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Comment by smallmancontrov | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Uber did something enormously creative. But it also did something destructive and we're guilty of an accounting sleight of hand if we focus on one while pretending the other doesn't exist.

We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.

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Destroying inefficient monopoly rents? By all means, let us not pretend that doesn't exist.

You're forgetting the workers, who were the important part of this analysis.

Why are the taxi workers more important than, say, the taxi customers? If the companies are providing garbage service, why do I have to care about protecting their workers?

When you lose your job to AI, you will understand.

Technology has always displaced workers. And then the society adjusts. Plenty of people will lose their jobs to AI, but most workers will be redeployed elsewhere.

The agricultural revolution displaced farm workers with machines. There was unrest and migration to cities, and eventually that fed the Industrial Revolution and created a working class.

Change is tough, but we will all be fine.

Yeah and it took about 150 years until industrial revolution started to actually benefit the common people and the workers started to have their working conditions improved.

What it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements.

Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.

It took a literal civil war, which you don't read about in history books so much because it's not beneficial for the owners of those publishing houses to have more people hear about it. Lots of people died on both sides.

> which you don't read about in history books so much

Just to clarify, are we referring to the American Civil War? The reason I ask is that the idea that it is not a topic that is broadly covered in history books and discussed at depth all throughout schooling is simply false.

No, I'm talking about the anti-union violence. This stuff, happening all across the economy, was a civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

Anti-union violence was a "literal civil war"? Yeah, no it wasn't.

Last time inequality cooked up it took a lifetime to go back down. It did so very painfully through capital incineration on a monumental scale: a great depression, where the incineration was metaphorical, and two world wars, where it was very literal. In both cases it was economical and in both cases it fixed the problem but at enormous cost. We should aim to do better.

Plus all the union violence. The ones where owners used guns to break strikes so striking workers also started bringing guns and using them. I don't think we want that, do you?

Easy to say it all worked out fine when you aren't one of the people who was displaced. They might feel differently.

It may have worked out fine for humanity as a whole, but it ignores the suffering of a lot of people.

I mentioned in my other comments that I did support welfare programs as safety nets.

Progress will result in better standards of living for many, and then we take care of the people left behind.

I’m in software - in all likelihood, I will be displaced at some point. But I’ll figure it out (I hope). When I started out, I was writing Perl. Then I had to learn Python.

How about we set up that safety net first for once then?

You don't put on your seat belt during an accident, you don't start driving until it is on.

Who is “we?”

This is taking a weird tone where it sounds like you’re asking me to change society for you, and blaming me for not doing it fast enough when I haven’t heard you mention a thing you’ve done either.

Like I said man, I voted for people who support sensible welfare programs. That’s my contribution.

Stop taking this out on me - if you’re so fired up about it, go get involved and start knocking on doors.

That doesn't answer the question.

In a world where AI has not yet taken all the jobs, when a company provides lousy service, why do its employees deserve to keep their jobs more than the customers deserve good service?

I honestly don't know how uber drivers can even make a living with the price of gas and upkeep for the car [being as hight as it is]. How many hours a day do they work? I know there is a 12 hour limit at Uber but you could continue to Lift until the next day. Then what?

So they drivers spend their life Ubering, not learning new skills or anything and next thing you know - AI takes their jobs.

Then what? That's how you get revolutions.

It created another monopoly to collect more rent, and some would say it's a worse one to boot.

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