Just because you evidently don't understand the matter at hand and the infeasibility of pushing certain decisions down to a huge employee base, doesn't mean it

Just because you evidently don't understand the matter at hand and the infeasibility of pushing certain decisions down to a huge employee base, doesn't mean it's due to some irrational mental block on the part of "programmers". Honestly that's the laziest form of ad hominem: "This conversation is hopelessly beyond my comprehension so I'm going to fall back on a lazy stereotype of a category that I assume the other person falls into". Hint: it's not just about labor costs. Imagine Google ranked their search results by hand, and had to defend themselves against every website owner who thinks there's foul play going on? Being able to point to a ranking algorithm which they swear they don't bias has saved them countless PR headaches (and it's not a coincidence that when other Google properties starting showing up prominently is when they started having to deal with these kind of complaints from govts and others). Uber's case is even simpler, since the surge factor algorithm is much simpler and much less secret that Google' ranking logic. If you hire a huge base of employees and task them with making tons of potentially PR nightmare decisions day in and day out, you'll be dealing with explosion after explosion and in every case, you can't point to an algorithm, but instead "Uber CHOSE not to count this weather event as an emergency and now some guy got charged a crazy amount of money to get his sick kid to the hospital!!!!".