Besides, even without innovation, cabs/ubers can just cost more, or cab company owners (I don't mean the drivers) can just make less profit.
edit: I also think that welfare and healthcare should come from the government and not from companies, but I just don't understand how being profitable enough to pay people decent wages is a political problem at all. Nothing political about this - it just requires making a simple decision to divert some of your profit into something other than shareholder pockets.
Yes, one is a technical problem, the other is a political problem. The first one we just solve by being smarter, the second one...has anyone ever successfully managed to treat private drivers as employees rather than independents?
In my opinion, basic benefits should be provided to all citizens, not just the ones with the correct employment status. Note that in Canada, it's already like this, so this isn't what we are arguing about in this context. Contracting work is much easier to stomach in Canada because retirement and health is provided by the state rather than the company (and if the USA did the same thing, it would really make labor markets much more liquid).
At the end of the day, might as well turn this into a technical problem by getting rid of the driver...oh.
Yes. The rocket thing is the current apogee of a (remarkably phallic) ego war between billionaires. Most automation that would truly benefit society is boring, low-margin work. There's no massive ROI in scrubbing out a toilet or mopping a floor, so we continue to pay humans survival wages to do that kind of miserable work. For these Industry Titans, a $2.5 million hypercar just doesn't do it anymore. Robert Mercer's 200-foot, 4-story yacht with an elevator is okay, but Elon Musk's rocket shooting other people off to die on Mars (or likely partway) is a real dominance display.
