9 ms·

Uber will offer gig work like AI data labeling to drivers while not on the road

77 points by bobertdowney 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
JodieBenitez 11mo ago
Yeah, that Moloch ain't gonna feed itself.
constantcrying 11mo ago
Somebody really needs to put a stop to what Uber and the like are doing. 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.
- sokoloff 11mo ago
  > If you want to pay someone to do something employ them. 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.
  - petre 11mo ago
    Is there an Uber for lawn mowing?
    - loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
      Maybe taskrabbit can cover this.
    - porridgeraisin 11mo ago
      Urban company is a gig platform for all manner of house work, I think it's only india based though.
    - skeeter2020 11mo ago
      They're really missing out by not moving into federal services. Current administration would be all over firing federal employees and paying a fraction to gig employees.
    - zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
      I recall a startup doing this a few years ago but I think they went out of business. I think the issue is lawn mowing is usually done on a set schedule for a long time so the transaction cost is fairly low and you don’t want to pay a third party to handle the matching problem.
  - FredPret 11mo ago
    In addition to your very good points: an economy of people who take this live-and-let-live view is going to be far more flexible and efficient in different scenarios. 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.
    - loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
      Has a whiff of Atlas Shrugged.
      - zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
        Sounds like a compliment
        loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
        Just a neutral observation :)
    - Avicebron 11mo ago
      Your spherical cow version of economics is laughably naive and misguided. If "adults" decided tomorrow that it was fine to employ people at only the infrastructure cost of preventing them running away, people would be outraged. But somehow flooding an ecosystem with money to starve meaningful competition and capitalize on people's inherent lack of options, which is "preventing them from running away with extra steps", is somehow... "a robust and dynamic economic ecosystem between consenting adults".. let's not be naive on HN.
      - FredPret 11mo ago
        It’s reality-based, empirical economics, not “mine”. Place that let adults choose who to work for and who to employ, and furthermore consider it improper to even use the word “let” in this context, universally have better employment situations than places that follow your “spherical cow” theoretical planned / over-regulated economies. You seem to ascribe agency only to the employers, but remember that every Uber driver and every shitty minimum-wage job holder is almost certainly just doing their best. Making their jobs illegal will not improve their lives one iota, not in theory, and not in practice.
  - loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
    Wait you sign a contract with the person mowing your lawn?
    - trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
      If they're an adult professional, yeah. Helps smooth out the home insurance if something happens and they get injured on your property or damage your property.
      - loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
        “I want my AI to handle my contracts so I can mow lawns in peace”. Ok now I see how that works! Thanks!
        skeeter2020 11mo ago
        How far away are we from AI running the business (marketing, contracts, payment, scheduling, etc) while the humans compete with each other to do the lawn mowing for subsistence food & shelter? Put one of these tech bro CEOs in charge long enough for the AI to get good enough to do the top-level coordination and then recycle them into energy to power it all, and we're good to go!
        trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
        A ways away. Anthropic tried recently and it went off the rails. https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1 https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
    - zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
      Verbal contracts are still contracts. Anyone you hire for a job has a contract with you (implicit or explicit).
  - constantcrying 11mo ago
    The gig economy is neither contract work nor casual work. >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.
    - sokoloff 11mo ago
      You know that when you cut the last two words off the quote “is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber” and respond to only the part you quoted that it leaves the impression that you’re arguing in bad faith, right?
      - constantcrying 11mo ago
        I left it off because I did not know what you meant by "non-Uber". It is a category so wide that I have no idea what you were talking about, so I decided to focus on the part where the subject was clear. In the case of Uber I know that it is possible to replace it by employee labor. You did not give any examples for "non-Uber" companies and we certainly were talking mainly about Uber, as was the article. I do not consider it at all bad faith to focus on the "Uber" part and ignore the totally unspecified and somewhat irrelevant "non-Uber" part. To be honest you calling me dishonest because I focus on the topic, namely Uber, and leave out a category which I can say basically nothing about such as "non-Uber", seems to me like you are trying to dodge making any argument at all. Since you are ignoring what I said and focusing on what I did not say.
  - JKCalhoun 11mo ago
    > How that person chooses to relate to an employer … is their business, not a concern of mine. 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.
  - skeeter2020 11mo ago
    >> 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. 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.
  - computerthings 11mo ago
    [dead]
- phatfish 11mo ago
  Because trust in governments and their ability to execute has been successfully eroded by the holders of private wealth. There are also plenty politicians that simply work for private wealth and deliberately sabotage government from the inside. 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.
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  Someone should write a "Gig Striker" app (or web site) for mobile phones. 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.
  - nativeit 11mo ago
    I’ve got a brilliant idea! What if, hear me out, we had some kind of united alliance of workers, and they could do things like leverage their collective labor power to negotiate better working conditions and/or pay? We might call them something, let’s say “unions”, and we could even setup some sort of National Labor Relations Board to ensure fair access to them, and to help settle disputes? Then we might get some of the things we need, even without resorting to labor strikes, which are disruptive and expensive to everyone on all sides. Surely this is possible, and companies like Uber haven’t been sandbagging and poisoning the well for decades?
    - nativeit 11mo ago
      I bet it’d be so popular, we would set aside a whole Federal holiday to commemorate all of the people who fought, and/or died, to win these basic labor protections 100-years ago! We’ll call it “Labor Day” and everyone will eat hot dogs while totally not spacing on the fact that they even enjoy “holidays” at all due to these very fights.
  - aranelsurion 11mo ago
    That sounds like a union plus mobile app and minus legal protections, or am I getting the idea wrong?
- noir_lord 11mo ago
  > Why are countries just allowing them to clown on established worker protections? 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.
shironandonon_ 11mo ago
in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense. 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?
- dawnerd 11mo ago
  It’s not really a gig job if you’re locked to one employer and paid hourly like any other job though.
- lotsofpulp 11mo ago
  >in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense. 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.
  - JKCalhoun 11mo ago
    Maybe in Los Angeles? Someone with more knowledge should answer though. I may be mixing Uber up with higher minimum wages for fast-food in California.
- cookiengineer 11mo ago
  > 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.
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  "Game the system", ha ha. Pretty sure "employers" that push for a gig economy are doing a bit of gaming themselves. Unionless, benefitless, interchangeable employees…
berkes 11mo ago
The whole "AI revolution" feels distopian opposite from what I'd naively thought it would do. 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.
- loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
  “I want my AI to do dishes and laundry so I can draw, code, write. Not for it to draw, code, write so I can do dishes and laundry”.
  - FirmwareBurner 11mo ago
    >I want my AI to do dishes and laundry You mean a washing machine and a dish washer?
  - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
    Pretty wishful thinking to think software and hardware is advanced enough to figure out very advanced materials science and physics to do those tasks requiring manipulation of objects in the real world. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t, but manipulating digital output seems like a step that would come before manipulating real world objects.
Havoc 11mo ago
That makes sense but it’s also a little grim
geetee 11mo ago
Sounds very Lumon.
- abbadadda 11mo ago
  Mysterious AND important.
black_13 11mo ago
[dead]
intended 11mo ago
So not Star Trek, we’re doing Corpo.
- noir_lord 11mo ago
  We always where going to, a star trek like society benefits the maximum number of people at the expense of curtailing the excesses of the wealthiest people. 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.
- mrbungie 11mo ago
  Yep, just a delayed combination of the full cyberpunk genre.
oefrha 11mo ago
Here’s a few bucks for helping us eliminate your jobs, isn’t that awesome? 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…
- siva7 11mo ago
  I recently browsed engineering job ads at x.ai where they looked for experienced software developers as data labelers for about 60 bucks / hour - so they work on replacing their own profession for a low pay. Funny times.
- abuani 11mo ago
  I had a recruiter reach out for a company doing Agentic SRE's due to my years of experience as an SRE. Second sentence was describing their mission as making the SRE role no longer necessary for companies. I know if you read between the lines that's the goal of many AI companies, but I was surprised how upfront they were.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    There's no reason to hide it anymore. A CEO can go on CNBC and openly admit "Yes, we are excited about AI because if it works we won't have to pay so many middle class white collar workers anymore" and there are many average people who will ideologically defend it, as if they'll somehow be immune.
    - oefrha 11mo ago
      Any time you dare to mention AI is going to replace software devs here, loads of people come out of the woodwork saying there’s zero evidence and it’s all just the end of ZIRP or whatever. Well I know for a fact that my company’s art spending is way down, and while we haven’t fired any software engineer we also haven’t added any. I’m very conservative about the AI hype but I can’t deny a 20%-30% boost at the moment so I’m not gonna hire a junior to do the boring 25% for me, who incidentally would be more annoying to steer the way I want. And it wouldn’t surprise me if a slightly more capable model actually makes us slash headcount or at least never need a junior again, same way artists are going. It’s also likely that solopreneurs won’t need to hire in the first place, or will be able to run very lean teams a lot more easily. Many of us will be replaced sooner or later, no idea when, but burying head in the sand doesn’t help much.
nativeit 11mo ago
If you want to keep your jobs, then it’s time to poison that well. Take their money, and provide critically flawed feedback to hobble their machines. (Insert “bodies upon the gears” speech by Mario Salvo at Berkeley) Edit: Berkeley, not Kent State
dangus 11mo ago
There totally won’t be a recession soon right guys?
labrador 11mo ago
As someone on both sides of the issue I think this is good. I worked in tech my whole life and then drove an Uber in retirement. Uber is basically saying "We're partnering with Waymo to eliminate drivers, so here's something to help pay you while you transition to another job."
- ulfw 11mo ago
  It's literally "We're partnering with Waymo to eliminate drivers, so here's something to help make your job disappear faster."
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - labrador 11mo ago
    When I was a kid growing up in the space age 1960's a popular phrase was "you can't stop progress!" I guess it helped people cope with the world changing.
  - gs17 11mo ago
    In the article: > 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.
seydor 11mo ago
Uber Monkey
anonzzzies 11mo ago
It is clear to me that in 1000 years we are extinct, Blake's 7 or Star Trek. If you ask me to bet on it, I wrote it in the right order.
jinbachman 11mo ago
Very impressive. 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.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  I've always wondered what the world would look like if these huge powerful corporations were run by average people instead of multi-billionaires completely out of touch with what it's like to live in the world. Like have a lottery where everyone gets a single ticket, and the person whose name is drawn gets to be the CEO of Apple for a year, and the 10 next-drawn tickets get to be the senior staff.
  - jamwil 11mo ago
    This is similar to my idea for a better democracy. Every cycle involves a lottery where, say, 1000 random citizens become eligible to run for public office. A small enough number to make ‘career politician/sociopath’ an unviable life path but large enough that there will inevitably be some excellent potential candidates in the pool that wouldn’t have entered politics otherwise.
    - r721 11mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

77 points by bobertdowney 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

JodieBenitez 11mo ago

Yeah, that Moloch ain't gonna feed itself.

constantcrying 11mo ago

Somebody really needs to put a stop to what Uber and the like are doing. 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.

sokoloff 11mo ago
> If you want to pay someone to do something employ them. 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.
- petre 11mo ago
  Is there an Uber for lawn mowing?
  - loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
    Maybe taskrabbit can cover this.
  - porridgeraisin 11mo ago
    Urban company is a gig platform for all manner of house work, I think it's only india based though.
  - skeeter2020 11mo ago
    They're really missing out by not moving into federal services. Current administration would be all over firing federal employees and paying a fraction to gig employees.
  - zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
    I recall a startup doing this a few years ago but I think they went out of business. I think the issue is lawn mowing is usually done on a set schedule for a long time so the transaction cost is fairly low and you don’t want to pay a third party to handle the matching problem.
- FredPret 11mo ago
  In addition to your very good points: an economy of people who take this live-and-let-live view is going to be far more flexible and efficient in different scenarios. 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.
  - loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
    Has a whiff of Atlas Shrugged.
    - zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
      Sounds like a compliment
      - loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
        Just a neutral observation :)
  - Avicebron 11mo ago
    Your spherical cow version of economics is laughably naive and misguided. If "adults" decided tomorrow that it was fine to employ people at only the infrastructure cost of preventing them running away, people would be outraged. But somehow flooding an ecosystem with money to starve meaningful competition and capitalize on people's inherent lack of options, which is "preventing them from running away with extra steps", is somehow... "a robust and dynamic economic ecosystem between consenting adults".. let's not be naive on HN.
    - FredPret 11mo ago
      It’s reality-based, empirical economics, not “mine”. Place that let adults choose who to work for and who to employ, and furthermore consider it improper to even use the word “let” in this context, universally have better employment situations than places that follow your “spherical cow” theoretical planned / over-regulated economies. You seem to ascribe agency only to the employers, but remember that every Uber driver and every shitty minimum-wage job holder is almost certainly just doing their best. Making their jobs illegal will not improve their lives one iota, not in theory, and not in practice.
- loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
  Wait you sign a contract with the person mowing your lawn?
  - trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
    If they're an adult professional, yeah. Helps smooth out the home insurance if something happens and they get injured on your property or damage your property.
    - loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
      “I want my AI to handle my contracts so I can mow lawns in peace”. Ok now I see how that works! Thanks!
      - skeeter2020 11mo ago
        How far away are we from AI running the business (marketing, contracts, payment, scheduling, etc) while the humans compete with each other to do the lawn mowing for subsistence food & shelter? Put one of these tech bro CEOs in charge long enough for the AI to get good enough to do the top-level coordination and then recycle them into energy to power it all, and we're good to go!
        trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
        A ways away. Anthropic tried recently and it went off the rails. https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1 https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
  - zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
    Verbal contracts are still contracts. Anyone you hire for a job has a contract with you (implicit or explicit).
- constantcrying 11mo ago
  The gig economy is neither contract work nor casual work. >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.
  - sokoloff 11mo ago
    You know that when you cut the last two words off the quote “is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber” and respond to only the part you quoted that it leaves the impression that you’re arguing in bad faith, right?
    - constantcrying 11mo ago
      I left it off because I did not know what you meant by "non-Uber". It is a category so wide that I have no idea what you were talking about, so I decided to focus on the part where the subject was clear. In the case of Uber I know that it is possible to replace it by employee labor. You did not give any examples for "non-Uber" companies and we certainly were talking mainly about Uber, as was the article. I do not consider it at all bad faith to focus on the "Uber" part and ignore the totally unspecified and somewhat irrelevant "non-Uber" part. To be honest you calling me dishonest because I focus on the topic, namely Uber, and leave out a category which I can say basically nothing about such as "non-Uber", seems to me like you are trying to dodge making any argument at all. Since you are ignoring what I said and focusing on what I did not say.
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  > How that person chooses to relate to an employer … is their business, not a concern of mine. 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.
- skeeter2020 11mo ago
  >> 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. 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.
- computerthings 11mo ago
  [dead]
phatfish 11mo ago
Because trust in governments and their ability to execute has been successfully eroded by the holders of private wealth. There are also plenty politicians that simply work for private wealth and deliberately sabotage government from the inside. 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.
JKCalhoun 11mo ago
Someone should write a "Gig Striker" app (or web site) for mobile phones. 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.
- nativeit 11mo ago
  I’ve got a brilliant idea! What if, hear me out, we had some kind of united alliance of workers, and they could do things like leverage their collective labor power to negotiate better working conditions and/or pay? We might call them something, let’s say “unions”, and we could even setup some sort of National Labor Relations Board to ensure fair access to them, and to help settle disputes? Then we might get some of the things we need, even without resorting to labor strikes, which are disruptive and expensive to everyone on all sides. Surely this is possible, and companies like Uber haven’t been sandbagging and poisoning the well for decades?
  - nativeit 11mo ago
    I bet it’d be so popular, we would set aside a whole Federal holiday to commemorate all of the people who fought, and/or died, to win these basic labor protections 100-years ago! We’ll call it “Labor Day” and everyone will eat hot dogs while totally not spacing on the fact that they even enjoy “holidays” at all due to these very fights.
- aranelsurion 11mo ago
  That sounds like a union plus mobile app and minus legal protections, or am I getting the idea wrong?
noir_lord 11mo ago
> Why are countries just allowing them to clown on established worker protections? 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.

shironandonon_ 11mo ago

in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense. 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?

dawnerd 11mo ago
It’s not really a gig job if you’re locked to one employer and paid hourly like any other job though.
lotsofpulp 11mo ago
>in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense. 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.
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  Maybe in Los Angeles? Someone with more knowledge should answer though. I may be mixing Uber up with higher minimum wages for fast-food in California.
cookiengineer 11mo ago
> 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.
JKCalhoun 11mo ago
"Game the system", ha ha. Pretty sure "employers" that push for a gig economy are doing a bit of gaming themselves. Unionless, benefitless, interchangeable employees…

berkes 11mo ago

The whole "AI revolution" feels distopian opposite from what I'd naively thought it would do. 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.

loloquwowndueo 11mo ago
“I want my AI to do dishes and laundry so I can draw, code, write. Not for it to draw, code, write so I can do dishes and laundry”.
- FirmwareBurner 11mo ago
  >I want my AI to do dishes and laundry You mean a washing machine and a dish washer?
- lotsofpulp 11mo ago
  Pretty wishful thinking to think software and hardware is advanced enough to figure out very advanced materials science and physics to do those tasks requiring manipulation of objects in the real world. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t, but manipulating digital output seems like a step that would come before manipulating real world objects.

Havoc 11mo ago

That makes sense but it’s also a little grim

geetee 11mo ago

Sounds very Lumon.

abbadadda 11mo ago
Mysterious AND important.

black_13 11mo ago

[dead]

intended 11mo ago

So not Star Trek, we’re doing Corpo.

noir_lord 11mo ago
We always where going to, a star trek like society benefits the maximum number of people at the expense of curtailing the excesses of the wealthiest people. 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.
mrbungie 11mo ago
Yep, just a delayed combination of the full cyberpunk genre.

oefrha 11mo ago

Here’s a few bucks for helping us eliminate your jobs, isn’t that awesome? 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…

siva7 11mo ago
I recently browsed engineering job ads at x.ai where they looked for experienced software developers as data labelers for about 60 bucks / hour - so they work on replacing their own profession for a low pay. Funny times.
abuani 11mo ago
I had a recruiter reach out for a company doing Agentic SRE's due to my years of experience as an SRE. Second sentence was describing their mission as making the SRE role no longer necessary for companies. I know if you read between the lines that's the goal of many AI companies, but I was surprised how upfront they were.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  There's no reason to hide it anymore. A CEO can go on CNBC and openly admit "Yes, we are excited about AI because if it works we won't have to pay so many middle class white collar workers anymore" and there are many average people who will ideologically defend it, as if they'll somehow be immune.
  - oefrha 11mo ago
    Any time you dare to mention AI is going to replace software devs here, loads of people come out of the woodwork saying there’s zero evidence and it’s all just the end of ZIRP or whatever. Well I know for a fact that my company’s art spending is way down, and while we haven’t fired any software engineer we also haven’t added any. I’m very conservative about the AI hype but I can’t deny a 20%-30% boost at the moment so I’m not gonna hire a junior to do the boring 25% for me, who incidentally would be more annoying to steer the way I want. And it wouldn’t surprise me if a slightly more capable model actually makes us slash headcount or at least never need a junior again, same way artists are going. It’s also likely that solopreneurs won’t need to hire in the first place, or will be able to run very lean teams a lot more easily. Many of us will be replaced sooner or later, no idea when, but burying head in the sand doesn’t help much.

nativeit 11mo ago

If you want to keep your jobs, then it’s time to poison that well. Take their money, and provide critically flawed feedback to hobble their machines. (Insert “bodies upon the gears” speech by Mario Salvo at Berkeley) Edit: Berkeley, not Kent State

dangus 11mo ago

There totally won’t be a recession soon right guys?

labrador 11mo ago

As someone on both sides of the issue I think this is good. I worked in tech my whole life and then drove an Uber in retirement. Uber is basically saying "We're partnering with Waymo to eliminate drivers, so here's something to help pay you while you transition to another job."

ulfw 11mo ago
It's literally "We're partnering with Waymo to eliminate drivers, so here's something to help make your job disappear faster."
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- labrador 11mo ago
  When I was a kid growing up in the space age 1960's a popular phrase was "you can't stop progress!" I guess it helped people cope with the world changing.
- gs17 11mo ago
  In the article: > 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.

seydor 11mo ago

Uber Monkey

anonzzzies 11mo ago

It is clear to me that in 1000 years we are extinct, Blake's 7 or Star Trek. If you ask me to bet on it, I wrote it in the right order.

jinbachman 11mo ago

Very impressive. 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.

ryandrake 11mo ago
I've always wondered what the world would look like if these huge powerful corporations were run by average people instead of multi-billionaires completely out of touch with what it's like to live in the world. Like have a lottery where everyone gets a single ticket, and the person whose name is drawn gets to be the CEO of Apple for a year, and the 10 next-drawn tickets get to be the senior staff.
- jamwil 11mo ago
  This is similar to my idea for a better democracy. Every cycle involves a lottery where, say, 1000 random citizens become eligible to run for public office. A small enough number to make ‘career politician/sociopath’ an unviable life path but large enough that there will inevitably be some excellent potential candidates in the pool that wouldn’t have entered politics otherwise.
  - r721 11mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition