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In creative destruction, you can do an accounting sleight of hand by attributing credit for creation while ignoring blame for destruction even though the two ar
by smallmancontrov 4mo ago
In creative destruction, you can do an accounting sleight of hand by attributing credit for creation while ignoring blame for destruction even though the two are linked.
This is a technology + investing forum and all of us agree that in general creative destruction processes are enormously net positive, but they frequently do kick off a toxic byproduct in the form of said destruction (e.g. Uber and displaced taxi drivers), so there is moral entanglement between creation and destruction. Morally speaking, figuring out how to mitigate this toxic byproduct is part of our remit just as it was part of the remit of earlier industrialists to figure out how not to discharge so much flammable goo into the river that it lit on fire. We neglect this at our peril, because society merely pinches its nose if the toxic byproducts are small, but they are increasingly not small.
- irishcoffee 4mo agoI will say before Uber was a thing, if I tried to call and schedule a taxi pickup in the city I lived in at the time, if they showed up at all they were at east a half hour late. Missed a flight because of it once. I don’t even like uber, but it is objectively a better service most of the time.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoYes, Uber did something enormously creative. But it also did something destructive and we're guilty of an accounting sleight of hand if we focus on one while pretending the other doesn't exist. We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoDestroying inefficient monopoly rents? By all means, let us not pretend that doesn't exist.
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoYou're forgetting the workers, who were the important part of this analysis.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoWhy are the taxi workers more important than, say, the taxi customers? If the companies are providing garbage service, why do I have to care about protecting their workers?
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoWhen you lose your job to AI, you will understand.
- Esophagus4 4mo agoTechnology has always displaced workers. And then the society adjusts. Plenty of people will lose their jobs to AI, but most workers will be redeployed elsewhere. The agricultural revolution displaced farm workers with machines. There was unrest and migration to cities, and eventually that fed the Industrial Revolution and created a working class. Change is tough, but we will all be fine.
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoLast time inequality cooked up it took a lifetime to go back down. It did so very painfully through capital incineration on a monumental scale: a great depression, where the incineration was metaphorical, and two world wars, where it was very literal. In both cases it was economical and in both cases it fixed the problem but at enormous cost. We should aim to do better.
- timr 4mo agoYeah, anyone who uses taxi drivers as an example of destruction either don't know what they're talking about (because they never experienced it) or they're crying crocodile tears. I had cab drivers nearly drive off with me hanging off the car in San Francisco, because they were far more concerned with screening my destination than, say, not killing me. If Uber destroyed that industry, it was only a net benefit to society. They created immense value, and the "destruction" was only to eliminate a layer of corrupt parasites who made money by preventing a free market (in this case, the medallion owners, but the entire industry was corrupt from top to bottom).
- inigyou 4mo agoNot all places have corrupt taxi industries. I think they were always more expensive than Uber (but there's a reason for that, Uber's pricing is not sustainable) but in most places a taxi is just a taxi.
- thisislife2 4mo agoDon't entirely agree that a local Taxi service is necessarily costlier than Uber. In my indian city, Uber and Ola cannot compete (and have been nearly wiped out) because a local Taxi service (that now dominates the market) is very competitively priced and professionally run. They charge their drivers a fixed percentage (unlike Uber or Ola, and lower fees than them) and release their payments timely in a transparent manner. The price per km, and all extra charges (late night fees, overtime driver charges etc., permit fees in case of long distance travel, toll fees etc.) are transparently conveyed to the customer too. And there is no bullshit practice of price gauging through "surge pricing" or "convenience fees" or "platform fees" etc.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoReminds me of Empower in the US, it charges drivers a fix fee, not even a percentage, and then the drivers take all the upside from their rides.
- retired 4mo ago
- matwood 4mo agoUber also forced taxi services to have apps and always accept CCs.
- nunez 4mo agoCounterpoint: I scheduled an Uber once to take me to the airport. They arrived earlier than the requested time and left when I met them at the time I requested because they waited too long. This was on Uber Black, their professional driver level service. Counterpoint: It is increasingly impossible to get to a human at Uber when you need support, as most of their support channels are gated by LLMs and self-service support workflows.
- LanceH 4mo agoUp front pricing -- even if higher -- is welcome.
- andai 4mo agoWhat's the byproduct of human-level AI and robotics?
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoDisplaced workers. I mean, maaaaaybe a Jevon's Paradox kicks into play with human labor and replacing people with robots somehow creates even more jobs, but whenever someone says this your immediate response should be: "ok, now put your money where your mouth is and bet on it by strengthening the social safety net."
- Esophagus4 4mo agoI generally do believe that workers get redeployed elsewhere after technological disruption. (Eg agricultural revolution in the US) I do believe in good safety nets as well and I think that shows in my voting record, so I’m not sure what else you would expect from me, if anything.
- inigyou 4mo agoThis assumes sufficient jobs. We have been below replacement jobs for a long time but we made up the difference with Bullshit Jobs. Now we might even be running out of those.
- Esophagus4 4mo ago> Bullshit Jobs I’ve only read the article, not the full book, but I’m not sure I buy the premise. Maybe we can’t see what the new post-AI society looks like yet, but I tend to believe society progresses as it evolves. It doesn’t mean it won’t be rocky for many people, and good social safety nets will make this easier, but I generally don’t think there will be some kind of dystopian future where society runs out of work to do for humans.
- inigyou 4mo agoA lot of current bullshit jobs involve generating text that nobody reads or cares about. LLMs replace these.
- theturtletalks 4mo agoWhen AI melts away these rent seeking marketplaces like Uber, Doordash, Amazon, etc, they won’t go as quietly as the people they displaced.
- dangoodmanUT 4mo agoThese are actually the most durable businesses because they have network effects: restaurants alright signed up, sellers onboarded, etc. Easier for them to adopt AI than AI companies to rebuild the networks
- inigyou 4mo agoOne way to take over a network is to start with an alternative front end. We'll see if this works out for AI companies. First you have the AI consult booking.com whenever someone asks it to book a hotel, then you get more and more hotels to directly communicate with the AI company, then you drop booking.com once you have enough.
- theturtletalks 4mo agoIt’s exactly what I’m building. First I’m building open-source SaaS for every vertical and then leverage that to build a decentralized, interoperable marketplace.
- inigyou 4mo agoIt won't work. The future gatekeeper just has to threaten to send traffic to your competitor if you (a hotel) don't sign an exclusive agreement with them.
- theturtletalks 4mo agoSo marketplaces will not allow users to have their own storefronts and websites? Most restaurants on DoorDash have a website where prices are cheaper. AI will allow your computer go to that website and place the order. How could Doordash stop that? How many restaurants would be willing to take down their website to appease a marketplace?
- zozbot234 4mo agoThere's no resource destruction involved in displacing taxi drivers. Taxi medallions are a rent-seeking scheme, there's no real scarcity involved. Most other instances of "creative destruction" are like that, the capital simply gets repurposed at negligible social cost and only excess profits disappear.
- wasabi991011 4mo agoPlease look up Uber's business practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber
- Bratmon 4mo agoAs opposed to taxi companies, who are famously efficient, honest, and not creeps.
- tsimionescu 4mo agoJust because Uber made a billion dollars by outcompeting terrible companies doesn't mean that Uber isn't also a terrible company. A crime lord is still a crime lord even if he displaced other, smaller, crime lords in getting his place.
- kelnos 4mo agoWhataboutism is usually not a great defense.
- Bratmon 4mo agoI apologize for derailing this conversation about whether or not Uber is better than taxi companies by bringing up irrelevant topics like whether or not Uber is better than taxi companies.
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- Muromec 4mo ago>Morally speaking, figuring out how to mitigate this toxic byproduct is part of our remit What's hard to figure out here? You either pay taxes or you build cathedrals. While you are doing neither the communist tendencies keep growing, because people see they are squeezed. It's that communism has any answer to it really, but the tendencies will keep growing until something happens.
- kpw94 4mo ago> What's hard to figure out here? Negative externalities are hard to figure out. Since parent mentions "toxic byproduct": Say you're the company that invented Teflon pans. you made billions. You saved billions in time for all the users of the pans... A true entrepreneurial success. But, by how many billions did you fuck up the environment, people's health etc with the spread of PFAS everywhere?