Ride into the Future with Waymo on Uber in Austin

Have you taken a Waymo before? The car and ride in general is much nicer than your average Uber or Lyft ride.

I’m also worried about this. I was recently down in San Francisco and was using uber a fair bit (I couldn’t use waymo bc I’m a Canadian without a zip address). It felt weird to be talking to uber drivers while seeing tons of Waymo’s zipping around. There aren’t many jobs that are going to be fully automated away by AI but human uber drivers actually might be and I feel sorry for them.

Cars are commodity. The brains/driver is the value.

I agree. There might be a fairly "simple" solution to that problem. Let the government tax some % of each ride and use that money to redistribute wealth.

(I am not saying it will happen or will be done well)

I don't think it's right to expect companies like this to do what is best for their workers or society at large. Nothing wrong with chasing profit, but don't expect them to be what capitalism never allowed them to become.

I just have some optimism left in me I guess. I really hope worker-owned companies or companies incorporated to chase after the public's interest take off in technology. In a purely capitalist context, it kind of makes a lot of sense. Consumers generate demand and they will do business with companies that have their interest in mind and provide the most value. But for that value to be generated, it usually means less profit for the corporation. But my hypothesis is that profit and growth are not always following the same linear path. A company can generate enough revenue to not just pay it's people but grow at a steady pace and even generate enormous amounts of profits to it's owners in the long run. while at the same time, it's priority would be generating the best value to it's users,customers and the public at large instead of short-term profits.

Take uber for example, until recently they were not even a profitable company, this is after 10+ years. I genuinely believe Uber provided a ton of value to the public at large, including myself. I spend a fortune at Uber. But that was not the goal of the company. To restate, if Uber focused on generating value to it's users and drivers/couriers, it can become a net positive in society and we would depend on it more. In the long run, it would be a monopoly like utility providers.

With Waymo, their priority is clearly profit, not the public interest. This means less employment and less quality of service. I'm sure it will generate a lot of profit in short term, but as much as I am a fan of Uber as a company, this is short-sighted. They will lose the public's trust with such moves and policy makers will have to regulate them a lot more. They will become a service the rich and privileged can afford but only in times of inconvenience. But they could have become more profitable than Walmart and Amazon combined. Think about it, they can dominate delivery, period! Amazon and Walmart are inconvenient and costly middle-men.

In short, businesses should provide not just a barely viable service or products, but they should provide a product their customers want, even at loss sometimes (loss-leaders and all), so long as it is the best strategy for long term profitability. Structuring a company so that it will always prioritize long term viability make sense, and I hope to see that sort of thinking prevail.