public office. A small enough number to make ‘career politician/sociopath’ an unviable life path but large enough that there will inevitably be some excellent potential candidates in the pool that wouldn’t have entered politics otherwise.
Here’s a few bucks for helping us eliminate your jobs, isn’t that awesome?
That said I shouldn’t laugh, I get at least weekly offers in my mailbox to make up to $50/hr or something to help train models to replace programmers…
I had a recruiter reach out for a company doing Agentic SRE's due to my years of experience as an SRE. Second sentence was describing their mission as making the SRE role no longer necessary for companies. I know if you read between the lines that's the goal of many AI companies, but I was surprised how upfront they were.
There's no reason to hide it anymore. A CEO can go on CNBC and openly admit "Yes, we are excited about AI because if it works we won't have to pay so many middle class white collar workers anymore" and there are many average people who will ideologically defend it, as if they'll somehow be immune.
state of the industry - you don’t want to be the one being replaced, you want to be the one doing the replacing work :)
And that attitude is exactly why humanities is a subject every computer science student should take.
I recently browsed engineering job ads at x.ai where they looked for experienced software developers as data labelers for about 60 bucks / hour - so they work on replacing their own profession for a low pay. Funny times.
Yeah, that Moloch ain't gonna feed itself.
The whole "AI revolution" feels distopian opposite from what I'd naively thought it would do.
My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
In which only legit people, and never spammers or scammers get me on the phone. Where I don't have to juggle appointments, pdfs, portals, dossier-codes to have my drivers license renewed. In which I can write software and all the boring stuff is taken care of so I need to only do the creative and fun parts. In which I can go surfing, and AI takes care of my taxes, my home, my income and my dishes.
In which tasks like labelling art, driving a taxi, or annotating pdfs is done by machines. So that the humans have time to make art, get transported anywhere for virtually free, or write stories.
But alas, it's the complete opposite. AI companies promise to replace the people that make art, demand ever more humans to stare at screens in order to "generate useful training data" rather than those humans spending time with each other, or spend time in inspiring surrounding. AI increases robo calling a hundred fold. AI generates more email, content, slop, and other noise that I manually have to wade through to get the actual info.
I get where you're coming from — the naively thought part. You may though just have to get a good deal more cynical. Perhaps you already are.
Tech fascinated me as a kid—and, because of my age, we're talking Apollo-era tech, promises of a moon base, the introduction of the Metric system is U.S. schools, elementary school libraries full of science books for kids on chemistry, electricity, model rocketry, etc.
I have come around to see, as I get older, that tech for tech's sake is often a hollow thing. Its biggest cheerleaders are (of course) the ones that stand to make a lot of money from it.
Change for change's sake follows in stride—is disruptive, unasked for, often benefits a few.
I dislike my modern cynicism on tech but it has also served me well.
Completely agree with every word except for
> tech for tech's sake
what we're seeing is tech for greed's sake, not tech's sake.
My journey has been the same as yours.
Hell, tech used to be.. it still is.. the thing I am interested in.
It meant a cool future to look forward to.
This for sure isn’t that.
To quote several other people who have made thoughtful pieces around this in the past: the futurism espoused by people like Elon Musk seeks to engage with the aesthetics of Star Trek, whilst ignoring entirely the post-scarcity socialism that Roddenberry’s worlds very clearly represented.
That’s not quite as apt today, as it seems he’s just as happy to engage with the aesthetics of Blade Runner while also cheerfully engaging with the fascist dystopia of Blade Runner…
> My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
I can't quite square people seriously believing such things, it seems like it must be wishful thinking crossed with denial. We have more than 200 years of technology taking away the hard and dangerous jobs and it hasn't been playing out that way at all, so why should the latest kind of automation have a dramatically different effect on society?
A hydraulic excavator can do the work of dozens of men with shovels, dozens of times faster too, but that hasn't lead to easy lives of luxury for the sort of men that would have been breaking their backs with shovels. They all had to get other manual labor jobs, because they weren't the capital that got to own and profit from the new machines. The best we can hope for is that when all the women manually spinning thread get replaced by factories, that at least some of them will get to have new factory jobs and the rest will at least be offset by society at large benefiting from clothing so cheap that even the poorest people can own more than one outfit.
This is pretty wrong. We went from 90% of the population working in agriculture in ~1800 to (now) 80% working in services. Most services jobs are much nicer (and require far less manual labor) than those in agriculture.
Funny. I don't claim to be a person of extraordinary intellect or a tech-visionary. However, the very first time in my life I heard the argument "robots are bad because they will take all the jobs" I immediately realized "oh, so 'who will own the robots' is the question we have to think carefully about". This was in the mid-nineties and I was about 10.
>My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
That didn't happen at any previous industrial revolution step either. Instead work for humans became more mechanical and soul-crushing.
Farmers ended up having to work on some factory line for 12 hours. Small store owners and employees were turned into huge chain cogs. People "freed" from household work, were send to the cubicle.
Usually boring and dangerous are harder problems that easy work.
“I want my AI to do dishes and laundry so I can draw, code, write. Not for it to draw, code, write so I can do dishes and laundry”.
Pretty wishful thinking to think software and hardware is advanced enough to figure out very advanced materials science and physics to do those tasks requiring manipulation of objects in the real world.
Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t, but manipulating digital output seems like a step that would come before manipulating real world objects.
I think you need to get past the literal examples to the concept that they are saying "I wanted AI to free me from the mundane, not imprison me with it". This has long been the promise from the same people who now appear to be quite happy to turn us into the Matrix-style feedstock for AI (again, not literal - but maybe literally?). Natural extrapolation: they may be the last to go, but it won't need them either. How can so many smart people all be Wile E. Coyote?
> How can so many smart people all be Wile E. Coyote?
Money. A whole lot of money. They won't live in the dystopian reality of most people in the near future, they'll buy their way out and live their comfortable lives.
That explains the ultra-wealthy, who likely will be able to buy their way out and live their comfortable lives.
But how do you explain the non-elites who are cheering on this dystopian reality? Some of them here in the HN comment section? If this thing that you are cheering for comes true, you'll be just as out of work and underclass as everyone else!
Do people really think the measly $2M 401(k) they got from their tech job is enough to buy them a ticket to the Elysium space station?
> Do people really think the measly $2M 401(k) they got from their tech job is enough to buy them a ticket to the Elysium space station?
Move to a low cost area and live like a king.
Not having to live in a low cost area is a defining feature of kings.
The literal examples show that their concept is or was a fantasy (within a short timeframe of one person's lifetime).
I don't know why one would have expected "AI" to be capable of stamping out machines that have fine motor skills, but to me, it seems perfectly in line that they can re-arrange pixels on a screen to mimic something humans previously made.
The parameters for folding laundry in each individual's home or doing the dishes are so much greater than deconstructing and re-arranging digital information based on prior probabilities.
All the "smart" people I know were not expecting to replace their HVAC/plumbing/electrical/house cleaners/etc work with automation.
I always believe technological advance eventually bring us to the point that 1) the elites have total control of all resources, and 2) impossible for ordinary people to rise up and clean the slate.
We are very close to it.
> impossible for ordinary people to rise up and clean the slate
Already is. Look at Russia, China and other authoritarian states. Hell, even most democratic ones.
What? I don’t think ordinary people are rising up in China at least.
Would they be able to if they wanted?
As someone on both sides of the issue I think this is good. I worked in tech my whole life and then drove an Uber in retirement. Uber is basically saying "We're partnering with Waymo to eliminate drivers, so here's something to help pay you while you transition to another job."
It's literally "We're partnering with Waymo to eliminate drivers, so here's something to help make your job disappear faster."
In the article:
> Casserly said that tasks will not be related to any of Uber’s autonomous partnerships or the development of driverless vehicles.
But also it would be hard to provide them with tasks that are genuinely useful to training autonomous vehicles with only their phone.
Think about what data Waymo needs at this point. Where I am, they're driving street by street to get sensor maps of everywhere to prep for launching, which requires people to be driving a car with their specific sensors, not a phone.
When I was a kid growing up in the space age 1960's a popular phrase was "you can't stop progress!" I guess it helped people cope with the world changing.
Sounds very Lumon.
Mysterious AND important.
It is clear to me that in 1000 years we are extinct, Blake's 7 or Star Trek. If you ask me to bet on it, I wrote it in the right order.
Somebody really needs to put a stop to what Uber and the like are doing.
They are doing their best to destroy basic labor protections, by circumventing employing their workers. Why are countries just allowing them to clown on established worker protections?
If you want to pay someone to do something employ them. The roll out of the gig economy is only viable because it allows companies to push costs on to the labor force.
> If you want to pay someone to do something employ them.
There is a purpose for casual/contract labor. If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.
How that person chooses to relate to an employer (whether to be self-employed or work for someone else) is their business, not a concern of mine.
However, from a policy standpoint, I certainly don’t want to prohibit them from being a solo entrepreneur or similar.
So, there’s a reason to allow contract work, even with individuals. Whether you extend that to Uber transportation or to Uber’s new business is a fair question, but “employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber.
In addition to your very good points: an economy of people who take this live-and-let-live view is going to be far more flexible and efficient in different scenarios.
An economy made up of people who think it proper to make entire classes of employment like gig work (or work that pays under a certain minimum wage) illegal is not only interfering in the decisions of adults, but can only prosper under the exact set of circumstances those people consider ideal.
Your spherical cow version of economics is laughably naive and misguided. If "adults" decided tomorrow that it was fine to employ people at only the infrastructure cost of preventing them running away, people would be outraged. But somehow flooding an ecosystem with money to starve meaningful competition and capitalize on people's inherent lack of options, which is "preventing them from running away with extra steps", is somehow... "a robust and dynamic economic ecosystem between consenting adults".. let's not be naive on HN.
Has a whiff of Atlas Shrugged.
Sounds like a compliment
Just a neutral observation :)
>> How that person chooses to relate to an employer (whether to be self-employed or work for someone else) is their business, not a concern of mine.
I think it will be, when the same strategies & policies come up the foodchain to your work that you probably think could never be modeled like this.
> How that person chooses to relate to an employer … is their business, not a concern of mine.
I could try and score points and ask if you would be okay if the lawn employee was prison-labor—if you would be okay employing them (money to go to the prison, of course).
My point though simply is that I don't think anyone should be okay hiring someone whose labor may be being exploited.
I was going to say that I don't think that is ever the case with lawn care but remembered that when I was maybe 10 years old, a neighbor had a lawn business during the Kansas summertime and he "hired" me and my sister (she was 9) to come with him (with his own two kids) to mow lawns for his business. I mean he bought us lunch at a fast food place and we made maybe $0.50 an hour—we were happy to have pocket money in order to buy candy at the drug store. I suppose we were being exploited though. ;-)
But anyway, I ramble.
Wait you sign a contract with the person mowing your lawn?
If they're an adult professional, yeah. Helps smooth out the home insurance if something happens and they get injured on your property or damage your property.
“I want my AI to handle my contracts so I can mow lawns in peace”. Ok now I see how that works! Thanks!
How far away are we from AI running the business (marketing, contracts, payment, scheduling, etc) while the humans compete with each other to do the lawn mowing for subsistence food & shelter? Put one of these tech bro CEOs in charge long enough for the AI to get good enough to do the top-level coordination and then recycle them into energy to power it all, and we're good to go!
A ways away. Anthropic tried recently and it went off the rails. https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
Verbal contracts are still contracts. Anyone you hire for a job has a contract with you (implicit or explicit).
The gig economy is neither contract work nor casual work.
>If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.
Error of categories. This simply is not the same.
It is normal employment in everything but name. Uber is replacing the taxi industry, which can not compete, because the taxi industry has to pay for labor protections. It is a scheme where Uber tricks existing labor laws to have employees it does not need to treat as employees.
>“employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber
It is. Before Uber ride hailing existed and it was done by employees or self employed people.
You know that when you cut the last two words off the quote “is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber” and respond to only the part you quoted that it leaves the impression that you’re arguing in bad faith, right?
I left it off because I did not know what you meant by "non-Uber". It is a category so wide that I have no idea what you were talking about, so I decided to focus on the part where the subject was clear. In the case of Uber I know that it is possible to replace it by employee labor.
You did not give any examples for "non-Uber" companies and we certainly were talking mainly about Uber, as was the article. I do not consider it at all bad faith to focus on the "Uber" part and ignore the totally unspecified and somewhat irrelevant "non-Uber" part.
To be honest you calling me dishonest because I focus on the topic, namely Uber, and leave out a category which I can say basically nothing about such as "non-Uber", seems to me like you are trying to dodge making any argument at all. Since you are ignoring what I said and focusing on what I did not say.
Is there an Uber for lawn mowing?
I recall a startup doing this a few years ago but I think they went out of business.
I think the issue is lawn mowing is usually done on a set schedule for a long time so the transaction cost is fairly low and you don’t want to pay a third party to handle the matching problem.
Maybe taskrabbit can cover this.
They're really missing out by not moving into federal services. Current administration would be all over firing federal employees and paying a fraction to gig employees.
Urban company is a gig platform for all manner of house work, I think it's only india based though.
Someone should write a "Gig Striker" app (or web site) for mobile phones.
When you sign on you select the company you work for and have access to group chats, forums (by region?). If a thread gets going on striking, the word can be put out on the app and all Uber drivers, just to pick an arbitrary example, refuse to accept calls for one day (again, as an example).
It would be an interesting experiment and tell us a little more about the world and economy we live in today.
I’ve got a brilliant idea! What if, hear me out, we had some kind of united alliance of workers, and they could do things like leverage their collective labor power to negotiate better working conditions and/or pay? We might call them something, let’s say “unions”, and we could even setup some sort of National Labor Relations Board to ensure fair access to them, and to help settle disputes? Then we might get some of the things we need, even without resorting to labor strikes, which are disruptive and expensive to everyone on all sides.
Surely this is possible, and companies like Uber haven’t been sandbagging and poisoning the well for decades?
I bet it’d be so popular, we would set aside a whole Federal holiday to commemorate all of the people who fought, and/or died, to win these basic labor protections 100-years ago! We’ll call it “Labor Day” and everyone will eat hot dogs while totally not spacing on the fact that they even enjoy “holidays” at all due to these very fights.
That sounds like a union plus mobile app and minus legal protections, or am I getting the idea wrong?
> Why are countries just allowing them to clown on established worker protections?
Money - directly towards politicians.
Money - buys them the best lawyers for when they sit down with the government lawyers.
Money - allows them to move faster than the legal system can catch up.
Money - they focus all of their resources on doing the things we'd prefer they didn't, governments have other things to do deal with.
Because trust in governments and their ability to execute has been successfully eroded by the holders of private wealth. There are also plenty politicians that simply work for private wealth and deliberately sabotage government from the inside.
The current situation is that even a government that wants to work for the majority of people is too scared to go against a corporation like Uber, or simply doesn't have the means (means being political capital as well as skills within the civil service).
Building that means is a project that lasts beyond election cycles, and needs one elected government to not immediately undo the work of a previous one.
So not Star Trek, we’re doing Corpo.
We always where going to, a star trek like society benefits the maximum number of people at the expense of curtailing the excesses of the wealthiest people.
The wealthy people don't like that, why would they and since they have a disproportionate amount of power via their wealth they oppose it successfully.
They'll keep the bread and circuses going and keep refining what is the minimum amount of bread they can get away with until they cross the line and then things get whacky for a bit, it resets and then they start taking the bread away again.
Yep, just a delayed combination of the full cyberpunk genre.
That makes sense but it’s also a little grim
Uber Monkey
There totally won’t be a recession soon right guys?
in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense.
They can answer support calls too.
Despite getting an Uber hourly wage many game the system by taking DoorDash and Lyft orders while on the job.
Should your employer tolerate you working another job while you are being paid to do yours?
"Game the system", ha ha. Pretty sure "employers" that push for a gig economy are doing a bit of gaming themselves. Unionless, benefitless, interchangeable employees…
> Should your employer tolerate you working another job while you are being paid to do yours?
That argument goes both ways:
Should your employer be able to have you on an exclusive contract with a salary so low that you cannot pay your own bills?
Probably not.
The fallacy in your argument is that you're assuming that people like to work. They don't, they do it out of necessity.
It’s not really a gig job if you’re locked to one employer and paid hourly like any other job though.
Should it depend on the what that other job is?
An Uber driver doing DoorDash or Lyft between Uber work would be working for a direct competitor, whereas an Uber driver doing errands that require a car from TaskRabbit would not be working for a direct competitor.
>> Should your employer tolerate you working another job while you are being paid to do yours?
When the company fights hard & dirty for decades to classify you as a contractor to externalize the majority of the costs in their business model? Yes.
A decent margin of voters (41% to 58%) in California (in an election with 80% participation) voted to keep classifying them as contractors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22
Maybe with an asterisk mentioning the 200+ million dollars Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc allegedly spent on it.
you can stop working at any time, so that's what they do, and then start working for another company. Any employer can't have a problem with working a second job, so long as you're not violating a non-compete.
Pretty tough to have a non-compete when you're casual and/or a contractor. Some jurisidctions make this illegal in even more of an employer/employee relationship, most aren't going to enforce it in an Uber-style job, and it would never be cost-effective for Uber et al. to go after a contractor. They would just kick the "offender" off the platform - which might still be very bad for them.
>in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense.
I did not know this. Is this verifiable? I thought the whole reason Uber and other “gig” businesses work is because they can pay piecemeal and not have people classified as employees. There were multiple high profile court cases and even attempts to legislate that Uber drivers are employees, but I believe in the US they are still independent contractors, hence they can work for whoever they want, whenever they want.
Maybe in Los Angeles? Someone with more knowledge should answer though. I may be mixing Uber up with higher minimum wages for fast-food in California.
Frankly, if you are driving around doing your job by simply being available, you are doing your job. If you are, e.g. not doing your job by picking up door dash and then an Uber that takes you out of the way and you deliver the food in an even colder state than if you drove to the DoorDash destination directly, then no, you are not doing your job and it should be apparent to DoorDash that you are not performing as is expected.
But what is your apparent assumption that Uber, dorodash, or any other employer owns your body or time. Frankly, that's both a holdover and also a bit of a crack that reveals that what we call slavery, is really just exploitation and abuse and it comes in many forms. Today it takes many other forms, but one of them is what you may unintentionally have internalized, that when you are "working for someone" you are effectively owned by them and you are not free to do anything but what you are told when you are "on the clock", like a part time slave, only with worse benefits.
It's an odd characteristic of seemingly all of humanity to varying degrees, but for whatever reason, one set of humans is not only exploited, but often even participates in their own exploitation (be it the "gig-economy" types or the corporate cheerleader types) while another set of humans enjoy the fruits of that exploitation and facilitate it with things like abusive, narcissistic manipulative language like "freedom of choice" and "democracy" and "gig-economy" and any other of the manipulative, word-smithed terms and buzzwords the PRopaganda people come up with.
If you want to keep your jobs, then it’s time to poison that well. Take their money, and provide critically flawed feedback to hobble their machines. (Insert “bodies upon the gears” speech by Mario Salvo at Berkeley)
Edit: Berkeley, not Kent State