This is amazing. Don't forget that by you doing this you're taking us one step closer to AI replacing not just the job of drivers but the jobs of all of us. Good sides and bad sides.
Hopefully we won't get there and only uber drivers are the ones screwed. Since you and I aren't uber drivers, we don't really care do we?
I'm for equal opportunity screwing: if they lose their jobs, it's only fair my job is at risk too - and given improvements in programming agents, it will be.
The only way we're getting through this is by facing it together, not throwing the more precarious of us under the bus.
I'm not actually convinced that "AI" will even replace all the jobs of drivers. Rumor is that Waymo had trouble in Austin (where I live) when they were centered downtown, because they would gridlock. I'm not convinced that they will work well once they become common on the roads, because they will all drive cautiously, and that may lend itself to gridlock situations. Right now they're in the SE corner of town (also where I live), and they don't seem to gridlock, but the first thing they do is almost always to go to another part of town. They will likely have a useful place, but I'm not convinced that it will pay enough to keep the cars in good shape, long term. The cars are all new, right now, but what happens when they get old and start to malfunction? Will they be making enough money to pay for that? Right now they might (like Uber and Lyft before them) just be burning through VC money, without any prospect of profitability.
Driving is not grueling work. Imagine a utopia where people aren't needed for any work at all! No job for you. Only AI robots taking care of rich people while everything else burns. Just make sure you're one of the rich ones and everything is A-okay!
Sitting for extended periods of time is bad for one’s health. Also, being in a vehicle is the highest morbidity/mortality risk thing people do. More time on the road = more chance of injury.
You don’t have to sit to program, and there are generally far more degrees of freedom, e.g. bathroom breaks and eating healthy food from a fridge and microwave, etc.
Also, many/most taxi drivers have to regularly work evenings, nights, weekends, and holidays. (Also upping the risk due to sleepy or drunk drivers).
This is just devolving into a dispute about the definition of grueling.
The dictionary says “extremely tiring and demanding”. Letting random people into your space, putting your primary income generating asset at risk, being on constant alert, and working long, undesirable hours that results in health problems qualifies as grueling for me. Maybe not as grueling as some other types of labor, but obviously more grueling than 95% of programming jobs.
The drivers taking constant breaks and working whenever they feel like it are not the ones earning any decent amount of money.
Hopefully we won't get there and only uber drivers are the ones screwed. Since you and I aren't uber drivers, we don't really care do we?