ON-DEMAND REVOLUTION POSES DEEP CONSEQUENCES
It’s sometimes difficult to understand the hubbub that surrounds Uber. Oh, it is a massive disruption for an industry that has been around for eons. But, as The Economist pointed out in a 2014 article entitled “The third great wave,” there have been many such disruptions — the Industrial Revolution is almost always used as a metaphor — in the course of human history.
Indeed, the concept of man versus mechanization is mainstream enough that Hollywood has made many a movie detailing the human cost of modernization.
Nor can all the controversy be sympathy for cabbies. Once upon a time — and, in the case of London’s Black Cabs, in a land far away — taxi driving may have been a respected position. But the modern hack is generally seen as barely a step above dogcatcher. So, why all the angst about Uber?
My suspicion is that it’s a proxy fight. We see an industry being decimated — by all accounts to little benefit of the new structure taking over — and fear for our own economic security. Uber itself may be worth billions, but those actually doing the driving are mostly part-timers making peanuts. And while we may focus our complaints on the lack of regulation of its drivers or lament — as Driving’s Lorraine Sommerfeld so eloquently pointed out — their lack of insurance coverage, what we’re really saying is, “There, but for the grace of God, goes my job.”
Many of you reading this might think you’re immune to such restructuring.
And, indeed, automation so far has mostly struck repetitive, noncognitive travails, in other words, manual labour. Recent analysis, however, points to a more insidious trend.
Shelly Palmer, managing partner of Palmer Advanced Media and one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Voices in Technology, recently penned an article entitled I’m Taking Your Job, describing how his consultancy, with little more than some open source code, was able to downsize two-thirds of an accountancy company, all, as Palmer says with a twinge of regret, “cognitive and nonrepetitive.”
In other words, the very types of jobs supposedly immune to replacement.
But what’s all this got do with Uber, you’re wondering. After all, you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to be a cab driver. Ah, but in some places, you do.
In London, traditional Black Cab drivers — the only ones legally allowed to be hailed from the street — are required to memorize every street before being granted a cab licence. London is an ancient city, a maze of rabbit warrens and goat paths. Worse yet, cabbies in London are not only expected to be able to memorize all the downtown’s 25,000 streets but also, without consulting a map, be able to flawlessly provide exact turn-by-turn directions from any pub in the downtown core to any shopping mall outside it.
A London cabbie is not only expected to emulate a satellite navigation system at the drop of a hat, but is also expected to have memorized every watering hole, restaurant and apartment building so they can recite said directions without being given the addresses.
It’s called “The Knowledge” and it takes the average cab driver three years to memorize virtually every building in London.
That’s full-time, 10 hours a day walking/bicycling/driving along every city street.
The New York Times says it is “the hardest test, of any kind, in the world,” inferring that the average cabbie is smarter than a practising lawyer and has memorized more permutations and combinations than a medical doctor.
Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London, says the average London cabbie’s mid-posterior hippocampus — the part of the brain that deals with memorization — is significantly larger than normal and actually grows as he progresses through the test.
Of course, London’s new Uber drivers — again, like their confreres around the world, mostly part-timers — can’t come close to matching this encyclopedic street nous.
Yes, they have GPS systems, but it turns out that even satellites and high-speed computers cannot yet match a Black Cabbie’s “Knowledge.”
These are the people Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick labels, “assholes,” telling 2014’s California Code Conference “We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an asshole named Taxi …. We have to bring out the truth about how dark and dangerous and evil the taxi side is.”
So the next time you’re in a “ride share” saving five bucks or so, confident in the knowledge that your job renders you immune to the on-demand revolution, remember the words of Martin Niemöller, German Lutheran pastor and famed antiNazi theologian: