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"we would never build a system that might “learn” that people whose destination is a hospital tend to be willing to pay higher fares" I'm sorry, but wouldn't t
by pgsimp 6y ago
"we would never build a system that might “learn” that people whose destination is a hospital tend to be willing to pay higher fares"
I'm sorry, but wouldn't that exactly be the point of "surge pricing"? To allow people who REALLY need a ride to be able to pay a higher price and get where they need to be?
"Surge pricing" would kick in because of scarcity, as in, not enough rides available for everybody.
The person who needs to go to the hospital needs it more urgently than the person who wants to meet her friends at the pub, so she should be able to pay a higher price to get where she needs to be (the hospital).
The alternative is that she doesn't have the option of paying a higher price out of "ethical considerations", and has a high probability of not actually finding a ride to the hospital. How is that the better variant.
If you want to get all ethical about it, maybe you can set up a system where people get their money back if they can prove they needed to go to the hospital (or health insurance could cover it). But it is unlikely to cover all possible cases of urgency ("needed to flee from a terrorist attack", "needed to catch the love of my life before she marries somebody else" and so on)
. Much easier and more effective to regulate by market prices.
It seems to me yet another case of misguided socialist ideology causing harm in the real world.
An even more cynical interpretation would be that companies prioritize "looking good" over saving lives, so they rather implement the virtue signaling "no surges for hospital rides" than actually letting people catch their ride to the hospital.
If you are worried people might not be able to afford the ride to the hospital, you could give them credit.
- IanCal 6y agoI think you're missing what the concern is. You're talking about a generic increase in prices due to scarcity. What they're talking about is a system that identifies that people getting a taxi to the hospital may have no/few other choices and you can just charge them more, regardless of how how many drivers are available.
- pgsimp 6y agoI get that scenario, just trying to gauge the maximum price a customer might be willing to pay. But that wouldn't be surge pricing, or would it? I suppose a "nice" company would not try to do that "price maximization" thing at all to begin with. Auctions seem fair, though.
- IanCal 6y agoNo, surge pricing would be "lots of people want to travel right now and we don't have the capacity, increase the price to maximise return". The averaging there is "all users in a wide area" rather than "all people that need to go to local place X". Both may cause ethical issues but the latter has a specific kind of problem. What a smarter but unethical system may discover is "people having a heart attack will pay almost any amount of money to get to hospital". Substitute heart attack for any other medical issue, if that is something you'd say should require an ambulance. Location based pricing may be fine, charging more for airport travel because there's less competition (due to waiting times, etc) could be fine. Charging more for getting medical treatment is not. Optimising blindly for profit is not something we want to do, but can easily be what we task a machine to do.
- pgsimp 6y agoThere is a difference between trying to determine the highest price somebody may be willing to pay and auctioning off to the highest bidder (with an AI trying to guess the auction prices also being a kind of auction). The point is exactly that somebody with a heart attack has the option to pay more so that they can a ride. Yes it would be nice to be able to detect "this person has a heart attack, let's give them a free ride to the hospital". But it is not really viable in practice yet. So giving them an option to pay more is the second best option. Now they decided to remove that option, so how are people with heart attacks supposed to get to the hospital?