Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's about opportunities, it's about what impact it's making to this world, is Uber worth existing? Is it really making the world any better? Is it even irreplaceable? Or it's just a toxic company trying to suck every bit from the world with a fake mask of "sharing economy"? With racism and sexism?
> Is it really making the world any better? Does this mean no one should work in many companies that do not make the world any better than what it is now? One could easily argue that most of the companies, though they claim to make the world a better place, they honestly do not.
Talking in absolutes doesn't actually aid the discussion.
Few institutions are purely good or purely evil. They are made of people, who themselves are not purely good or purely evil, who have their own motivations, some altruistic and some selfish.
We live in dynamic systems, in which institutions and individuals play a role. As a general rule all make things better in some ways and worse in others.
Transportation network companies (TNC) have produced economic winners and losers. Many people have access to more job options with less friction. Taxi drivers have seen their income shrink. The laws of supply and demand both with the network of one TNC and between the networks of multiple TNCs in competition with one another drive prices down. Driving the prices down makes transportation accessible to more people (both the more privileged and the less privileged), but it also drives down the income of those driving. Eventually self driving cars will drive down the costs further, democratizing convenient transportation further and eliminating many jobs.
Due to path dependency, humanity is heading down this path one way or another. If one institution doesn't take us in this direction, another will.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...
It's not going to be easy. It will be fraught with challenges, technical and social. The human and social problems will likely eclipse the technological problems in both scope and magnitude, but we're going to face them either way. We've been through this before during the industrial revolution. Life is recursive. It was a painful transition, but we came out the other side with a society that was more prosperous and had more opportunities for more people to live a life free of suffering than ever before. We can either claim the sky is falling, or we can put our heads down and work on figuring out how to solve the biggest challenges of our day. No solution we come up with will be perfect. We're going to have to cooperate in the form of institutions to tackle such large problems. No institution we come up with will purely make the world a better place because there are no silver bullets.