Uber drivers are commercial drivers. There's no way around it. They should have a chauffeurs license at minimum and be subject to DOT limits on hours per week and hours per shift and hours between shifts.
Even without regulation, there must be a huge legal risk that Uber's lack of a serious fatigue management system will be found to be negligent. The ways this goes wrong in the trucking industry are very well known.
Unless, of course, it was actually Uber doing it.. then it would suddenly be made legal in 90% of the places it operated and have a blind eye turned to it in the other 10%. I saw a ton of gypsy cab services get shut down in my city before Uber came along.
Are you referring to the recent movie "I.T." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.T._(film) where Pierce Brosnan plays the role of a airline company CEO who roles out an app that does for planes what Uber does for cars? He gets wrongfully arrested in the movie, but not for his "Uber for planes", but for something else. The roles in that film didn't square with reality. Brosnan portrayed an ethical family man and company director ignorant about IT, whereas in real life he'd be fiddling his company books, cheating on his wife, and using his business's IT infrastructure to illegally monitor his employees. The antagonist could talk to girls and run a sophisticated surveillance system, but couldn't shrug off a snub by Brosnan's character. None of it was believable. I wouldn't use anything in that film as a reference to real life.
I've used uber in SF, NY, and London. It's painfully clear they are a taxi service going from 1 "customer" to another.
I'm sure there are ppl that legit share their ride to work, but I'd love to see the numbers of ride shares vs serial taxi-like behavior
Maybe in California. Up here in Canada, "the robots" are still paralyzed by the snowy roads that cover the huge majority of our roadways in the winter. I suspect that this is also true in large parts of Europe.
Living in the Silicon Valley, where the days are always above 50 and mostly sunny, really skews your expectations of what the rest of the country faces for weather.