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I recently had issues with my hybrid where it would randomly shut down. The third time this happened I ended up taking a long ride with an Uber driver. It turns out he was extremely conservative and I suggested that we keep the conversation abstract rather than getting into concrete specifics.
I asked him what he thought about Uber’s plan for driverless cars and he said that he was planning on retiring before that happened. Having been trained up in law school (shout out to U.C. San Francisco college of the law) I proposed the hypothetical that if he was ten years from retirement and he knew for a fact that all Ubers would be driverless in three years, what would he think of UBI.
He said he would be against it because he felt he was good at adapting and could find something else. But I pressed on what about the other drivers. Should they end up being homeless when they were willing to work but all the Uber jobs they used to have were now gone. I pressed this a bit, trying not to be insulting but suggesting that most people now driving Ubers, this was not their first choice of careers and something they did because they couldn’t find other steady work. And my very conservative driver acknowledged that UBI would be important (in that set of circumstances at least.) If the ride had been half an hour longer maybe I could have fully convinced him but I felt I’d done a good job preaching the gospel of…
