nananana9 9 hours ago

That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.

  • seanmcdirmid 8 hours ago

    There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.

    • bluecheese452 2 hours ago

      There are not labor shortages. Instead we see massive youth unemployment.

    • malfist 8 hours ago

      Maybe the better option is to not be so anti immigration

      • seanmcdirmid 5 hours ago

        So let's poach these people from the third world and...what about the third world? People can't just be made in factories like robots and self driving cars can. It seems inevitable that either we will have really sucky retirements (please die early grandpa, we can't take care of you!) OR (hopefully) automation will come to the rescue despite luddite protests.

      • xnx 8 hours ago

        Birth rate is declining almost everywhere

  • Al-Khwarizmi 5 hours ago

    Well, the point is that if we reach a point in which a robot can do it better and cheaper, it's no longer useful work.

  • strulovich 8 hours ago

    I personally find that fighting dismissive attitudes is better done by not being dismissive towards other things (or people in this case)

    It’s healthier for the discussion culture here as well.

  • greyw 8 hours ago

    I wont really miss taxi drivers. I guess that says a lot about them.

  • znkynz 5 hours ago

    I've taken taxis in the US, and i can understand why people wouldn't want to. Taxis in other countries are a different experience.

    • signatoremo 2 hours ago

      Huh? how can one possibly generalize whatever experience they have not only to one country but to “other countries”, i.e. to the world. I’ve taken taxi in many countries, in all continents, and my experience have been that the drivers are generally helpful. There are scams and bad experience, but that’s minority. That applies to any country, the US included

  • dyauspitr 5 hours ago

    Artificially protecting jobs by holding back technology is terrible form. At best it’s short term before the economics become an order of magnitude cheap and at worst it’s hamstringing your economy so you’re left behind.

    • anonymars 3 hours ago

      Be that as it may, I would argue there's a straight line from "it's okay to destroy this fairly-low-skill-career for the good of the economy" to the overall situation the US finds itself in today

  • stackghost 8 hours ago

    I think the word "professional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.

    My experience with taxis has been almost universally negative.