“we’ve made in giving tech companies, even those with well-intentioned CEOs, so much power over our daily lives. ” This line also stuck out to me when reading

“we’ve made in giving tech companies, even those with well-intentioned CEOs, so much power over our daily lives. ” This line also stuck out to me when reading the article. It seems as if the author thinks we had a choice to make Uber/Grab/etc so wildly successful and popular. I would argue instead that the current state of the ride-sharing industry is merely a natural progression due to technological advancement (smartphones, Internet, etc.) and strong economies - it’s not 1940 and we aren’t all building military planes and making bullets in factories, after all. People (human capital) are free to pursue rather wild and crazy ideas like auto-lacing shoes and blockchain WiFi-enables dog feeders, as well as quite useful things like transportation and self-driving cars. People say my grandfather was a dreamer. They told me he would say things like “one day, we’ll have TVs that you hang on your wall, like a picture!”. Well, we’ve done that, and even some of the stuff from cartoons seems to be coming true. Whoops, off-track a bit! So, back to my argument. Taxi cabs could have been the ones to develop apps and put them in the hands of millions of people. Not at the scale of Uber/et al. But they of course, did not, because the smartest people in tech aren’t going to work for Yellow Cab Company of (NY/Chicago/major city), and they wouldn’t have been able to change the habits and buying patterns of millions of people around the world. Ride-sharing works because you have people who need income providing you with their driving skill and their car, anywhere in the world, just to use your app. And it’s a losing $ situation for the drivers, but many of them are too desperate to see that. We didn’t choose to give the big Tech players power over our lives. It just happened. Technology changed the way the world operates, and thus, it changed the way we experience life and interact with each other. If it weren’t Uber, it would be another startup with a silly name. Maybe Goober. Güber.