Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

haven't read any joel mokyr, will take a look though! my bibliography has this "theories of technology grab-bag" section, trying to arm myself with different lenses but don't want to end up accidentally pursuing too much of the one S-T-S/"social shaping of technology" way of looking at things.

i like your examples, it's a very interesting history. one of my favourite economics blogs is by a guy working in a field that's basically trying to understand invention, he writes papers about like the early airplane industry and stuff. i agree that the direction of invention isn't inevitable and is highly path dependent. some people with a lot of power may have been able to turn the tides are certain moments as your gas-driven refrigerator example beautifully illustrates, but i think the technologies that succeed and get adopted are highly sensitive to demand, and that the gains largely accrue to consumers (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=820309)

well, the thing about technology's success being "sensitive to demand" is that demand is also socially constructed, and what constitutes a "gain" to consumers is basically subjective and up for debate (as in this thread). i'm thinking here of something like superhighways in the US - many or even most consumers saw them as a definite "gain" at the time and they made possible the adoption or expansion of many other technologies, most obviously the rapid proliferation of the detached single-family house (itself plugged into, driving, and being driven by, other technological systems like the plywood industry). but of course as i think we all realize, the adoption of superhighway infrastructure was not just a response to a neutral and innate "demand" for automobile-ready transportation to the boonies; it was more or less a free gift from the federal government, bonded out and financed by the general tax purse, while other alternative transportation and residential technologies were left adrift. thanks to racial red-lining, technocratic assumptions about the evils of the city, and other socially-driven biases, the FHA/GI Bill cash and financing-guarantee options were not available for building or renovating in the inner city, and mass transit was effectively abandoned as a capital spending priority. from 1921 to 1971, the federal government spent $72 billion on highways versus $65 million on rail. armed with the one technology (or really, technological system: the highways, the plywood, the means of accounting and other logistical techniques for efficiently putting the builders on the sites etc.) we built a suburban country.

to some people looking back it's pretty straightforward: americans Just Wanted suburbia and that is what they consumed - the technologies and infrastructure responded to their demands. but other people who wanted other things didn't get them, and now if we survey the state of the country's land use, transportation infrastructure, economic mobility, housing stock, etc. etc. it becomes apparent that automobile suburbia can't be read as simply a "gain." at best, a really mixed bag. the way we used the technologies we chose had some consequences that were probably pretty nice for some people and a lot of others that may have been really destructive and shitty and not easily reversible. see also pollution and global warming as others have pointed out. the planet's ecology has already been dramatically, perhaps catastrophically altered. dunno how or whether i would begin to determine whether on balance that was "worth it" for all the technologies and applications that brought that about.

was thinking about the atom bomb in the shower, too. i mean there's nothing inevitable about that one by any means --- the idea was thought up before the implementation, and it was decided to spend years and an absolutely ungodly amount of money and logistical force to develop it. los alamos, oak ridge, everything, and this is a blank check made to order deal: "at the end of this, give us an atomic bomb." but there's so many alternate universe scenarios. a country that wasn't facing war might have read the einstein/szilárd letter and said "gtfo with this crackpot idea." or if we'd won the war earlier, budget-cutters might have shut down the lab and we'd now know the bomb only as an item in a funny list of "ten crazy superweapons the government actually tried to build in WW2!" or if it so happened that the US didn't actually have easy access to any quantities of uranium, it would have just sat in a file collecting dust. or different leadership might have built one bomb, tested it, and decided not to use it. or in peacetime with a less developed Pentagon, this might have been a decision subject to public debate, like reagan's SDI, and some hypothetical publics would have voted for it, and others would have said "a weapon suited only for genocide? count me out!" or maybe it would have been first developed in the context of peaceful uses, like the (hopeless) plowshares program, bombs for digging canals, and only a century later someone said "hey we could use this super-dynamite as a weapon of war!" who knows. the way it happened is the way it happened and so it just seems like a game of Civilization where yup, after you develop the rocket and mass production, the next thing you're going to discover is the atom bomb. sorry if i'm beating a dead horse here -- partly just talking myself through my own notes as a way of reinforcing my memory of the stuff i've been reading! obviously, uber is much worse than the atom bomb but maybe we can extrapolate.

"inevitability" is one of silicon valley's great ideological cudgels

http://ariamythe.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/inevitability1.jpg

the way it happened is the way it happened and so it just seems like a game of Civilization where yup, after you develop the rocket and mass production, the next thing you're going to discover is the atom bomb.

haha pretty sure i fucked up the tech tree though, don't you need something kind of off-topic like mechanized infantry units or something?

looked it up, you need Electronics

bummer that it cancels out isaac newton's college though

my favorites are how discovering electronics means shakespeare no longer impresses anybody, and communism cancels out both the pyramids and michelangelo. i mean i can see what they were going for but what a wonderfully arbitrary and schematic model of world history. great game obv.

War economy has been around for thousands of years, its one of the most sustained economies on the planet. Weapons since the dawn of man have gotten more and more devastating in response to heavy spending on war R&D.

Crooked warlords have spent thousands of years trying to make a planet-destroying ultra weapon. The only thing that made it inevitable was technology/physics going WE THINK WE CAN TECHNICALLY DO THIS and the war market reacting in kind by protecting their futures betting on a runaway train of supply and demand.

but, like, sweden didn't undertake the manhattan project. and really, how many crooked warlords, if any, ever made a planet-destroying ultra weapon their goal? it's really nit an innate feature of the human condition... and that kind of industrially-scaled r&d effort had barely been around for fifty years at that time. another legacy of gilded-age attitudes about the relationship between 'science' and 'technology.' even the idea of the dedicated, product/results-oriented research lab was pretty new. the paradigm up until the civil war or so was 'the inventor' (as flawed and incomplete an understanding of invention as that gives us).

the point though is that the money could have just as easily been spent on something else, and ta-da, no bomb. or a bomb that comes around at a time in history when nobody feels it's pressing to use it, hence no fear of the bomb and no sense of urgency around developing the h-bomb. anyway it was, i think, the biggest research effor ever undertaken for anything in history, so it's not hard to imagine circumstances or tiny shifts that would have made that seem like a less compelling use of the government's resources than -- even sticking within the military-- funneling the same resources into ongoing projects for submarines, jet propulsion, electromechanical computers. lots of these things feed each other obv. or if things hadn't looked so dire in europe or einstein's letter had gotten lost in the mail, maybe it would have all gone into the TVA. who knows?

thanks for your posts itt doctor casino, and i would say this but it needs more STS not less, which you're happily doing. these forces aren't arbitrary, demand isn't a black box, we have a choice, etc.

ugh, inevitable, not arbitrary

shucks, thanks.

to bring it back to uber i would just say, forget the 1890s tech bros, just remember we can resist the 2010s tech bros and that no invention is a "genie that's out of the bottle" or a horse that's left the stable. lots of arguably good ideas die on the vine, lots of bad ones don't "take" in the market, lots of both can be controlled in many ways. uber and their ilk, i think, count on us seeing all technologies as idea-goods on a free consumer marketplace, in which case they will win out with the people who want to buy them, whatever the consequences that poses for them or anybody else. but we have plenty of models for other ways we might receive new technologies or new ways of using technology, from los angeles banning the jitney buses, to our accepting canned meat but requiring FDA inspectors in the plants.

andrew feenberg pushes this a little further, arguing for a democratization of technological decisions (though being perhaps fatally vague about how we'd get to that point), arguing by analogy to other once-"free" areas that have become subject to some forms of public decision-making, like education. for technology, he gives the example of steam boilers on riverboats: they used to explode, kind of frightfully often, killing people left and right. that, the manufacturers would have said, was just the nature of the technology. don't want your decapitated head landing a mile away from your riverboat poker game? don't ride a steamboat! it's just what the technology does. but in fact this became subject to regulation and standards, and eventually, for all practical purposes, a steamboat boiler of insufficient thickness and reliability wasn't just a normal boiler, or even a bad boiler - it was definitionally not a steamboat boiler because you couldn't use it to power a steamboat. we don't have to assume from the get go that the particular form that taxi-coordination software currently takes is going to be its final form and that everything else has to get out of the way.

Yeah inevitable sort of a bad word to use here anyways. Something a Bond villain would say. Or out of a Herzog commentary.

I think the thought that humanity is at root a violent animal is mostly pro-war propaganda. We have tools at our disposal and it is up to each person to use them with respect.

how many crooked warlords, if any, ever made a planet-destroying ultra weapon their goal?

Considering the world-view at the time, much of humanity has not had a full view of the planet as a globe in space. Even discounting ancient cosmologies the simple fact that travelling was slow and out of reach for 99.9% of the population, most people not knowing more than their village and the surrounding woods. To destroy everything they knew would not require a globe-demolishing nuclear bomb, it would have been smaller in scale, because the world was smaller to the pre-industrial mind.

anyway it was, i think, the biggest research effor ever undertaken for anything in history, so it's not hard to imagine circumstances or tiny shifts that would have made that seem like a less compelling use of the government's resources than -- even sticking within the military-- funneling the same resources into ongoing projects for submarines, jet propulsion, electromechanical computers.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/SpaceRace.jpg

yeah i meant to throw in a "as of that date" in there, sorry

okay, saw this cover on the newsstand on my way home and, after this thread, had to chuckle a bit

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/issues/2015/06/09/0715_Cover/large.jpg

oh man

that's economist-level "will this do?" cover artwork

Got an Uber-X ride home the other week and the driver looks at me when he picks me up and says, "Do you know you only have a passenger rating of 4.5 stars? I would have expected higher from you." I'm like, I don't know dude, I just get the rides, never had any issues. Then he says, "Well some drivers are just assholes. I give everyone 5 stars. Everyone! Unless they slam my door."

A few weeks ago an out of town friend really wanted me to come hang out with him and his sister down in sunset park (where he was staying), and the subways were massively fucked up plus it's already hard as hell to get there from queens, so I wound up taking the train like 3/4 of the way there, then taking an Uber for the last leg, which was only $8.

This struck me as kind of remarkable, I got out of the subway in some neighborhood of brooklyn that I don't know at all and where I certainly would not easily have found a cab, hit the button on my phone and the guy was there in 2-3 minutes.

OTOH that's a pretty unusual use, and I still rarely use Uber (or cabs).

I used one in Fort Wayne last week because it started raining after dinner, I felt bad for the guy who picked me up because it was only a $5 fare, I didn't have any cash and Uber doesn't even give the option of tipping extra. That's some bullshit.

As awful as I find Uber the company, I think the drivers are quite valuable in non-mass transit heavy cities for curbing drunk driving if nothing else. In the DFW area everyone plans a $20+ Uber at the end of the night into their drinking budget.

yeah my brother in LA has been using them for way longer than me and says it's been a standard part of LA nightlife for a long time now.

the amount of drunk driving i witnessed/was privy to in pre-rideshare LA was ghastly

and Miami. I've noticed my hangovers increasing again.

Same in pretty much every non-major city I've ever lived.

I went to a wedding in Milwaukee over Labor Day weekend and my companions called an Uber driver who showed up in a fancy ass BMW SUV. Presumably Uber was working out well for her. Or she's in deep financial shit rn.

fuck uber

apparently one of my college roommates drives for uber now

Did I already mention that my Uber driver for a school run the other week was HORRID?? He was so bad I actually gave him a terrible review and I never bother with that kind of thing or want to mark anyone down usually.

Among other things he insisted on opening his and my front windows because the smell of fresh bagels, including some onion bagels, was going to "ruin" the car.

I had an uber driver who smelled pretty bad once, but I gave him five stars because I figured there was a good chance he smelled bad from working a really long shift and/or multiple jobs.

the only time i gave a driver less than 5 stars was when he made me late for a date after bragging about how he'd been a professional limo driver for decades and knew the city like the back of his hand and then proceeded to take me on the slowest, dumbest, most cumbersome route, literally avoiding an overpass designed to skip a busy intersection, to then go wait at a red light to make a right turn (where there was no signage prohibiting a right on red)

i gave him 3 stars

how many stars did you give the date

I've enjoyed the few times I've used Lyft.

My Lyft driver has played nothing but The Wailers' "Burnin' and Looting" on loop for my whole drive.

Just finished the third go-round...

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2015/12/01/shooting-draws-attention-downtown-police-presence/76565344/

weird trickle-down effect from uber? taxi stand used to have two off-duty cops in the entertainment district. uber becomes popular, they abolish the practice of having a standing queue of cabs. shooting happens right next to where the security used to be

yep I'll buy that as another aspect of uber's contribution to increased antisocial insularity

Uber's just been declared as operating illegally in Melbourne. They've been ignoring the govt on it up til now.

Making the rounds, here for future reference: http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemcneal/uber-hangover#.fq0jbeDVa NYE surge multipliers of up to 9.9x. sad lol.

eh trying to get a cab on nye is hell, it took us an hour to get a ride home last nite, would easily have paid 10x more at peak of desperation

considering how much bars/clubs/restaurants jack up their prices for NYE, it really doesn't make uber look particularly evil in comparison

If you go out on NYE you've already lost

otm × 3

i went to bed at 10 last night and slept for 11 hours, jackpot

we actually ended up paying normal fare... in quebec city though

friend took a Lyft out of Baltimore to the 'burbs at like 1:30 am on new years and it cost him $25. like a 20 minute drive. uber woulda been around 80 bux. good to shop around.

Dunno why people complain about surge pricing, apparently you have to re-type the surge multiplier in before you proceed? Some friends are arguing is this consent if you're pissed. but ehhhh...

http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/travel/perth-man-lodges-complaint-after-copping-massive-uber-bill-on-new-years-eve/news-story/2a9d9f2596f19d7ba0f38a569b3fe574

Me, I'd never put myself into a position to rely on cabs on NYE at all, and I live in a big city. But tbf here they have allnight free trams on NYE.

yeah uber multipliers for high demand times that are like, not related to a natural disaster are pretty understandable, and you have to agree to the fare before you finalize anyway. get over it imo

The weird situation is when people (like Gawker writers) simultaneously attack Uber for being hostile to its workers (fair) and throw a fit about surge pricing - I know that not all of that surge pricing goes to the drivers but some does and shouldn't you be happy when those workers who are putting in time when they could be asleep/partying get some extra cash out of it?

I got a 3.8 surge before heading out on NYE, waited a few minutes before it dropped to 1.5 and decided that was good as it was gonna get. A few minutes before midnight I checked and no surge at all. When I left for home 15 mins later, the surge was for 1.3, which, again, struck me as pretty good. My driver said I had chosen well -- he'd just dropped off a dude a few minutes earlier who paid the 8.2 surge for what is normally a $9 ride.