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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Surely this is possible, and companies like Uber haven’t been sandbagging and poisoning the well for decades?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> tech for tech's sake
what we're seeing is tech for greed's sake, not tech's sake.
It meant a cool future to look forward to.
This for sure isn’t that.
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.
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.
Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t, but manipulating digital output seems like a step that would come before manipulating real world objects.
You mean a washing machine and a dish washer?
We are very close to it.
Already is. Look at Russia, China and other authoritarian states. Hell, even most democratic ones.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22
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.
Edit: Berkeley, not Kent State
