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Don’t Be Afraid of Robots: Technology is What We Make of It

Rapid technological change, if it is even happening, does not necessarily need to lead to mass unemployment or even major disruptions in people’s lives. In all cases, new technology is what society makes of it — that is, it should be used to broadly improve lives and work, not reorient the world around the technology itself or redistribute wealth upwards. Ride-hailing services like Uber and the promise of self-driving cars illustrate both sides of this point; polices like a job guarantee provide a path forward.

Illustration: Heske van Doornen

Don’t Be Afraid of Robots: Technology is What We Make of It

By Kevin Cashman

There is a lot of talk of the rapid development of technology leading to changes in the way people work as well as mass automation and thus mass unemployment. However, the data generally don’t support this story (the most recent data being a notable, but very limited, exception). Nevertheless, the story has currency among the public and politicians, in part due to the novelty and allure of technology — and the political power of its promoters. Throughout recent history, the promises of revolutionary technology have captivated imaginations but also come up far short. Instead of flying cars, there are apps for refrigerators and ordering cat food over the internet.

It is important to note that the gains from technological advancements do not necessarily need to go to the rich or lead to mass unemployment. If shared fairly, the gains could lead to social benefits, such as increased social services, and broad individual gains, such as more leisure time. And there can be concerted action to help those directly affected by technological change. While there are many policies that could be implemented, a job guarantee — where the government provides jobs to all those that need them — is the simplest and most straightforward way to deal with job loss. If people lose their jobs due to factors outside of their control, why not simply provide them with new jobs?

If the gains go to the top, it is important to point out that this is because of deliberate policy. It is not a natural outcome. The rich and their allies in politics promote this redistribution to the top as inevitable — as the “future of work,” for example — whether or not advancements in technology pan out or not. Since advancements in technology do not fundamentally necessitate a change in social relations, this is intentionally deceptive at worst and wishful thinking at best. To see this dynamic, looking at particular jobs and industries is instructive, for example, in taxis and buses and trucking.

The ability to use smartphones and the internet to mediate services is not particularly revolutionary or unique but it does provide some benefits. Uber, the ride-hailing company, brought investment and these ideas to the taxi industry and quickly took over a large part of the market, despite many issues with its service and sustainability. In Uber’s case, appealing to the political power of affluent residents in cities and the supposed innovation of its app was enough to negate its blatant disregard for regulations, questionable safety record, exploitation of drivers, and unprofitability. In this sense, Uber’s investment allowed it to provide some benefits to its relatively wealthy passengers at the expense of the disabled, regular taxi drivers, and others. Most importantly, because it subsidizes every ride (Uber loses money on every ride taken), it was able to undercut the regulated taxi industry. The government’s lack of interest in maintaining fairness in the taxi industry effectively led to Uber being handed the market.

How could this have been different? The taxi industry on a whole is not an industry with large margins or much investment. In part, this is due to underlying characteristics of the industry as well as regulation, including those aimed at limiting the number of taxis operating in a city (which is good policy). To realize the benefits of technology, taxi commissions or groups of taxi drivers in various places could have developed their own app and infrastructure to facilitate ordering of cabs on the internet. This would have required substantial organization and money, which could have been facilitated and provided, respectively, by the government. The result could have been an app that allowed taxi authorities to continue to maintain standards for safety and operation and also provide the seamless service that certain groups of consumers desire. Indeed, competitor apps are being developed this way and existed before Uber, but they must now claw market share away from Uber. This is quite difficult because Uber is still subsidizing rides and keeping prices artificially low.

Let us now assume that rapid technological advancement is inevitable: self-driving cars and buses are finally right around the corner, as has been promised for years. (Indeed society could be on the cusp of this sort of technology, although the challenges shouldn’t be understated.) There would be massive benefits if self-driving vehicles are implemented successfully: increased mobility for the elderly, many fewer accidents, lower operating costs, increased productivity when in transit, etc.

Along with these benefits, there would be significant disruptions to the labor market. Ideas around how to approach these changes were discussed in a recent report, Stick Shift: Autonomous Vehicles, Driving Jobs, and the Future of Work.¹ It discusses two questions that are central to evaluation rapid disruptions to the labor market: How fast will the technology develop? How much of an impact will it have?

Regarding the first question, and assuming that these technological hurdles are overcome,² the report notes:

If the technology is successfully developed, the rate of the adoption and popularization of autonomous vehicles will depend greatly on whether necessary infrastructure is built, and whether and how regulation responds to these advances in technology. One of the inevitable debates will be between those who wish to ensure that autonomous vehicles are safe and reliable and those who want to get them to market as soon as possible. The outcome of this debate could greatly determine how the labor market is affected. Thorough vetting of the technology, along with phased rollouts, would allow time for workers to adjust to incoming shocks, and would dampen those shocks as well.

If the government were to assume the costs of building infrastructure for self-driving vehicles instead of the companies that are selling them, it would be fair for the government to also take a pro-active approach and develop a process to adequately assess the safety of those vehicles. This would somewhat mitigate the effects on the taxi industry and on bus drivers, especially in the early years of their use.

Proponents of self-driving vehicles also often forget to mention that technology will replace individual activities of workers but not necessarily all of the activities that encompass their jobs. Truckers, for instance, perform many other activities besides simply driving:

…in the trucking industry, there are many tasks that are difficult to imagine autonomous-vehicle technology being able to manage, which may limit their adoption or consign them or the driver to a secondary role. This includes many things that truck drivers are required to know, such as how to inspect the vehicle and cargo, perform maintenance and fix emergency problems, put on tire chains and deal with unpredictable weather, refuel the vehicle safely, and carry dangerous materials safely, to name a few.

If self-driving trucks took over the trucking industry, this suggests there would be many more support jobs in the trucking industry.

The other question is more pertinent considering our assumptions. How much of an impact technology will have on society is entirely up to society. The question is then not how much of an impact will self-driving cars have on society but where does society need self-driving cars and how do self-driving cars fit with social goals? There is a convincing argument that cars — self-driving or not — should have much less of a role in cities in the future. While taxis could have a role to play in the future, for example, public transportation and good urban design should be the focus, thus eliminating much of the need for taxis. In this vein, employment in the taxi industry could decline, but in addition to more social benefits from less vehicle use, employment would increase in association with an increase in investment in public transportation.

The social aspects of occupations are also important to consider when asking whether it might be desirable to transition to self-driving vehicles:

There is also the question of more socially oriented driving jobs. Bus drivers are one example. City bus drivers preserve order and safety on buses, provide information, ensure payment, and are generally considered community members and authority figures. School bus drivers have specific responsibilities related to the safety of the children they supervise. For these reasons, it may not be desirable or necessary to replace bus drivers, completely at least, even if the buses were fully autonomous.

In this sense, the elimination of these jobs would be akin to cuts in public services, and they would also eliminate some social benefits. Social aspects of jobs are rarely considered — but they are very important.

Here, a jobs guarantee would be useful, since it is a policy that prioritizes the social aspects of jobs and since social benefits are not prioritized in the private job market. Returning to the example of bus drivers, buses could be self-driving in the future but the “driver” need not be replaced. Rather, the position could be reoriented in a purely social role.

Whether technology will bring small changes, as in the case of Uber, or large changes, as in the case of self-driving vehicles, who benefits is entirely up to society. Gains from technology can be shared broadly with the right policies — just a few of which were described here — so there is no need to inherently fear the robots. A jobs guarantee is one of those policies, and it is perhaps the most important. (And it’s gaining traction in the mainstream.) A broad coalition, focused on the appropriate use of technology and promoting a job guarantee, could keep the actual threat — those wanting to harness the benefits of technology for themselves — at bay. Whether or not robots and mass automation are around the corner, it’s good policy, too.

Think Uber’s Problems Stop at Its Management and Culture? Think Again.

Keep track of all of Uber’s problems with The Big List of Uber’s Controversies.

In February 2017, Susan Fowler published a blog post detailing the sexual harassment and gender discrimination she experienced during her time as an engineer at Uber, the ride-hailing company. Although this was not the first time that Uber had been accused of creating a workplace where pervasive sexism and discrimination thrive, Fowler’s piece struck a chord. It built on a wave of criticism of the company from an earlier public relations disaster — Uber’s missteps following protests of President Trump’s racist executive order at John F. Kennedy Airport starting on January 28th and the resulting #DeleteUber campaign — and emboldened others to report sexual and other misconduct at the company (215 complaints about its corporate workplace have been filed).

While the criticisms levied at Uber are generally applicable to Silicon Valley as a whole, public ire was now focused on Uber, which was having a public relations crisis seemingly every week. The one-time $70 billion-valued private company (five times more valuable than the grocery store Whole Foods, which has 431 supermarkets, and was recently acquired by Amazon) was under immense pressure from even investors too. In response, it agreed to two investigations, both led by law firms. One investigated the workplace complaints that had been lodged against the company, leading to the firing of over 20 employees as well as disciplinary action against others. The second’s task was to investigate Uber’s corporate culture and develop recommendations to restructure the company to try to address the root causes of the problems. This team was led by former Obama administration Attorney General, and former Uber advisor, Eric Holder.

The report from Holder’s team, released a few days ago, came up with 13 pages of recommendations, all of which were adopted by Uber’s board of directors. In general, they seek to bring Uber in line with the practices of a company of its size. Some of these are common sense: developing internal controls and processes in a variety of ways, eliminating bias by performing blind reviews, reducing the unusually high amount of power of key executives, giving the board of directors more power, creating oversight and audit committees, using compensation as a carrot and stick, etc. Other recommendations include ensuring that people with children can participate in company events, which is laudable. Where the proposal fails is in its recommendations for changing values and emphasizing diversity, which include training for staff, developing programs to attract qualified diverse candidates, and reforming the list of the company’s core values (from something that a frat boy would write to, no doubt, corporate-speak clichés). It also included symbolic changes, like renaming Uber’s “War Room,” the “Peace Room”.

While revamping Uber’s structure and setting a bunch of (corporate) priorities might seem like a positive change at the company, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. One is that the problems that Uber is facing with regards to its culture and diversity are pervasive in Silicon Valley. Uber might be especially bad in these areas right now, but the typical solutions are unlikely to make much of a difference at the company because they haven’t made much of a difference at most tech companies. There are complicated reasons for these failures, and there should be little confidence that these tired and hollow strategies will work.

Another is that Uber is a private company, with control intentionally held closely among certain people, like CEO Travis Kalanick, who is most responsible for Uber’s reprehensible culture. As the CEO and founder, he ultimately controls much of what happens at the company, whether the Holder recommendations are adopted, and whether they are taken seriously. The most important result from the Holder investigation — Kalanick’s decision to take leave and take on a supposedly diminished role at the company — was undoubtedly due to pressure from the investigation but still entirely Kalanick’s own decision (and he’s still the CEO). Lastly, while the recommendations wisely agreed to use compensation as a way to incentivize and punish managers for transgressions, in practice, out-of-control pay of CEOs and executives, regardless of performance, is a systemic problem among not only tech companies, but companies in general. Kalanick’s poor performance as head of Uber should lead to a pay cut, but it likely won’t.

Thus, the Holder report might have some good ideas about how Uber could be run better, although it is unlikely that Uber will fundamentally change. (Indeed, at the board of directors meeting to discuss the results of the report, an Uber board member made a sexist remark.) But what this conversation about Uber misses are the more fundamental questions about Uber and its business. The narrative that has emerged about the company since the beginning of this year is that Uber’s problems start and stop at its management (specifically, Kalanick) and culture, when they don’t.

The Big List of Uber’s Controversies is a compendium of the problems and controversies that have plagued the company since its founding in 2009. Many of these are related to the problems the company is very publicly dealing with now; others are not. The goal of the list is to point out that Uber’s problems are pervasive and fundamental to the company’s operations, yet not necessarily unique to the company (although Uber might be an outlier with regard to how poorly it is managed and structured). To that end, the controversies are divided into six categories: Business Practices; Social Costs; Misuse of Data and Software; Corporate Culture; Passenger Issues; and Driver Issues.

While the 79 controversies and problems currently on the list touch on many different and unique issues, there are themes that give some insight into the inner workings of the company and its problems, and demonstrate that Uber’s problems run much deeper than its culture or even the company itself.

Uber hemorrhages massive amounts of its investors’ money every year and does not have a viable business model, absent major changes in the industry or the creation of a monopoly;
Uber’s success depends on attracting more investment and growing quickly, as well as anti-competitive practices: it has not created efficiencies or value that would justify its poor financial performance;
Uber uses misleading research and fantastic technology forecasts to distract from the dismal failure of its core business, taxi service;
Uber has large and sophisticated lobbying, public relations, and research departments, often involving former Obama administration officials, that deliberately misleads (and outright lies to) reporters, investors, regulators, and the public in order to justify and give cover to flagrant violations of the law, defend exploitative conditions, and paper over the problems with its business model;
Uber erroneously claims that it is a technology — not a taxi — company, and that the business conducted on its platform is “sharing” in order to evade responsibility;
Uber has inadequate internal controls for its data and software tools, leading to improper, and possibly illegal, access and use by employees, including to surveil critics and regulators;
Uber’s growth-at-any-cost mentality and poor management has led to a culture that ignores problems and creates a toxic culture and workplace for its employees — significantly and negatively impacting its drivers and passengers as well;
Uber’s past behavior suggests it has a complete disregard for the safety of its drivers and passengers until it is pressured to take action;
Uber manipulates its drivers, entices them to enter into exploitative arrangements (including their misclassification as independent contractors), opposes their unionization, and exerts undue influence over their working conditions, consistently lowering their pay; and
Uber’s operation has significant social costs with implications for public safety, public finance, access for those with disabilities, discrimination, investment in public infrastructure, and the regulated taxi industry as well as the taxi driving occupation.

Recent criticism of Uber is undoubtedly a good thing, but as this list demonstrates, its problems extend far beyond the individuals that run it or its corporate culture. With these problems, the fundamental question should not be whether Uber can reform its workplace culture, or whether Kalanick should stay on as CEO, or if he is overly important to the company. Rather it should be whether Uber, and companies like it, should be tolerated at all. In Uber’s case, it is unclear whether it is any better than regulated taxis broadly. Individuals might like Uber’s service — and that’s fine, and also to be expected, considering their rides are all subsidized by Uber’s investors — but policy should not cater what certain segments of the population want, especially if they don’t understand how the company operates.

Another important point is that Uber’s reckless behavior has been tolerated and excused because of its ascending position in the market. But as the clear industry leader today, that is part of the reason why it is now in the crosshairs, even though other ride-hailing companies suffer from some of the same problems as Uber. (Lyft eagerly capitalized on Uber’s misfortunes following the JFK protests, for example.) Importantly, they too have not developed ways to be profitable or more efficient than regulated, fleet-based taxis. Even Juno, the supposedly fair and ethical ride-hailing company that gave its drivers equity in its business, sold them out when it was acquired.

So, while some have suggested that the solution is simply to stop using Uber (and, ostensibly, to use competitors like Lyft or Gett), this is no solution at all. The solution is making sure that these companies are subject to the same regulations as traditional taxis, as well as that they comply with labor and other laws, all of which was unsurprisingly absent from the Holder report. This is the innovative idea that is also a solution to many of Silicon Valley’s problems, regardless of the industry.

Uber might not be able to survive if it started caring about the safety of its passengers, the exploitation of its drivers, or the social costs it shifts onto the rest of us (it’s in trouble already), but maybe it shouldn’t. As politicians plot with Silicon Valley to take over public infrastructure and to revamp the fundamental nature of work, maybe Silicon Valley shouldn’t either.