Amusing. By yoking taxicab drivers to the other two, the argument attempts to make them seem like victims. However, most people’s direct experience with taxicab drivers and the resulting improvement under Uber directly contradicts that sentiment. This probably has the opposite effect and makes it seem like the AI companies aren’t so bad if they’re akin to the guys who freed us from cabs.

> In England, ca. 1500s common law established the legal precedent that if your cattle broke loose of its pen, wandered into your neighbor's field and trampled their garden, you were liable for the damage your cattle caused.

Ok.

> Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.

And how does this paragraph connect to the previous one? The streets of New York isn't taxi drivers' private property. No one trampled their garden any more than me opening a coffee shop tramples the garden of the Starbucks down the street. Should we forbid any new entry into a market just because it upsets the incumbents who invested big money into their business?

I struggle to see how the 3 examples go together. Your exposition implies a connection, but I struggle to see one. The best I could do is that it has to do with rights and responsibilities?

The first example is clear. And it has pretty much carried on, as the "right to property" and "the responsibility to cover damage to other's rights".

The second example, even though you wrote it as Uber vs. the cab driver, is more about Uber vs. the municipality. By the fact that almost all over the world people wanted Uber (or the other brands) over the imposed limitation of their municipalities, shows that the deal was wrong. In places where it was artificially limited, people have showed to prefer the alternatives. It has little to do with Bob the driver, and more to do with Alice the mayor who decided unilaterally that a taxi cab should require a 100k/yr medallion. That's what's changed, and society accepted it.

The third example is weirder still. Again you pose it as AI provider vs. average Joe, but here I struggle to even see what rights / who's rights are being infringed upon. I don't see any. While we generally have a right to work, there is absolutely no right to work in a certain industry, if the industry doesn't have demand. If someone else doesn't need your output, your right to work in that particular field has absolutely no basis in reality.

Unless you want to go back to the places and regimes that decided who works where, modern society has no place for such thinking. A right to work protects you from employers choosing not to hire you because of things that you are (race, age, gender, etc.) It absolutely doesn't protect you at all against "people don't need elevator operators anymore". And I say this as someone who's worked in this industry 20+ years. If tomorrow people don't need software done by hand anymore, tough luck for me. But it's absolutely not the problem of rights. I don't have a right to demand people wanting my services. That's not the social contract at all.

Say you own a well and sell the clean water.

I learn that boiling the stream water makes it safe and tell people about it.

What do I owe you?

Uber and AI are certainly more complicated than that, but you are pretty close to arguing that the constructed rights of some people inhibit the rights of other people.

> 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.

Why is this Uber's problem? Do you realize how ridiculously dumb, inefficient, and corrupt a 6 figure taxi license is? It is not Uber's job to compensate for that ridiculousness.

They provided a better and more cash efficient solution for passengers. That is enough.

If you required every technological venture to cover the cost for every person it "disrupts," you would halt progress entirely.

"cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless"

Doesn't it strike you that if licenses for a banal service like taxi are that expensive, that this likely indicates political corruption?

Good riddance to this sort of rent-seeking. I wonder if the NYC taxi service was provided by the mob.

In Central Europe, I don't have to wonder. Prior to Uber, the local taxi services were operated by the mob, and the taxi drivers basically robbed naive tourists through exorbitant, illegal prices. Stories of rape or abuse of intoxicated women abound. Some of the drivers were so sketchy and creepy that people refused to board their cars. Scammy Prague taxi service was legendary, but by far the worst sort of tracksuit-and-gun wearing mobsters behind the wheel I ever encountered was in late 1990s Bratislava.

This ugly rotten web was swept clean by Uber, where people have a reputation to maintain. Thanks god. My wife is no longer afraid to take a cab at night. Hooray.

Welcome to the New (fifth, I believe) Industrial Revolution! It will not quite as brutal as the first and the second ones were, but it still won't be gentle.