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

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

#31

Post by trenchpilgrim »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #26
sokoloff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Wait you sign a contract with the person mowing your lawn?

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.

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

#32

Post by JKCalhoun »

constantcrying wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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

#33

Post by intended »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #25
berkes wrote: post #8

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,…

I get where you're coming from — the naively thought part. You may though just have to get a good deal more cynical. Perhaps you already are. Tech fascinated me as a kid—and, because of my age, we're talking Apollo-era tech, promises of a moon base, the introduction of the Metric system is U.S. schools, elementary school libraries full of science books for kids on chemistry, electricity, model rocketry, etc. I have c…

Hell, tech used to be.. it still is.. the thing I am interested in.

It meant a cool future to look forward to.

This for sure isn’t that.

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

#35

Post by markus_zhang »

berkes wrote: post #8

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,…

I always believe technological advance eventually bring us to the point that 1) the elites have total control of all resources, and 2) impossible for ordinary people to rise up and clean the slate.

We are very close to it.

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

#36

Post by loloquwowndueo »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #31
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait you sign a contract with the person mowing your lawn?

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.

“I want my AI to handle my contracts so I can mow lawns in peace”. Ok now I see how that works! Thanks!

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

#37

Post by skeeter2020 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #15
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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”.

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.

I think you need to get past the literal examples to the concept that they are saying "I wanted AI to free me from the mundane, not imprison me with it". This has long been the promise from the same people who now appear to be quite happy to turn us into the Matrix-style feedstock for AI (again, not literal - but maybe literally?). Natural extrapolation: they may be the last to go, but it won't need them either. How can so many smart people all be Wile E. Coyote?

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

#38

Post by constantcrying »

sokoloff wrote: post #6
constantcrying wrote: post #4

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…

> 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…

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.

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

#39

Post by mikkupikku »

berkes wrote: post #8

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,…

> 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.

I can't quite square people seriously believing such things, it seems like it must be wishful thinking crossed with denial. We have more than 200 years of technology taking away the hard and dangerous jobs and it hasn't been playing out that way at all, so why should the latest kind of automation have a dramatically different effect on society?

A hydraulic excavator can do the work of dozens of men with shovels, dozens of times faster too, but that hasn't lead to easy lives of luxury for the sort of men that would have been breaking their backs with shovels. They all had to get other manual labor jobs, because they weren't the capital that got to own and profit from the new machines. The best we can hope for is that when all the women manually spinning thread get replaced by factories, that at least some of them will get to have new factory jobs and the rest will at least be offset by society at large benefiting from clothing so cheap that even the poorest people can own more than one outfit.

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

#40

Post by Avicebron »

FredPret wrote: post #16
sokoloff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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.
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