[ericmcer]

It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you.

This has been a 15+ year process and will probably take a few more years. I don't feel too bad if they didn't manage to pivot in that time period.

[SirFatty]

"It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you."

You mean the way taxi drivers had to watch as Uber and Lyft replaced them?

[adventured]

I imagine most traditional taxi drivers converted into Uber and Lyft drivers. Unique regulatory circumstances in places like NYC might have delayed that process some of course (eg trying to pay off a medallion).

Uber and Lyft drivers are taxi drivers.

[SoftTalker]

Drivers rarely owned the medallion. They leased the cab for 8-12 hours and drove it on behalf of the medallion owner.

[theoreticalmal]

I work for a company that owns (iirc) a large portion the medallions issued by NYC. We rent the vehicle and medallion out to people to drive/work

[jvanderbot]

What a stupid process. It bothers me that farmers rarely own the land too. We can't shake our tendency to let wealth turn us into tiny little kings that live off the rent. (not so tiny in the case of farms, but you get it).

[Isamu]

>It bothers me that farmers rarely own the land too

You will be glad to learn that most farmland is farmer owned:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v...

[jvanderbot]

I am glad to hear that. Thank you for correcting me.

[NoGravitas]

This depends a fair bit on how you define "farmer", of course.

[dzhiurgis]

Medallion is an artificial scarcity. Land is actually scarce.

[sib]

I've been in plenty of Uber & Lyft rides in what were literally taxis.

[umeshunni]

> You mean the way taxi drivers had to watch as Uber and Lyft replaced them?

For the most part, they were the same drivers I think

[anigbrowl]

That was a slightly different business model, vs a different technology.

[ang_cire]

It's funny how "exploit workers worse (medallions) and worse (rideshares) until we can fully cut them out" has played out in such a perfect microcosm, and yet somehow people here don't seem to register that it was never the workers' own fault.

Taxis didn't lose because rideshares played the game better, they lost because rideshare companies used investor money to leapfrog their apps, ignored actual commercial transport regulations that would have made them DOA, and then exploited workers by claiming they weren't even employees, all so they could artificially undercut taxis to kill them off and capture the market before enshittifying.

[astrange]

Taxi drivers were already not employees, they were exploited contractors for the taxi companies.

And do you not remember what using Yellow Cab was like in the Bay? It was like being kidnapped. They'd pretend their credit card reader was broken and forcibly drive you to an ATM to pay them.

When I first moved here I went to EPA Ikea, afterwards tried to get home via taxi, and literally couldn't because there was a game at Stanford that was more profitable so they just refused to pick me up for hours. I had to call my manager and ask him to get me. (…Which he couldn't because he was drinking, so I had to walk to the Four Seasons and use the car service.)

[nradov]

Taxis lost at least partly because the workers were assholes. Refusing to take credit card payments (the card reader is "broken") or not picking up members of certain ethnic groups or not driving to certain areas. Sure some cabbies were nice, honest people with good customer service skills but those were the exception in many cities.

There was nothing stopping taxi companies from raising investor capital to build better apps and back end technology infrastructure. They were just lazy and incompetent.

[SoftTalker]

> some cabbies were nice, honest people

Most were, in fact. You just remember the assholes a lot more.

[lotsofpulp]

Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place. Uber and Lyft created a superior product that people wanted. Doesn't matter whose fault it is, the buyers preferred something that was more convenient.

There was never a situation where uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.

[ang_cire]

> Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place.

This shows just how badly behind they were. All the large cab companies have had apps for years. No one knows about them.

Here's YellowCab's: https://rideyellow.com/app/

> uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.

Are you under the impression that most cabs are/ were independent? That wasn't the case since at latest the 1980s. Having a radio dispatcher is a huge necessity as a cab driver.

[mattzito]

I think you have to go market by market to make that statement. In NYC, for example, it was explicitly illegal for yellow cabs to accept radio/pickup calls, which was the domain of the livery cabs (black cars). The tradeoff was that only yellow cabs could do street hails. That worked for everybody for years - yellow cabs did a volume business, livery cabs were for outer boros or luxury/business travel and would sneakily try to pick up street hails.

In those days if you needed a car to take you someplace, aside from the outer boro examples, it was always faster to get a yellow cab. The car services could maybe get there in 45 minutes if you were lucky - big companies would often have deals with car service companies to have a few cars stationed at their buildings for peak times, so execs didn't have to wait for a car.

The yellow cab operators were essentially all independent - many rented their medallion/vehicle, either from a colleague or an agency, but they worked their own schedules and their own instincts on where to be picking up fares at given times.

No one expected something like uber - what is essentially a street hail masquerading as a livery cab. This basically destroyed yellow cabs and the traditional livery cab companies, but some of it is attributable to the VC spend, lowering prices (yellow cab fares are set by the city, livery cab fares are market-regulated) and incentivizing drivers. They made it so lucrative to drive an uber that you had thousands of new uber drivers on the road, or taxi drivers who stopped leasing their medallions and started driving uber.

At some point, though - the subsidies dried up, prices went up, and now its often faster to get a yellow cab than an uber/lyft. This is anecdata, but I take cabs a lot, and I've spoken with ~6 taxi drivers in the last year who either started with driving uber and shifted to driving a taxi, or went taxi-uber-taxi. Then I've had a lot more taxi drivers where they need passengers to put the destination into the driver's waze or google maps, even for simple things like intersections - I suspect they're uber drivers who became depedent on the in-app directions and native language interactions.

But the broader point I'm making is that in NYC, the drivers themselves were essentially unable to do anything about the changing market. The only power they had was to shift between the type of fares they were getting. And today when you order an uber, sometimes you get a yellow cab.

[energy123]

Enshittifying? It's still better than taxis ever were and competition between providers is preventing that from regressing.

[pa7ch]

You say the term pivot like its a startup founder who has every option in life. You should feel bad for anyone who would struggle for a basic job.

[dekhn]

the history of humans on earth has been pivots, even amongst people who had few options.

I don't subscribe to feeling guilty every time somebody loses a job. I feel empathy, but telling people to "feel bad" is not constructive.

[kannanvijayan]

In a society where having a job is, for that vast majority not in the non-gilded classes, the only mechanism by which a person can secure their core needs.. losing a job is indeed a pitiable situation for most.

If we've built a society that when it "pivots" leaves swathes of people smeared out as residual waste, I'd argue we should feel bad.

We've certainly reached a point of technological advancement where many of these consequences at the individual level are avoidable. If they're still happening, it's because we've chosen this outcome - perhaps passively. But the clear implication of would be that we're collectively failing ourselves, as a species that tends to put some degree of pride in our intelligence.

And we should feel bad about that failure. It's OK to feel bad about that failure. We tend not to improve things we don't feel bad about.

[phainopepla2]

"Feel bad for" is not the same as "feel bad". The former is the same as feeling empathy, in colloquial English

[treis]

It's interesting that we're on the cusp of a major change in our world and no one is really talking about it. Self driving cars will have a profound impact on society. Everything from real estate to logistics will be impacted.

[HPsquared]

Looking forward to when they get rid of traffic lights and the networked cars just whiz through and avoid hitting each other. They'll also seamlessly zip lanes together on the highway, and traffic waves will be a thing of the past. Maybe China will do it first.

[onemoresoop]

No thoughts on pedestrians? With no traffic lights it'd be a total nightmare to be a pedestrian

[HPsquared]

You could still have pedestrian crossings with buttons etc which signal the cars to stop, just the same logic as we have now. Maybe even physical lights for redundancy. Pedestrians are pretty rare in most places though so this shouldn't slow things down too much.

[Moomoomoo309]

And if the button doesn't work, what should pedestrians do?

[seanmcdirmid]

Walk? Waymo already stops at crosswalks (marked or unmarked) if a pedestrian looks like they are crossing or starting to cross. That is more than I can say for human drivers. I’m confused why you don’t think this is just a win for pedestrians given how messed up things are now.

[xnx]

More likely that Waymo's will make it a paradise for pedestrians. It should be possible to cross any road at any point without so much as looking either way.

[kmacleod]

My Tesla FSD v14 will wait for any pedestrian stepping or approaching stepping into the road.

[nxor]

Some places are less car-dependent. That plays a role

[vinni2]

Actually i spoke a uber driver about this and he said he was waiting for cars with FSD available to buy then he could make his car work for him.

[tuhgdetzhh]

If he can create a buisness of operating a fleet of self driving cars fine, but 99% of regular taxi/uber drivers will loose their job.

[mensetmanusman]

cleaning 1 car can be a full time job.

[xnx]

> This has been a 15+ year process and will probably take a few more years.

In 1995 Navlab 5 completed the first autonomous US coast-to-coast journey. Traveling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to San Diego, California.

The history is long, but the technology is finally here. Hopefully soon the technology will be everywhere.

[cynicalsecurity]

> It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you.

You mean just like programmers watching AI replacing them?

[ang_cire]

AI doesn't replace programmers, it's used by programmers for efficiency.

Waymo is most definitely not being used by taxi or rideshare drivers to be more efficient.

[dqh]

If a programmer is more efficient with AI then you need fewer programmers, assuming a fixed amount of work is needed. So in that sense AI would be replacing programmers.

[PlunderBunny]

I've never worked at a company that would choose to have less programmers instead of choosing to do more work. I guess such companies exist though.

[JeremyNT]

Waymo definitely uses human drivers in some markets... currently

Just like AI still uses human programmers... currently

[sentientslug]

Sorry, what? Waymo does not use human drivers for passenger trips, unless you’re referring to training drives (with no passenger).

Edit: I think I get what you mean now, you mean when humans have to remotely intervene for whatever reason and pilot the car

[lotsofpulp]

As I understand, Waymo still uses humans in some circumstances. Theoretically, the drivers could do this job instead.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

[emmelaich]

If it doubles your efficiency, that's one less employee required.