Uber will offer gig work like AI data labeling to drivers while not on the road

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.

It's literally "We're partnering with Waymo to eliminate drivers, so here's something to help make your job disappear faster."

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.

> 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.

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”.

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.

Mysterious AND important.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.