At some point, maybe. Let's say we are subsistence farmers (as close to self sufficient, pure labor as it gets), and I spend extra time on the side to raise an ox. I cannot utilize the ox to its full potential myself, but I can lend it to others and massively increase their labor productivity without much increasing their labor input (or even while decreasing it). The ox is capital. What creates the extra wealth from others' work here and who deserves to keep it? I'd argue that if it decreases labor input I "deserve" 100% of the wealth differential, or close to 100% otherwise. That labor gets a lot of it is really unfair, although I do admit it's a necessary evil.
This is just nitpicking. The wealth differential produces by the ox for 15 years of its useful life requires very little extra labor from me, the ox raiser.
That's why they have a category for "capital". If some people build a factory, it is technically labor, but it will be enabling the creation of extra wealth for decades, to some extent centuries. Who should get this wealth? The labor 50 years later working at the factory has no moral claim on it.
Most of the things drivers complain about - like unability to see the rides upfront and decline ones they do not see as profitable - do not require any advanced technologies. It is a managerial decision to make it so, not some technological advance that required "tech workers" to "build" it. It's like lamenting people learned to build houses because that also enabled building prisons. If you opposed to it, you can refuse to work for a contractor that builds prison, but blaming the whole house building technology makes no sense.
Without tech and its “ecosystem,” if you will, the system of Uber could not have existed at all.
- Advanced tech allowed Uber to reach its pervasive global scale
- Insane venture capital valuation allowed Uber to artificially deflate the price of rides to gain market share, with the explicit understanding that they would then leverage their market power to jack up prices
- Near-zero marginal cost of administration allows Uber to recruit far more employees than a traditional cab company ever could, commoditizing the supply of workers and enabling abuses (someone will always take their place)
- High profit margins enable faster spread, and allow the company to spend much more on lobbying and anti-union efforts
- Business-side workers are complicit because they aren’t working at a taxi company with actual human workers on the other end, they’re building a killer app!
- Managers and higher-ups are similarly abstracted away from their decisions
Are all of these properties inherent to the notion of tech itself? No. Could Uber have been built differently, given different managerial decisions? Yes. But tech allows behaviors that were not previously possible.
And btw taxi companies that you seem to hold here as paragon of virtue, in many cases are nothing but rent-extracting entities that own the medallions (the cost of which has been artificially inflated to make them out of reach of most individuals willing to actually drive a taxi) and charge the drivers for the privilege of being allowed to use it, without ever producing anything useful.
And any added value such companies might produce (many of them don't even bother) - like centralized dispatch, convenient user interface, payment processing, etc. - guess what, is enabled by the same technology you blame for Uber.
Well, that's like saying "without cars Uber could not exist at all". True, but useless. We aren't going to go back to horseback riding to prevent Uber from happening, neither should we. And we're not going to give up on other technology likewise, and likewise neither should we.
I question my career choice more and more every day