Drivers rarely owned the medallion. They leased the cab for 8-12 hours and drove it on behalf of the medallion owner.

Taxi drivers were already not employees, they were exploited contractors for the taxi companies.

And do you not remember what using Yellow Cab was like in the Bay? It was like being kidnapped. They'd pretend their credit card reader was broken and forcibly drive you to an ATM to pay them.

When I first moved here I went to EPA Ikea, afterwards tried to get home via taxi, and literally couldn't because there was a game at Stanford that was more profitable so they just refused to pick me up for hours. I had to call my manager and ask him to get me. (…Which he couldn't because he was drinking, so I had to walk to the Four Seasons and use the car service.)

Taxis lost at least partly because the workers were assholes. Refusing to take credit card payments (the card reader is "broken") or not picking up members of certain ethnic groups or not driving to certain areas. Sure some cabbies were nice, honest people with good customer service skills but those were the exception in many cities.

There was nothing stopping taxi companies from raising investor capital to build better apps and back end technology infrastructure. They were just lazy and incompetent.

Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place. Uber and Lyft created a superior product that people wanted. Doesn't matter whose fault it is, the buyers preferred something that was more convenient.

There was never a situation where uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.

Enshittifying? It's still better than taxis ever were and competition between providers is preventing that from regressing.

In a society where having a job is, for that vast majority not in the non-gilded classes, the only mechanism by which a person can secure their core needs.. losing a job is indeed a pitiable situation for most.

If we've built a society that when it "pivots" leaves swathes of people smeared out as residual waste, I'd argue we should feel bad.

We've certainly reached a point of technological advancement where many of these consequences at the individual level are avoidable. If they're still happening, it's because we've chosen this outcome - perhaps passively. But the clear implication of would be that we're collectively failing ourselves, as a species that tends to put some degree of pride in our intelligence.

And we should feel bad about that failure. It's OK to feel bad about that failure. We tend not to improve things we don't feel bad about.

"Feel bad for" is not the same as "feel bad". The former is the same as feeling empathy, in colloquial English

No thoughts on pedestrians? With no traffic lights it'd be a total nightmare to be a pedestrian

cleaning 1 car can be a full time job.

If a programmer is more efficient with AI then you need fewer programmers, assuming a fixed amount of work is needed. So in that sense AI would be replacing programmers.

Waymo definitely uses human drivers in some markets... currently

Just like AI still uses human programmers... currently

As I understand, Waymo still uses humans in some circumstances. Theoretically, the drivers could do this job instead.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

If it doubles your efficiency, that's one less employee required.