Throughout many Western cities local taxicab drivers are staging mass protests in response to the impact the Uber app is having on their means of earning a living.
For those who don’t know what Uber really does, it’s a smartphone app which allows people who want a ride somewhere to get that ride from someone else who has a car, a smartphone with Uber also installed, and is in the vicinity. This bypasses not only the cab company dispatcher, it even makes hailing a cab superfluous. The Uber drivers don’t need to pay the huge sums needed to get a cab license and there is a good chance the Uber driver won’t even be making much of a detour for a trip already under way.
The technology of Uber changes, effectively, the boundaries and legal restrictions that provided some kind of “environmental protection” to cabbies. Cyberspace redefines the legal and physical environment in which cabbies support themselves and their families.
Some defenders of Uber cite the evolution of the free market, consumer choice, and in essence the idea of getting “on the right side of history”. This is the future. It’s inevitable. Get used to it. Economic efficiency and consumer choice are the engines of progress.
The cabbies are just going to have to adapt or be left behind. Demands to outlaw Uber are probably correctly seen as futile. It’s been illegal to download music for many years. The Pirate Bay refuses to die.
Two parallels can be drawn. One is between the traditional ways of participating in the economy and how the digital world will change all of that. The second is about illegal immigration (sometimes called “migrants” with the “illegal” word omitted) and how just as previous “national frontiers” once protected workers who were “legal and documented” from either having to accept inferior working conditions or go without an income are now being told there is an overarching humanitarian, moral, or perhaps even logisitical reason for tellling those individuals the world has changed. The changes will hit some people most directly. The changes will cost some of the less adaptable and more vulnerable their incomes. The changes will give cheaper items or services to others who will praise the changes as being ethical or at the very least inevitable. The right side of history.
We can analyse both Uber and illegal immigration as either being different in their details or equal in one or two possible forms of abstraction. Which way to find the “devils” in the details of the same abstraction will usually be related to which way of viewing the specifics is best for us personally. In the immediate present and economically.
Whichever way we choose to carry out this analysis, we’ll use “true facts” to assure objectivity, we’ll use logical deductions based on assumptions which are both justified by a known and accepted ideological perspective, and conveniently enough leads to the conclusion which is most beneficial to the analyst.
Each of the various desired conclusions can be reached by one or another of the partially rational worldviews available.
The study of classical rhetoric is the most appropriate way to learn how to detect these linguistic manipulations.
150 years ago this subject was taught to 12-year olds.
Now?
150 years ago we had horses pulling wagons. Horseless carriages came along — a technological innovation changed the boundaries and therefore the ecosystem of society — and the horses became mostly redundant.
Today those whose jobs are vanishing because of technology are told “new jobs will emerge to replace those which disappear”. This is no doubt true but will enough jobs emerge and will those who are made redundant be able to fill them? What happened to all the redundant horses?
A growing number of credible studies have told us already that in 20 years about 50% of all the jobs people do today will be automated. Travel agents are fast disappearing. Uber is a technology which does not care how the car is driven. Self-driving cars are only a few years in the future and it would be very likely their first deployment will be in taxi fleets where their routes can be carefully monitored. .
Even as the leading media figures insist on talking about “migrants” without the adjective “illegal” to modify their status we are seeing all around us the displacement of workers who are already here by artificial intelligence and technology. The studies and other reasons have led some of the world’s most prominent individuals to set up “The Future of Life Institute” to provide meaningful analyses and policies to deal with these matters
Uber is just another harbinger of the future economy. So is the self-driving car and a little farther into the future the replacement of many computer programmers by software like UML which will soon enough be able to write the code for us.
Throughout human history we have been largely defined by our occupations. Many family names are occupation names. One of the first questions we ask people when we first meet them is “what do you do?”
Political and academic leaders who use one kind of local rationality to discuss the moral obligations we have to those who illegally enter our countries, another local rationality to assure us up when we face unemployment in a new “ecosystem” which will be defined by artificial intelligence and robotics and in which we will either adapt or die, and then go on to sponsor “happiness” projects — such people may wish to pull back a bit and ask themselves if all of these different rationalities can exist in the same world at the same time.
We alive in this generation may have more pressing problems than rooting out the last vestiges of short term microaggressions. We may actually have some long-term macro challenges which also need our collective attention.
What kinds of future worlds are open to us? Which of them do we want for our children and grandchildren to inhabit? Which futures do we want to avoid?
Don’t forget the horses.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Where did all the horses go?
Horse-drawn wagons.
Horseless carriages.
Driverless cars.
…
Unjustified Margins 