Om Malik wrote a great article that has taken the technology intelligensia by storm. It centers around the uproar among taxi/cab (private car) drivers that the Uber service is causing in San Francisco. A quick summary of the issue is that Uber has become an extermely popular service (Android app, iOS app) that allows people to reserve/arrange a car to come pick them up at a time and place. The customers then rate thier drives so other customers can make a good choice in the future. It is a fantastic app and its use has exploded in the cities it has opened up in, including Boston.
The uproar came when Uber started removing drivers from the app so that they no longer could get any customers through the service. Uber claims this is because these drivers were poorly rated and they didn't want Uber's customers to be referred to drivers which were not providing good experiences. The drivers claim the data isn't always correct and they have no way to challenge it. Thus, their business is now in big trouble and they have no recourse to fix it with Uber. A very tough position to be in.
Here's OM's take on the larger trends happening here:
What are the labor laws in a world where workforce is on demand? And an even bigger question is how are we as a society going to create rules, when data, feedback and, most importantly, reputation are part an always-shifting equation? (Reputation, by the way, is going to be the key metric of the future, Quora founder and Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo told me in an interview.)
At present we rank photos, rate restaurants, like or dislike brands, retweet things we love. But if this idea of collaborative consumption takes hold — and I have no reason to think it won’t — we will be building a quantified society. We will be ranking real humans. The freelance workers — like the Uber drivers and Postmates couriers — are getting quantified. The best ones will continue to do well, but what about the others, the victims of this data darwinism? Do they have any protection or any rights?
The Uber situation is likely a peek at how all of us will be rated in the future. Our coworkers, customers, bosses, and friends will be able to rate us, and everyone will be able to use this data to choose how they want to interact with us. For many folks, this is going to hurt a bit. Who likes being judged in this way?
This trend of rating people hass already taken hold in several professions. Will your profession be next?
Professions being ranked:
- Doctors
- Tachers
- RateMyProfessor – College
- RateMyTeacher – College and High School
- Lawyers
- Plumbers
How Will This Play Out? What Rights Will We Have?
We are at an early stage of this trend and there has not been much public discussion about how these services should work so that they respect people's privacy, and allow for due process. Om believes this will cause a large upheaval:
the challenges of the connected future are less technical and more legislative, political and philsophical. The shift from a generation that started out un-connected to one that is growing up connected will result in conflicts, disruption and eventually the redrawing of our societal expectations. The human race has experienced these shifts before — just not at the speed and scale of this shift.
Fred Wilson chimes in with some comments on Om's article and adds to that thought:
This redrawing of societal expectations is likely to be the political battle of our time. Om goes on to talk about this in the context of the labor issues that Uber is having in San Francisco. That is a good example of what happens when networks and the data they produce reshape a market that has been operating in a traditional framework.
We are at the start of this battle between incumbents, be they black car drivers or cable companies or government itself, and the network driven upstarts.
My advice. Do a good job and be nice to folks. If you are rated on that, it should work out for you.