> It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.
Okay, so I am extremely liberal and everything, but "let's ban any new technologies that might make somebody lose their job to a robot" is seriously the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard RMS make. What the hell.
It's nearly in the job description of every software engineer to create things that ease people's workloads or replace their jobs entirely. I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs.
Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive.
And that's the problem. If basic income won't happen until technological advancement causes mass unemployment, and governments ban technological advancement that might lead to mass unemployment, then we will get neither technological advancement nor basic income.
Why can't basic income happen first? Or why can't basic income be phased in smoothly? I mean, don't get me wrong, I agree with you that basic income is unlikely to happen until there has been an incredible amount of pain and suffering, but does it have to be that way? Not necessarily. If we, as a society, set compensating policies as a condition for technological progress, then the progress might come more slowly, but it will still come. Of course I'm probably being a crazy person thinking that our government might act rationally. :(
It's not just about job loss it's as much about salaries stagnating and thus making people poor. Especially here in the US it's a problem since it in return affect things like ones ability to pay for healthcare.
We can't stop anything from going away. Technology progress by and large has always been incremental. Large changes haven't occurred since the time of Industrial revolution. And I guess the next one won't occur until we get Artificial general intelligence. Until then affairs of the world will go on as they always have.
AGI would alter the very course of economy in a way the whole concept of a job and a income would be very largely irrelevant. Heck you may not even need a basic income, because you only need to bootstrap a few machines and from there on they are going to do every single thing for you.
"I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs."
Indirectly, perhaps. Application-level software projects do tend to have the "automate people's jobs away" effect, but AFAIK, Stallman has been mostly involved in infrastructure-ish "enable some people to work (on automating away other people's jobs)" projects.
" I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs."
No question about that. As someone who back in the day paid thousands for business software that is now almost always free, money went from our company to a company that had employees, sales people, programmers who made a living off the software that was being offered. Not to mention obviously the people that we didn't need anymore as a result of that software. (Bookeepers, anyone?)
What are Uber and passengers going to do with the extra money? In both cases, we see the loss of specific jobs and (at least) short term pain for the people who were relying on them.
Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use. The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy.
"Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use."
Right. Which isn't to say we shouldn't be considering it. The short term matters - we spend a lot of time there.
"The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy."
Well, there's nothing to say the money is redistributed to labor, and it's hard to run a consumer economy when only a few people have any money to pay for anything. That said, I don't really get that vibe from the parent comment in the first place...
>I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs.
Great point. It's hard to quantify though. OSS gives companies access to a quality software stack for minimal cost. On the other hand, those companies are not now buying software from proprietary vendors. I don't know which is more: jobs created by having access to inexpensive quality software, or jobs lost due to less spending on application code.
First off, that's not what he said. Secondly, lots of smart people have been talking about the need for basic income when robots take over large portions of the labor force. I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy.
Can you elaborate on the divide between his claim and my interpretation, operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow? I honestly don't see it.
For the record, I also advocate strongly for basic income. But I don't think that robots taking jobs leads to particularly poor outcomes. For example! Driving a car 17 hours a day (or at all!), as described in the Uber article, is a needlessly dangerous activity for a human to be performing.
Basic income was included to show that removing jobs is not necessarily bad, but it can have immediate negative effects. This is just an instance of consolidating wealth. It is moving a system which distributes wealth to many taxi drivers into a system which distributes wealth to a few people who run Uber. When there's no system in place to correct this imbalance, it contributes to the wealth gap between rich and poor which is accelerating in many other ways. When we see a massive shift of resources to just a few people, it leaves everyone worse off, even the wealthy ones, because we all have to live in a world in which more people are more disempowered and desperate. He just didn't go into detail because he likes short statements.
> I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy.
Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must come to an end. Jobs that require smarter humans don't work for the vast majority of barely capable humans that exist.
Mass unemployment is coming, the masses aren't capable of knowledge jobs and labor jobs are being taken over by machines, what other possible outcome do you see?
Currently, they certainly are not. Our education systems (non-higher education) are largely designed to produce good workers for a manufacturing/labor economy that we're (relatively) quickly automating out of existence. And our higher education systems are being "dumbed down" to handle the influx of students not capable of handling the old curriculum.
Anecdotally, most of my extended family couldn't write a line of code if their lives depended on it; nor could they design a serious science experiment or write a novel. They aren't trained for those things, and that training has to start young or come with serious motivation, time, and effort. Not one of those people have any interest in learning those things.
I think it's possible to have a knowledge based economy, but we would have to drastically redesign our education systems and our culture in ways that I find it hard to even imagine how we would do so.
But, I think it's only a matter of time before we gain more skill in writing programs that automate out even the most complex knowledge based jobs. Watson is already showing the potential to be a better doctor than any human. The program named "Emily Howell" can already write symphonies that pass whatever the musical version of the Turing Test is. How long before we apply those things to all the other knowledge based jobs? What'll be left? More automation and maintenance programmers? How many of those will we even need?
Why are the 'masses' not capable of knowledge jobs?
If you accept that certain jobs[1] to be performed at a worthwhile level require a certain degree of general intelligence, or at the very least, the vast majority of people performing certain jobs have a measurable general intelligence above a certain level, and you accept that things like general intelligence, height, and other observable, measurable phenotypic traits of a species occur on a more or less normal('bell-curve') distribution, two things that are pretty much taken as a given outside the PC deluded, "I love me some outrage!," "Wow, just wow." crowd, then there is your answer. Is it not?
You might think you're doing good for the world by saying 'everyone is equally capable,' but you'll probably have more success in doing good for the world by understanding the world as it presents itself upon clear-eyed observation.
I guess the question is then, "What is General Intelligence?"
It's a question that CS has struggled with for decades and I haven't heard anyone give a compelling definition, certainly not one that could be tested with any confidence.
What? I'm not sure why you invoke CS(by which I assume you mean Computer Science,) I wasn't refering to artificial general intelligence, which could be said to fall under the domain of CS.[1]
I was refering to the 'general intelligence' that is an attribute of human beings, what iq tests measure basically.[2][3]
It is a matter that has undergone much study since the early 20th century, and there is indeed agreement on what it is among those who study it.[4]
certainly not one that could be tested with any confidence.
Why so certain? It can indeed be tested and has been. Taking intelligence to mean 'ability to deal with complexity,' and taking something complex like say, life on earth, people with higher IQs on average make more money, and live longer. Not to say the amount of money one makes is wholly indicative of successful living of course, but it can be used as a rough proxy since it is something many people seek to do in the complex environment that is Earth and the Universe.
Also, I think the ability to 'live sucessfully' and to find out what doing so entails is an ability spread evenly throughout the population.
Have you met the masses? Half the population has an IQ below 100, those are not and won't ever be knowledge workers; those are the people that machines will easily replace. They currently live off of either manual labor or service jobs, both of which are being decimated by machines and that trend will only continue.
I don't think we're pretty far off down the road from mass AI/Robotic created unemployment, but I do think it will happen.
Perhaps in 50 years, maybe 100, but I see the writing on the walls.
Humans seem almost universally have this hubris that says that machines will never be able to take their place, think as us, be as smart or creative as us. They almost certainly will, but it will take time, perhaps a long time. After all, biology and evolution has had(and used) billions of years to create the human brain, and we've only been building computer for less than a 100.
I don't think we're pretty far off down the road from mass AI/Robotic created unemployment, but I do think it will happen.
Perhaps in 50 years, maybe 100, but I see the writing on the walls.
Humans seem almost universally have this hubris that says that machines will never be able to take their place, think as us, be as smart or creative as us. They almost certainly will, but it will take time, perhaps a long time. After all, biology and evolution has had(and used) billions of years to create the human brain, and we've only been building computer for less than a 100.
If I were to argue "We should declare war on Canada, unless/until everyone in the US has free healthcare", you would be right to respond with "What? Declaring war on Canada is a terrible idea!" rather than "Well, there's more to his argument than merely declaring war on Canada".
I'd take this all with a grain of salt. Reading this from RMS is like taking financial advice from Michael Jordan or medical advice from Albert Einstein. This is Russel Brand level thinking.
You have TRULY misquoted the author. Actually you did not, you said something entirely different.
He said "let's ban this," with this referring to Uber. Secondly even if he said "let's ban ANY techno...," he did add "Unless/until every ..," which is more than a valid argument.
I agree. Also, if Uber doesn't introduce robotic cars, some other company surely will.
Uber seems to be the cool company to hate, but when I talk to Uber drivers that unanimously seemed to think it was a good gig. The talked about the money(how it was much better than what they were doing), they talked about the hours(whenever they would like to work), and they talked about the pleasure of working for themselves.
When the switch to robotic cars comes, in it will impacts the world over, and Ubers interaction with the robotic car revolution will be a very small part of the impact self driving cars have, in my own humble opinion. I'm not even convinced Uber can hold onto it's market share when self-driving cars take over, the space will seems ripe for competition.
Fuck banning technology; isn't the logical thing to do to make it a free (i.e. tax-supported) public good, like health care should be, or roads? I mean, why should the roads be free, and the cars not?
that is pretty much what Orlando just did... a taxi lobbyist made them introduce a minimum price for rides provided by Uber and Lyft that I think is higher then taxis...
I was following the arguments until I came across the one where the company is to blame because some customers are afraid of being harassed by drivers with the conclusion: "this problem comes directly out of the practices listed above that mistreat all users of Uber".
> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street or phone in any fashion; you can pay cash; you can be anonymous.
And even with Uber around, you can still do that. No one's taken that choice away. Use Lyft/Uber if you're comfortable with it. If not, user a regular cab.
Well, he makes the point later that if Uber/Lyft/etc are sufficiently successful they could displace regular cabs. You can disagree with that point, but it probably deserves to be addressed rather than ignored.
RMS doesn't use credit cards and walks around town wearing a "Don't be tracked. Pay with cash" button. Even if Uber addressed every single point on his list, he still wouldn't use them.
Plenty of political prisoners fit the bill. Here's one guy who spent 23 years in prison in Singapore because he refused to sign a statement renouncing violence -- not being he likes violence, but because that would have implied he supported violence earlier:
On release into house arrest, he refused a government job because that would have "muzzled" him. 32 years aftert his initial arrest, all restrictions were finally lifted -- and the first thing he did was call for the abolition of the act used to arrest him.
And where’s the problem with that? There are millions of people who pay with cash instead of credit cards, except for large payments, so why would that be something important enough to mention?
Most of them don't wear a button proclaiming it an important choice. The point of the parent is only really undermined if Uber were able to support anonymous passengers.
That's all well and good. Except that I still need to get around, and Uber (and it's competitors) remains better than my local cab system. That's true of basically every city I've ever visited as well.
Until that is no longer true, I'll continue to be an extremely satisfied Uber user.
Actually all of this is almost certainly something like "where I draw the line is the right line anyone who does less has failed anyone who has done more is taking it to far".
As someone else is this thread has mentioned, RMS addressed the issue of Uber wanting to put drivers out of jobs as bad but ironically the comment pointed out that the "free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs."
His points start out idealistic and abstract, and full of Free Software rhetoric. The list then turns to more concrete and specific objections, whatever their validity may be.
Talk about burying the lede :P I think it would resonate with a larger audience if he just flipped the order of his bullet points.
Modern taxis fail every one of these "tests", so the fact that RMS wouldn't use Uber but would continue to use taxis at all is merely RMS riding a hatred bandwagon in an effort to stay relevant.
Fortunately for us, he hasn't said anything remotely new, so we can continue to think of him as the 20th century man he is.
You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your information in a database that can be used against you later.
While I don't agree with all of his reasoning here, he is correct that taxis offer you substantially more privacy than Uber, and Uber has been known to abuse the data they collect on passengers in several instances, so it's far more than just a theoretical concern.
> You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your information in a database that can be used against you later.
No you can't. Plenty of taxis record the backseats of their cars, and you have no way of knowing which do/don't.
Taxis don't offer you enough privacy over Uber, and the reason he's coming after Uber is because he wants to stay relevant, not because Uber is particularly bad.
But if you pay by cash, there's no easy way to match that recording to you.
Also, I'm pretty sure RMS doesn't give a fig about "relevance". He's just applying his principles to the world as he sees it, and he's been doing this literally for decades:
Or... Why you shouldn't use any ride sharing company.
Numbers 4-6 are even more broad, they basically apply to any situation where you are required to use a credit card to pay (which identifies you), which is basically every single app.
I'm empathetic to the issue that there is no way to anonymously take an Uber (a real downgrade as compared to cabs), but for your average person where a massive upgrade in convenience offsets the slight loss of anonymity, this is going to be a tough sell.
Why compare this with ride sharing? That's not what Uber is. It doesn't matter that Uber calls itself a ride sharing company, it is not. This has been mentioned before: with Uber someone takes you from a place to somewhere you specify. They drive the way that you want because you requested it from them. Further, you pay their expenses and a bit more. Exactly like a taxi.
Ride sharing is where someone was already going somewhere and you share the costs.
IMO you could use a ride sharing company where you're more anonymous. E.g. public transport :-P (though not in my country :()
I agree that the government shouldn't have pervasive access to the records, but I WANT Uber to track my rides. That's how I can have recourse if a driver takes me for a spin. I WANT my driver to be identified and for them to track who picks me up. He claims that it's troublesome for a female passenger to be identifiable to a driver. How about if you're a female (or male) driver driving in your spare time? Would she not feel safer picking up someone who is at least somewhat identified versus a shady looking stranger?
One of the crucial components of sharing apps is the building of trust and accountability. Identification is part of that.
This list of complaints doesn't hold water for me.
Granted there are several items that ... detract from the point, but there are some real problems here and I don't think it does them justice to gloss over them because of some errant points at the beginning.
We don't see eye to eye on the identification issue, but even if we put that one issue aside I can't agree that the list of complaints doesn't hold water for me personally.
Executives stalking passengers and trolling through passenger ride data to ferret out alarming narratives crosses a line in my opinion. This starts to get into discussions of which data belongs to whom, which is a discussion that I don't think has been had yet, and I don't like the assertion of ownership over my data that many companies are making.
We agree that part of building sharing apps is building trust and accountability, but I disagree that Uber has done a good job of earning our trust or demonstrating accountability.
The first half of the post is RMS's usual loaded rant on what 'freedom' means. He's a weird brand of anarchocommunist, and axiomatically doesn't believe in running any code that you can't see the source to and haven't compiled yourself. That sets him up to start off most of his rants that might otherwise have a point with a bunch of bullshit that we've all seen and laughed at before.
I like him around just because he expands the Overton window. In the last 10 years the conversion around proprietary (which includes web and mobile apps) vs. open-source software has really taken a back-seat.
> I agree that the government shouldn't have pervasive access to the records, but I WANT Uber to track my rides. That's how I can have recourse if a driver takes me for a spin.
Why would that require the passenger to identify themselves? You can have one without the other. Where I live, most taxis are organized in cooperatives. Drivers pay monthly for access to dispatch and are held to certain quality standards beyond the legal requirements.
Drivers are tracked by dispatch and expected to take optimal routes. If they deviate too far from that route on a fare, they have to explain themselves to dispatch. Simple as that, and it works extremely well.
If one wants to individually have recourse, then the ride needs to be identified. You are right that there can be systemic ways of addressing this issue other than individual recourse.
There's the rub. It all depends on how you define 'free'. Under the FSF definition, it isn't. They would (maybe) argue that this isn't a valid definition of 'free' because it would be like saying you're not 'free' unless you have the right to subjugate your neighbor.
I find Taxis to be very stressful when traveling for two main reasons:
* I'd guess about 10% of the time they don't show up, so I have to bake in extra travel time for that. With uber I can see on my phone that they are actually coming.
* With uber I know payment is all set, Taxi's will often say that their credit card machine is broken.
I imagine these problems could start to get solved with a good open source software suite (with client mobile apps) and an organization to bring this technology to cab companies. Of course, creating something is hard, raising complaints is not. The cognitive dissonance for me is that a creator like RMS would write something like this instead of trying to lead people towards creating a solution.
> Taxi's will often say that their credit card machine is broken.
Then, insist that they break out the manual credit-card processor and carbon paper. If they refuse, offer to have them call the cops. Their payment-processing hardware will probably magically start working.
That sort of confrontation is where some of the stress comes from. Also when that happens I just say I don't have enough cash (which is generally true).
>It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.
So what? This is the way of technology: obsolete work becomes automated. Extending RMS' argument to its logical conclusion means reinstating many forms of manual labor (that are now done by machines) in effort to reduce unemployment. Do you want to plow your land with your bare hands? No! Do you want to drive taxis? No!
There's a special point regarding driving taxis: it's one of the most dangerous jobs currently available. Moreover, the taxi industry is infamously exploitative of drivers, such that the competition from Uber/Lyft is actually raising taxi drivers' wages in the interim.[0]
I did not expect the logical conclusion of RMS' argument to be ludditism. I find this surprising.
> Uber is an unregulated near-monopoly, so it can cut rates for drivers arbitrarily.
I think this is an unrealistic long-term view. The rideshare market has low barriers to entry and a high potential for competition, such that I expect to eventually see this market fragmented among many isomorphic companies (Lyft, Uber, SideCar, etc.), perhaps more so on a local than on a global level. I've laid out my thoughts on the issue in an essay.[1]
The way of technology is to increasingly render people obsolete. This is great for some people for most its a threat to their ability to make a living.
The logical conclusion is not what you state but one conclusion his other is basic income and then you can automate away all you want.
There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is structural unemployment not just temporary.
The luddite fallacy is well known by many yet there are an increasingly worrying trend that indicates that the fallacy is a fallacy itself.
The consequence is that as technology does what technology do, it will leave an increasingly larger and larger group of people unable to find new jobs.
The real competitors arent china, its automation and people really dont give it enough credit.
> There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is structural unemployment not just temporary.
Yeah, I know. The thing you're forgetting is that unemployment denotes a percentage of the eligible workforce, which, in itself, is only a fraction of the total population. Before the industrial revolution, literally EVERYONE, save for infants and toddlers, had some sort of employment -- some daily task to assist their making ends meet. The long-term trend is extremely obviously one of monotonic decline of the number of jobs available per capita.
I'm totally aware that the consequence of technology replacing jobs is structural unemployment. Yes, over time, there will be more unemployment. It is likely that we will adapt for this by changing the definition of the eligible workforce, and by supplying further social aid (e.g. basic income) to those who are not in the workforce.
However, the problem with your argument is that you are putting the cart before the horse: you want basic income before you remove jobs. Instituting basic income while people still have jobs is politically well-nigh impossible. There actually must be a felt need for basic income, not just "once y'all have basic income we can start automating away your jobs".
Would you have said, on the cusp of the industrial revolution, that nations should hold out on the technological progress until everyone is assured a new job and a decent quality of life? Maybe, but I think that's a bit idealistic. Innovation -- like all forms of change -- can be a bit rough as it sweeps through.
1. The benefits of scale -> lower cost insurance/gas/car/services for drivers.
2. The benefit of having more customers -> less time for driver to get to customer, i.e. more money.Also when shared rides become possible(2-3 or more passenger sharing a car) , more customers you can arrange them to shorter routes(which means more people willing to share) , which also means less cost.
3. Lyft is trying to make the trip a social experience by matching you with people you'd like. Data for better matching could be an advantage.
I think the problem is javascript that's not 'free' as in explicitly licensed as free software.
The web, as a concept, seems to conflict with his ideals in a number of ways, at least superficially. For instance, you can't modify and redistribute the source code of any site you visit, since by definition you only get the response of that site. Technically, every URL leads to a black box. Although many sites use free libraries and might offer their source code as a repo, you never really know what they're actually running.
Hacker News is a perfect example. It's only barely "open source" in that you can download an old version of the Arc forum, and it's known that the HN staff have made their own edits to the software, which no one can contribute to, or fork, or even see, since they don't want people to be able to game the system. What people are interacting with is pretty much a closed source and proprietary service.
But on the other hand, you interact with the html, and you can mess with it in the browser all you want. Still not technically free, though.
Does Uber's javascript code come with a license that gives you these freedoms:
* Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose;
* Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish;
* Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour, and
* Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits?
Interesting. Mr. Stallman should check with the local laws of any given municipality regarding taxis - in some, not only can you not hail a cab on the street, but you must also provide extensive contact information in order to summon one via phone.
To wit, Birmingham, AL has precisely these restrictions & regulations.
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a nonfree program tramples its users' freedom.
> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers.
> It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.
Which is a bigger case of "trampling freedom": voluntarily using someone's closed-source program, or having the government tell me they'll put me in jail if I offer to sell someone a ride in my self-driving car?
> Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards.
"I have a credit card, but I use it as rarely as possible. Effectively, only for airline tickets, car rental, and hotel checkin — because they demand identification anyway."
RMS has an extreme stance, but it's actually quite refreshing that he just puts it out there in an easily digestable form.
Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards.
And I think RMS cares less about that. No doubt he will be unhappy about the taxi driver's/company's choice to run non-free software; however, regular taxi companies are willing to do business with free software users - Uber refuses to do so. That's a pretty significant difference.
Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along with credit card receipts, just like Uber.
Taxis can be paid in cash, unlike Uber.
The medallion issues are oddities of a few (not even all!) cities particularly in the US. You are right to complain about them as that system is ridiculous; however, the comparison with Uber is unfair because Uber is trying to take over the world.
I worked for Stallman in the 90's. Given the choice, he will walk miles versus using a credit card.
> Taxis can be paid in cash, unlike Uber.
Ah, so soon you forget that Taxis must legally record pick up and drop off points for the police department and their drivers can be questioned by LEO.
You're saying there's no difference between reporting (pick up location, drop off location) and reporting (pick up location, drop off location, identity)?
"until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed."
Hand-waving pleb magnets like this (the statement, not the person stating) show a painfully inept understanding of how autonomous labor is going to work.
Once Moore's Law crosses the processing power/price ratios where robots can perform "good enough" object acquisition and manipulation, (pre-Singularity phase) no nation on earth can deflate their currency fast enough to stop charlatans from promoting wholesale human elimination instead of inflationary appeasement.
Meaning, after the "good enough" threshold is crossed, nations will engage in inflationary policies to bide time while desperately seeking a clearing price for human labor. But they won't find it for most labor because of two factors:
1.) At the most efficient time usage (under politically impossible configurations and assuming equal productivity), in which people work 18 hour days forever and utilize 6 hours of sleep, 1 machine's labor equals 1.25 human's labor. Typically, 1 machine's labor equals 3 human's labor. Accounting for productivity enhancement, the comparison will be about as worthwhile to make as comparing engines to horses today. (My drone is 500 plebpower?)
2.) It takes 12 years (again, under politically impossible standards) and ~18,000 pounds of food to make a human productive. It takes a drone a few weeks to be born out of a few gallons of fuel, and a few pounds of materials.
The real cost of labor is staggering. And if you think people are stupid enough to fall for the trap (again) to use the productive gains of a new technology to do nothing more than cycle it all back into a mechanism to breed more humans into existence, I think you will be in for a rude awakening when human costs drop so low from endless inflation appeasement that using said drones to harvest these surplus humans for their physical materials becomes wildly profitable. And if the charlatans can make even HackerNews believe North Korea was behind the Sony hacks and clamor for invasion, just imagine how easy it will be to manufacture some social justice narrative for mining populations centers for biomaterials. ("Those evil sexists need to be mined! For great equality!")
TL;DR: Once the price of human labor drops to sub-zero levels due to political appeasement via inflation to counter "good-enough" drones, it will be more profitable to crush human organization than promote it.
Very cool vision of the future. I'm trying to imagine more consequences of the price of human labor going negative.
After we free up the surplus material making the humans, there will be far less need for many robot-provided services.
Farming won't be as big of a deal anymore. Many of our modern industries will shrink dramatically. We won't need food, clothing, entertainment, or medical services.
We can expect to keep a contingent of engineers around to service and design the robots until they hit the self-repairing, self-designing level of the singularity recursion.
It seems like a more-or-less plausible jumping off point into a runaway-AI future.
One of RMS's points is that Uber exploits its drivers by paying them low wages. I've taken several Ubers in the past month. The drivers tell me that they get 80% of the cost of the ride. One guy said that his previous company took 60%. I also met a student who said that he liked being able to work the part time hours.
You should be more skeptical when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs, especially given the presence of numerous press articles quoting many dissatisfied Uber drivers.
There's a significant chance that they are telling you they love their jobs because if they told you they hate Uber and feel trapped by it, you would give them a bad rating and they would get fired.
"when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs"
Parent comment doesn't say the drivers said "love" and the comments made don't appear to be over the top in any way. Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion. (Not saying you aren't right to be skeptical as you raised a valid point).
The point is that taxi driving is a service industry, and nobody makes money in a service job by appearing unhappy or bitter. Customers come back more often and tip better if you seem cheerful, not if you confront them as cogs in a system that's screwing you. We want our baristas to be Manic Pixie Dream Girls, not overworked, underpaid people who resent our taking 15 minutes to decide what flavor syrup we want in our latte.
This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, and on and on. You know this smile-the one that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee...
Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?
And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who's ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile.
While it's valid to question what an Uber driver says to a customer, it doesn't necessarily follow that because some Uber drivers have come out against it publicly that all of them are somehow in thrall to the company and hiding their disgust, or even that their issues are actually worse than the issues you might hear a taxi driver say about their company off the meter. Particularly since taxi companies are almost always local and local rules vary.
To go back to a specific point in the OP, if an Uber driver says that when they were a taxi driver the company's cut was 40% instead of the 20% uber takes, I'd be inclined to think they're not lying about it. Merely not bringing it up would be more than sufficient to maintain the illusion.
And to compare this to a personal experience conversing with a cab driver and an uber driver, I had a cabbie tell me that they wait a month to get money from debit or credit transactions in their cab from the company, and this is one of the reasons they resist customers paying that way. An uber driver told me it's a week for them. That's a huge difference in payment cycle.
Also, if Uber drivers are trapped somehow from taking their labour elsewhere, it is entirely because of the regulatory capture created by the taxi industry's relationship with city administrations that imposes inflexible limits on the way the taxi industry can grow (often to the point of it being essentially a planned economy).
> Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion.
The parent commenter shouldn't feel insulted; I don't trust anyone's ability to perform that task reliably. That's why the entire field of sociological research exists, and is conducted with far more rigour than asking people things and attempting to interpret the answers they give while they are under coercion.
Richard Stallman is engineering's smartest conspiracy theorist in the world. He's great at his sport, but getting to his level of expertise has clearly taken a toll on his ability to distinguish paranoia from reality. The tinfoil is doing something... The whole post is both objectionable and somewhat warranted/understandable at the same time.
Yeah, only he was right about spying and tracking by government. In fact, his "conspiracy" theories fell quite short to the brutal reality of AT&T, Wikileaks, and Snowden revelations.
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app).
I'm not sure if I agree with this, unless you consider the web to be non-free. Uber also runs a really great mobile website[1], which is one of the few reasons I use Uber not owning an iPhone or Android device.
Stallman definitely considers web sites not licensed under a Free Software license to be non-free. Why would the web be somehow different from any other mechanism for delivering sotware?
149 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadOff to a great start persuading the everyman once again, Stallman
Agreed on the more salient point of the pervasive record-keeping and the government have full access to them, though. Shoulda lead with that.
> It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.
Okay, so I am extremely liberal and everything, but "let's ban any new technologies that might make somebody lose their job to a robot" is seriously the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard RMS make. What the hell.
Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive.
Seems like this is really his point, if it isn't going to be preemptive, then (he feels) we should stop the jobs from going away.
We can't stop anything from going away. Technology progress by and large has always been incremental. Large changes haven't occurred since the time of Industrial revolution. And I guess the next one won't occur until we get Artificial general intelligence. Until then affairs of the world will go on as they always have.
AGI would alter the very course of economy in a way the whole concept of a job and a income would be very largely irrelevant. Heck you may not even need a basic income, because you only need to bootstrap a few machines and from there on they are going to do every single thing for you.
Indirectly, perhaps. Application-level software projects do tend to have the "automate people's jobs away" effect, but AFAIK, Stallman has been mostly involved in infrastructure-ish "enable some people to work (on automating away other people's jobs)" projects.
No question about that. As someone who back in the day paid thousands for business software that is now almost always free, money went from our company to a company that had employees, sales people, programmers who made a living off the software that was being offered. Not to mention obviously the people that we didn't need anymore as a result of that software. (Bookeepers, anyone?)
What does your company do with that extra money now? Throw it in a barrel and burn it?
Right. Which isn't to say we shouldn't be considering it. The short term matters - we spend a lot of time there.
"The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy."
Well, there's nothing to say the money is redistributed to labor, and it's hard to run a consumer economy when only a few people have any money to pay for anything. That said, I don't really get that vibe from the parent comment in the first place...
Great point. It's hard to quantify though. OSS gives companies access to a quality software stack for minimal cost. On the other hand, those companies are not now buying software from proprietary vendors. I don't know which is more: jobs created by having access to inexpensive quality software, or jobs lost due to less spending on application code.
Can you elaborate on the divide between his claim and my interpretation, operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow? I honestly don't see it.
For the record, I also advocate strongly for basic income. But I don't think that robots taking jobs leads to particularly poor outcomes. For example! Driving a car 17 hours a day (or at all!), as described in the Uber article, is a needlessly dangerous activity for a human to be performing.
Uber is not automating its fleet tomorrow, either.
Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must come to an end. Jobs that require smarter humans don't work for the vast majority of barely capable humans that exist.
Mass unemployment is coming, the masses aren't capable of knowledge jobs and labor jobs are being taken over by machines, what other possible outcome do you see?
Anecdotally, most of my extended family couldn't write a line of code if their lives depended on it; nor could they design a serious science experiment or write a novel. They aren't trained for those things, and that training has to start young or come with serious motivation, time, and effort. Not one of those people have any interest in learning those things.
I think it's possible to have a knowledge based economy, but we would have to drastically redesign our education systems and our culture in ways that I find it hard to even imagine how we would do so.
But, I think it's only a matter of time before we gain more skill in writing programs that automate out even the most complex knowledge based jobs. Watson is already showing the potential to be a better doctor than any human. The program named "Emily Howell" can already write symphonies that pass whatever the musical version of the Turing Test is. How long before we apply those things to all the other knowledge based jobs? What'll be left? More automation and maintenance programmers? How many of those will we even need?
If you accept that certain jobs[1] to be performed at a worthwhile level require a certain degree of general intelligence, or at the very least, the vast majority of people performing certain jobs have a measurable general intelligence above a certain level, and you accept that things like general intelligence, height, and other observable, measurable phenotypic traits of a species occur on a more or less normal('bell-curve') distribution, two things that are pretty much taken as a given outside the PC deluded, "I love me some outrage!," "Wow, just wow." crowd, then there is your answer. Is it not?
You might think you're doing good for the world by saying 'everyone is equally capable,' but you'll probably have more success in doing good for the world by understanding the world as it presents itself upon clear-eyed observation.
[1]"Software is an IQ business." -Bill Gates
It's a question that CS has struggled with for decades and I haven't heard anyone give a compelling definition, certainly not one that could be tested with any confidence.
I was refering to the 'general intelligence' that is an attribute of human beings, what iq tests measure basically.[2][3]
It is a matter that has undergone much study since the early 20th century, and there is indeed agreement on what it is among those who study it.[4]
certainly not one that could be tested with any confidence.
Why so certain? It can indeed be tested and has been. Taking intelligence to mean 'ability to deal with complexity,' and taking something complex like say, life on earth, people with higher IQs on average make more money, and live longer. Not to say the amount of money one makes is wholly indicative of successful living of course, but it can be used as a rough proxy since it is something many people seek to do in the complex environment that is Earth and the Universe.
Also, I think the ability to 'live sucessfully' and to find out what doing so entails is an ability spread evenly throughout the population.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
[4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intellige...
Perhaps in 50 years, maybe 100, but I see the writing on the walls.
Humans seem almost universally have this hubris that says that machines will never be able to take their place, think as us, be as smart or creative as us. They almost certainly will, but it will take time, perhaps a long time. After all, biology and evolution has had(and used) billions of years to create the human brain, and we've only been building computer for less than a 100.
Perhaps in 50 years, maybe 100, but I see the writing on the walls.
Humans seem almost universally have this hubris that says that machines will never be able to take their place, think as us, be as smart or creative as us. They almost certainly will, but it will take time, perhaps a long time. After all, biology and evolution has had(and used) billions of years to create the human brain, and we've only been building computer for less than a 100.
This. There's far more to his argument than merely "lets prevent people from losing jobs."
Wouldn't it be an ethical imperative for all taxi drivers to quit their jobs rather than use non-free software?
He said "let's ban this," with this referring to Uber. Secondly even if he said "let's ban ANY techno...," he did add "Unless/until every ..," which is more than a valid argument.
Uber seems to be the cool company to hate, but when I talk to Uber drivers that unanimously seemed to think it was a good gig. The talked about the money(how it was much better than what they were doing), they talked about the hours(whenever they would like to work), and they talked about the pleasure of working for themselves.
When the switch to robotic cars comes, in it will impacts the world over, and Ubers interaction with the robotic car revolution will be a very small part of the impact self driving cars have, in my own humble opinion. I'm not even convinced Uber can hold onto it's market share when self-driving cars take over, the space will seems ripe for competition.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-ly...
but I think that Lyft and Uber still have a chance to appeal the ruling...
No it doesn't. It's a non sequitur.
And even with Uber around, you can still do that. No one's taken that choice away. Use Lyft/Uber if you're comfortable with it. If not, user a regular cab.
Stallman is nuts, but he is an extremely important type of nuts. The world needs more people like him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh
On release into house arrest, he refused a government job because that would have "muzzled" him. 32 years aftert his initial arrest, all restrictions were finally lifted -- and the first thing he did was call for the abolition of the act used to arrest him.
Also Mandela, Gandhi, etc.
Until that is no longer true, I'll continue to be an extremely satisfied Uber user.
As someone else is this thread has mentioned, RMS addressed the issue of Uber wanting to put drivers out of jobs as bad but ironically the comment pointed out that the "free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs."
Talk about burying the lede :P I think it would resonate with a larger audience if he just flipped the order of his bullet points.
Fortunately for us, he hasn't said anything remotely new, so we can continue to think of him as the 20th century man he is.
You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your information in a database that can be used against you later.
While I don't agree with all of his reasoning here, he is correct that taxis offer you substantially more privacy than Uber, and Uber has been known to abuse the data they collect on passengers in several instances, so it's far more than just a theoretical concern.
No you can't. Plenty of taxis record the backseats of their cars, and you have no way of knowing which do/don't.
Taxis don't offer you enough privacy over Uber, and the reason he's coming after Uber is because he wants to stay relevant, not because Uber is particularly bad.
Also, I'm pretty sure RMS doesn't give a fig about "relevance". He's just applying his principles to the world as he sees it, and he's been doing this literally for decades:
https://stallman.org/~rms/archives/index.html
Numbers 4-6 are even more broad, they basically apply to any situation where you are required to use a credit card to pay (which identifies you), which is basically every single app.
I'm empathetic to the issue that there is no way to anonymously take an Uber (a real downgrade as compared to cabs), but for your average person where a massive upgrade in convenience offsets the slight loss of anonymity, this is going to be a tough sell.
Ride sharing is where someone was already going somewhere and you share the costs.
IMO you could use a ride sharing company where you're more anonymous. E.g. public transport :-P (though not in my country :()
One of the crucial components of sharing apps is the building of trust and accountability. Identification is part of that.
This list of complaints doesn't hold water for me.
We don't see eye to eye on the identification issue, but even if we put that one issue aside I can't agree that the list of complaints doesn't hold water for me personally.
Executives stalking passengers and trolling through passenger ride data to ferret out alarming narratives crosses a line in my opinion. This starts to get into discussions of which data belongs to whom, which is a discussion that I don't think has been had yet, and I don't like the assertion of ownership over my data that many companies are making.
We agree that part of building sharing apps is building trust and accountability, but I disagree that Uber has done a good job of earning our trust or demonstrating accountability.
Edit: changed some loaded phrasing
Let's be fair, he's been right about a LOT of things. Things that we did laugh at him for saying.
Maybe we shouldn't have laughed so hard.
Why would that require the passenger to identify themselves? You can have one without the other. Where I live, most taxis are organized in cooperatives. Drivers pay monthly for access to dispatch and are held to certain quality standards beyond the legal requirements.
Drivers are tracked by dispatch and expected to take optimal routes. If they deviate too far from that route on a fare, they have to explain themselves to dispatch. Simple as that, and it works extremely well.
That's why it's ok to run a non-free program on top of Linux or install a non-free driver, etc.
* I'd guess about 10% of the time they don't show up, so I have to bake in extra travel time for that. With uber I can see on my phone that they are actually coming.
* With uber I know payment is all set, Taxi's will often say that their credit card machine is broken.
I imagine these problems could start to get solved with a good open source software suite (with client mobile apps) and an organization to bring this technology to cab companies. Of course, creating something is hard, raising complaints is not. The cognitive dissonance for me is that a creator like RMS would write something like this instead of trying to lead people towards creating a solution.
Then, insist that they break out the manual credit-card processor and carbon paper. If they refuse, offer to have them call the cops. Their payment-processing hardware will probably magically start working.
>It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.
So what? This is the way of technology: obsolete work becomes automated. Extending RMS' argument to its logical conclusion means reinstating many forms of manual labor (that are now done by machines) in effort to reduce unemployment. Do you want to plow your land with your bare hands? No! Do you want to drive taxis? No!
There's a special point regarding driving taxis: it's one of the most dangerous jobs currently available. Moreover, the taxi industry is infamously exploitative of drivers, such that the competition from Uber/Lyft is actually raising taxi drivers' wages in the interim.[0]
I did not expect the logical conclusion of RMS' argument to be ludditism. I find this surprising.
> Uber is an unregulated near-monopoly, so it can cut rates for drivers arbitrarily.
I think this is an unrealistic long-term view. The rideshare market has low barriers to entry and a high potential for competition, such that I expect to eventually see this market fragmented among many isomorphic companies (Lyft, Uber, SideCar, etc.), perhaps more so on a local than on a global level. I've laid out my thoughts on the issue in an essay.[1]
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/12/how-lyft-...
[1] http://johnloeber.com/w/uber.pdf
The way of technology is to increasingly render people obsolete. This is great for some people for most its a threat to their ability to make a living.
The logical conclusion is not what you state but one conclusion his other is basic income and then you can automate away all you want.
There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is structural unemployment not just temporary.
This for instance is worrying http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/d...
The luddite fallacy is well known by many yet there are an increasingly worrying trend that indicates that the fallacy is a fallacy itself.
The consequence is that as technology does what technology do, it will leave an increasingly larger and larger group of people unable to find new jobs.
The real competitors arent china, its automation and people really dont give it enough credit.
Yeah, I know. The thing you're forgetting is that unemployment denotes a percentage of the eligible workforce, which, in itself, is only a fraction of the total population. Before the industrial revolution, literally EVERYONE, save for infants and toddlers, had some sort of employment -- some daily task to assist their making ends meet. The long-term trend is extremely obviously one of monotonic decline of the number of jobs available per capita.
I'm totally aware that the consequence of technology replacing jobs is structural unemployment. Yes, over time, there will be more unemployment. It is likely that we will adapt for this by changing the definition of the eligible workforce, and by supplying further social aid (e.g. basic income) to those who are not in the workforce.
However, the problem with your argument is that you are putting the cart before the horse: you want basic income before you remove jobs. Instituting basic income while people still have jobs is politically well-nigh impossible. There actually must be a felt need for basic income, not just "once y'all have basic income we can start automating away your jobs".
Would you have said, on the cusp of the industrial revolution, that nations should hold out on the technological progress until everyone is assured a new job and a decent quality of life? Maybe, but I think that's a bit idealistic. Innovation -- like all forms of change -- can be a bit rough as it sweeps through.
It would also be useful to have some small-scale prototypes running well in advance to help work out wrinkles.
1. The benefits of scale -> lower cost insurance/gas/car/services for drivers.
2. The benefit of having more customers -> less time for driver to get to customer, i.e. more money.Also when shared rides become possible(2-3 or more passenger sharing a car) , more customers you can arrange them to shorter routes(which means more people willing to share) , which also means less cost.
3. Lyft is trying to make the trip a social experience by matching you with people you'd like. Data for better matching could be an advantage.
https://m.uber.com/ doesn't require the app to be installed.
Using that mobile site still requires one to run non-free Javascript, which RMS also has a problem with.
Therefore it is free (as in speech) for you to inspect.
The web, as a concept, seems to conflict with his ideals in a number of ways, at least superficially. For instance, you can't modify and redistribute the source code of any site you visit, since by definition you only get the response of that site. Technically, every URL leads to a black box. Although many sites use free libraries and might offer their source code as a repo, you never really know what they're actually running.
Hacker News is a perfect example. It's only barely "open source" in that you can download an old version of the Arc forum, and it's known that the HN staff have made their own edits to the software, which no one can contribute to, or fork, or even see, since they don't want people to be able to game the system. What people are interacting with is pretty much a closed source and proprietary service.
But on the other hand, you interact with the html, and you can mess with it in the browser all you want. Still not technically free, though.
* Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose;
* Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish;
* Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour, and
* Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits?
No? Then it's not "free software".
To wit, Birmingham, AL has precisely these restrictions & regulations.
> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers.
> It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.
Which is a bigger case of "trampling freedom": voluntarily using someone's closed-source program, or having the government tell me they'll put me in jail if I offer to sell someone a ride in my self-driving car?
Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards.
Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along with credit card receipts, just like Uber.
Taxis are a regulated market, but the medallion market is largel unregulated and a near-monopoly.
Taxi drivers complain they are underpaid and beholden to the medallion owners.
And so on...
"I have a credit card, but I use it as rarely as possible. Effectively, only for airline tickets, car rental, and hotel checkin — because they demand identification anyway."
https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html
I don’t even have a credit card, and I only pay electronically for large payments or where identification would be done anyway.
And it’s cheaper for the merchants as well, with cards they lose 3% of the income, some merchants even make losses with every card customer.
Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards.
And I think RMS cares less about that. No doubt he will be unhappy about the taxi driver's/company's choice to run non-free software; however, regular taxi companies are willing to do business with free software users - Uber refuses to do so. That's a pretty significant difference.
Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along with credit card receipts, just like Uber.
Taxis can be paid in cash, unlike Uber.
The medallion issues are oddities of a few (not even all!) cities particularly in the US. You are right to complain about them as that system is ridiculous; however, the comparison with Uber is unfair because Uber is trying to take over the world.
> Taxis can be paid in cash, unlike Uber.
Ah, so soon you forget that Taxis must legally record pick up and drop off points for the police department and their drivers can be questioned by LEO.
Hand-waving pleb magnets like this (the statement, not the person stating) show a painfully inept understanding of how autonomous labor is going to work.
Once Moore's Law crosses the processing power/price ratios where robots can perform "good enough" object acquisition and manipulation, (pre-Singularity phase) no nation on earth can deflate their currency fast enough to stop charlatans from promoting wholesale human elimination instead of inflationary appeasement.
Meaning, after the "good enough" threshold is crossed, nations will engage in inflationary policies to bide time while desperately seeking a clearing price for human labor. But they won't find it for most labor because of two factors:
1.) At the most efficient time usage (under politically impossible configurations and assuming equal productivity), in which people work 18 hour days forever and utilize 6 hours of sleep, 1 machine's labor equals 1.25 human's labor. Typically, 1 machine's labor equals 3 human's labor. Accounting for productivity enhancement, the comparison will be about as worthwhile to make as comparing engines to horses today. (My drone is 500 plebpower?)
2.) It takes 12 years (again, under politically impossible standards) and ~18,000 pounds of food to make a human productive. It takes a drone a few weeks to be born out of a few gallons of fuel, and a few pounds of materials.
The real cost of labor is staggering. And if you think people are stupid enough to fall for the trap (again) to use the productive gains of a new technology to do nothing more than cycle it all back into a mechanism to breed more humans into existence, I think you will be in for a rude awakening when human costs drop so low from endless inflation appeasement that using said drones to harvest these surplus humans for their physical materials becomes wildly profitable. And if the charlatans can make even HackerNews believe North Korea was behind the Sony hacks and clamor for invasion, just imagine how easy it will be to manufacture some social justice narrative for mining populations centers for biomaterials. ("Those evil sexists need to be mined! For great equality!")
TL;DR: Once the price of human labor drops to sub-zero levels due to political appeasement via inflation to counter "good-enough" drones, it will be more profitable to crush human organization than promote it.
After we free up the surplus material making the humans, there will be far less need for many robot-provided services.
Farming won't be as big of a deal anymore. Many of our modern industries will shrink dramatically. We won't need food, clothing, entertainment, or medical services.
We can expect to keep a contingent of engineers around to service and design the robots until they hit the self-repairing, self-designing level of the singularity recursion.
It seems like a more-or-less plausible jumping off point into a runaway-AI future.
There's a significant chance that they are telling you they love their jobs because if they told you they hate Uber and feel trapped by it, you would give them a bad rating and they would get fired.
Parent comment doesn't say the drivers said "love" and the comments made don't appear to be over the top in any way. Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion. (Not saying you aren't right to be skeptical as you raised a valid point).
The result is what David Foster Wallace, in his classic essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_N...), called the "professional smile":
This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, and on and on. You know this smile-the one that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee...
Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?
And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who's ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile.
To go back to a specific point in the OP, if an Uber driver says that when they were a taxi driver the company's cut was 40% instead of the 20% uber takes, I'd be inclined to think they're not lying about it. Merely not bringing it up would be more than sufficient to maintain the illusion.
And to compare this to a personal experience conversing with a cab driver and an uber driver, I had a cabbie tell me that they wait a month to get money from debit or credit transactions in their cab from the company, and this is one of the reasons they resist customers paying that way. An uber driver told me it's a week for them. That's a huge difference in payment cycle.
Also, if Uber drivers are trapped somehow from taking their labour elsewhere, it is entirely because of the regulatory capture created by the taxi industry's relationship with city administrations that imposes inflexible limits on the way the taxi industry can grow (often to the point of it being essentially a planned economy).
The parent commenter shouldn't feel insulted; I don't trust anyone's ability to perform that task reliably. That's why the entire field of sociological research exists, and is conducted with far more rigour than asking people things and attempting to interpret the answers they give while they are under coercion.
I'm not sure if I agree with this, unless you consider the web to be non-free. Uber also runs a really great mobile website[1], which is one of the few reasons I use Uber not owning an iPhone or Android device.
[1] https://m.uber.com/