The hypothesis about self-driving cars doesn't hold water. Anyone doing practical assessment of the idea (as opposed to table talk) knows there won't be any, at

The hypothesis about self-driving cars doesn't hold water. Anyone doing practical assessment of the idea (as opposed to table talk) knows there won't be any, at least until all the infrastructure and human-driven cars are reorganized to inter-operate with automatic ones. “If the mountain won't come to Muhammad…” — unfortunately, it is possible that people will have to adapt to robots instead of the other way round if everyone decides that it really is the future. It might be that the author believes the general idea of “car sharing” to be correct, and struggles to find the reason why the company loses money. The problem is that the whole thing is a lie. Their business model is not self-driving taxis. As with other “platforms”, it's just blatant cutting down on “irrelevant” expenses wile keeping the good bits to themselves under the pretense that they are just “operating the computer” that allows someone else to do “everything”. Uber might have a lot of money to smokescreen it, and keep the image of a middle-class citizen “sharing” the car for a certain price, but in other places competition between taxi companies rapidly “optimizing” and “professionalizing” the market makes it clear that humanity has pompously reinvented the hackney coach. Even worse, the unregulated hackney coach, when poorest peasants ride their carriages to a big city and work endless shifts trying to catch some passenger first to be able to feed themselves for a day, or some rickshaws fight and badmouth each other only to get the tiniest number of coins. A typical driver for a “digital” taxicab is a sleep-deprived immigrant (private person or an employee of an official subcontractor, there's little difference) wielding a number of burner phones running client apps from different companies (BTW, location spoofing solutions market is booming) who is useless without a navigation (hooray for modern bio-robots), but jumps every red light to shave minutes off. The real sharing happens between drivers — they share shifts, devices, accounts, and cars. However, the only important thing is that the big company gets the commission from each and every ride, so it's all good. They seem to make enough money to spend some on remediation when accidents happen, all while keeping their stance on being just a system operator that gratuitously helps clients. None of this is specifically modern. Immigrants working as cab drivers predate computers, and tricks that allow stretching of taxi car shifts are just as old. Well, you can argue that there are ratings. (John Doe rated this driver 1/5: We both died in a car crash. Would not recommend.) Well, anyone in any kind of “digital marketplace” business can tell you that the whole point of stars, likes, and the like is to make users believe that there is a complex system that protects them in the background, and that their input matters. The fact is, the owner and only the owner of the system decides whether any of that is used, and to what extent. Say, how are upvotes and downvotes on Youtube videos used? They are just a game, something for users to fidget and feel satisfaction from.